First dates always give me stress.  First playdates, that is.

Whenever one of my kids makes a friend at school, it pretty much means, like it or not, I’m going to make a new friend, too—that kid’s mom.

It’s not that I have anything against making friends. It’s just that as far as our kids’ friends’ parents go, it’s a forced friendship.  Once you start having kids, you realize they start picking your friends for you.  And when it comes to meeting parents for the first time, you’re expected to bond with them faster than their kid can say “Do you want to see my room?”

And the thing is, my type of people can’t normally be found in Simsbury.  I like the straight-talking, foul-mouthed, messy-housed, noncookie-baking, parent-blundering kind of mom, and if I want to find that, well, I need to raise my kids back in Torrington.  And who in their right mind would want to do a thing like that?

And so when Tyler had a playdate for the first time with his friend Brian, the first-playdate jitters set in.  Would it be rude to drop him off and leave?  Or should I hang around for small talk and tea?  Could I bring his little sisters with me?  And God forbid…should I bring cookies?

As it turned out, as far as this playdate was concerned, cookies and tea were the least of my worries.

Brian’s mother’s name is Kate, and she is a kind, dainty, soft-spoken woman who might as well be captain of the soccer mom league, assuming Dinomites Pre-K soccer qualifies her.  She spoke of the glorious weather we’re having, how she hasn’t missed a night of reading to Brian and his brother since they were born, and how she adores the “Love and Logic” method of discipline.  Her house was immaculate.

Clearly, we weren’t going to be besties.  But Kate was friendly and easy-going, and I liked her.  The boys were busy bouncing balls on a miniature basketball court, and our two four-year-olds quickly bonded at the playscape.  There was a batch of cookies in the oven, but it was the premade kind that came in a tube.  Everything was going to be just fine.

Outside the window, a woman on a ladder was painting their house.  Her house, Kate explained, was built in 1920, and she was making renovations.  When she’s not busy raising two boys only thirteen months apart and working on home improvements, she is an attorney.

Seeing how our four-year-olds were about to enter kindergarten, I asked her if she’d been to the orientation.

“Yes, I was there with Laura,” she said, then added, “my partner.”

The only excuse I can offer from my next question was that I was still on the law firm mindset, and my mouth beat my brain to the punch.

“Your partner?  From your law firm?”

I actually said that.

“No,” she explained.  “The woman out there painting the house.  We’re gay.  We’ve been together now for fourteen years.”

I felt my face get hot.  Not because I’m uncomfortable in the presence of lesbians.  But because it was 2013, and I’d actually made her clarify.

I went into some babbling explanation about how I thought we were still talking about law, but she would take no apologies.  “It’s OK.  Really,” she coaxed.

She’s been at this for fourteen-plus years.  Apparently by now, she’s used to stupidity.

After that first hurdle, things went back to normal.  We compared notes about the kindergarten experience.  Once Laura was finished with painting for the day, she joined us long enough to tell me she is a mail carrier and, if you want to talk about small worlds, she’s been delivering mail to my house every Monday for the past three years.  I asked her if either of my dogs ever ripped a hole in her pants.  We shared a laugh.  They told me about the agonizing five years that it took to conceive their two children with in vitro fertilization.

What I noticed most of all was how they had this parenting thing down pat.  When one kid starting wailing because he got a splinter, one mom jumped up to get a needle and Band-Aids, while the other ran to rescue another kid on a tipped scooter.  While one raced to the kitchen to pull cookies out of the oven, another darted after a basketball that rolled out of bounds and across the street.  While one gathered the empty plates and cups from the picnic table, the other bustled inside to busy herself with the task of making dinner.  It was like a well-rehearsed, perfectly synchronized Broadway musical, where no one had to remind the other of a forgotten line, and no one missed a single beat.

At the crack of dawn the next morning I was at the kitchen counter making math worksheets.  (I can’t simply photocopy one that already exists, because that wouldn’t be nearly anal retentive enough.)  Just as I was finishing it, Doug emerged, glanced over my shoulder and said, “Whacha doin’? Making hypotenuses?”  (Of his entire academic career from high school, community college and the police academy combined, the only math term he retained is “hypotenuse,” and he insists on using it even when there’s not a triangle in sight.)

I sprang from my seat, noticing the time.  “You’re not going to use the blender, are you?” It was time for my morning shake, and every morning we battle over who gets to use it first.

“Hurry up.  I’ll make my coffee first,” he said—but just as he finished his sentence, he was growling into a near-empty pot in the refrigerator with an inch of black tar on the bottom.

He glared at me like he was caught on the pot with an empty tube of toilet paper.

“What?” I asked most nonchalantly.

“You couldn’t make more coffee?” he demanded.

“Looks to me like there’s still a full cup in there,” I shrugged while gathering my final ingredients in the blender.

“It’s all grounds!” he snarled.

At least, I think that’s what he said.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear him.  After all, I was running late for work, and I had no choice but to flick on the blender.

“Hey, I just remembered, Tyler has a doctor’s appointment at 4:00,” I said as he counted scoops of coffee, then gritted his teeth and shook his head when he lost count.

“I won’t be home from work until five,” I continued. “So we have to figure out how to get him there.”

“I didn’t know you spoke French,” was his wry response.

“What do you mean?”

“You keep saying ‘we.’”

And thus began a Monday morning for two non-Monday, non-morning people sharing a blender, an address, three kids and a pot of coffee.

On the way home from work that day I couldn’t help comparing Brian’s parents to me and Doug.  How is it that a couple who has relationships and child-rearing down to a science isn’t allowed to be married, but then there’s straight, bumbling couples like me and my husband, and it’s all perfectly legal?

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I ranted to Doug when I got home.  “We suck at this.  Yet, not only did they let us get married and reproduce, but no one’s even asking us to renew our license.”

He responded with his usual grunt, which said “I’m pretending to be listening.”  I assume he had more important matters to think about, like which side of a right triangle was the hypotenuse.

I sighed.

“I’m having hot lesbian fantasies,” I confessed.  “I don’t want a husband, I want a partner.  Women are more empathetic, better listeners, and far more helpful around the house.  Not to mention, they’re prettier than boys.  The only useful thing about men is they get paid more.  Is it too late for me to change my mind?”

I wasn’t worried about offending him.  After all, he wasn’t listening to a word I was saying.

Then again, sometimes my husband surprises me.

“If you’re trying to come out of the closet, you have my full support,” he said.

“Really?”  I asked.  “You’re going to let me go that easily?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said.  “If you want to go out and find yourself a girlfriend, she has to live right here with us.  She has to sleep in bed with us.  And she has to be really, really hot.”

And with that, my hot lesbian fantasies fizzled to a pile of smoldering embers.