Finding time for friends saves sanity

As my friend's almost two-year-old son repeatedly cried, "daddy, daddy, daddy" at his father who had gone outside to grill dinner for the group of us, I took some solace in the fact that it was not my child, crying at that moment. Of course, 80 or so miles away, my five-year-old son was likely laughing maniacally at my wife while using rude language and refusing to get ready for bed.

Whereas I once experienced some sort of nightlife and at least attended concerts, went to the movies after 6 p.m. and regularly ate at restaurants that did not serve chicken nuggets or offer crayons, I now considered myself lucky to be having a noisy dinner with friends. Becoming a parent makes time spent with pals not nervously waiting for our kids to come off a ride at Chuck E. Cheese or chasing them around a park especially precious.

Parenting, of course, has its joys, but it can be an isolating experience as even when you manage to find time to spend with other adults, the conversation tends to focus on the little ones. Having kids (or in our case kid) tends to consume your life giving you little else to talk about.

This makes having relationships with people without kids nearly impossible. You can at least commiserate with other parents, but the child-free live in an entirely different universe -- a land where staying up past 10 and watching a whole movie on a weeknight remain possible.

For people without kids, listening to someone talk about their children is about as interesting as listening to a long story about someone's cat. My single friends maybe want to see a picture and a hear a quick update. They do not want to sit through my story about how Joshua spent three hours refusing to go to sleep while taking every item out of every storage area in his room and calling me "a fresh face."

Being a parent overwhelms your life in a way that makes it hard to remember that you are anything else. I'm theoretically a guy who runs one of the largest toy and hobby stores in the country who also writes a widely read newspaper column. I have a wife with an interesting job. I read a lot, watch all sorts of television and should have something to say that does not involve my child.

Unfortunately, that generally proves not to be true as sitting there with my one of my oldest friends and her husband -- people I share interests with -- we mostly traded war stories about parenting. While we never got around to talking about the Battlestar Galactica finale, we did discuss that Billy Ray Cyrus puts on a fake mustache when he plays Hannah Montana's dad but takes it off when he plays Miley Cyrus' dad.

I genuinely wish I did not know what any of the words in that last sentence, but I do, as well as a few facts about Spongebob that no grown man should have in his brain. At some point though, the younger child bounced happily on my knee and the older (shockingly well-behaved) boy began getting ready for bed.

We did spend a few minutes talking about grownup stuff (work and real estate) and it was one of the better times I've had in recent memory. Three people, too tired to sit up straight, talking like grownups. It may not be much, but when you're life usually revolves around bedtimes and tantrums, it was enough.

Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com.

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