Chat List Fun

‘Chat List’ fun

Here in beautiful Efrat we have something called a chat list. It is one of those ‘Yahoo Groups’ where people in our town who subscribe share information about births, deaths, weddings, engagements, things for sale, things to borrow, things being sought, rides being offered, rides being sought, school bake sales, pick-up softball games, weather forecasts… in short, if you wait long enough, nearly anything one could possible want to know or find will eventually show up on the list.

Today as I was going through my inbox, deleting nearly everything from the chat list, my mind registered a problem a fraction of a second after I had dispatched the offending message to my ‘Deleted Items’ folder. A couple of clicks retrieved a Chat List e-mail entitled:

“Looking for a play group for babies 3-6 months”.

I’m sorry, I gotta call bullsh*t on that one! An aggregation of amoebas wearing baby gap clothing, who don’t do much more than eat, drink and defecate (the latter, inexplicably, in far greater quantities than the sum of the first two) is not a ‘play group’!

I had to physically restrain myself from clicking the 'respond' button. Good thing, too… because this is a small community, and my response would not have been charitable (or well received). In our home office, Zahava's computer workstation sits right next to mine... and on more than one occassion, my response to something idiotic on the chat list has elicited a sharp intake of breath from my wife, followed by the words, "Oh David... do you think it was a good idea posting such a sarcastic response?"

She's usually right about these things. My knee-jerk reply to the 'Play Group' post would have been something like:

“Hi… I saw your posting and was wondering…why not organize a ‘play group’ for your lawn furniture while you’re at it… that could be fun too, no?”

Don’t misunderstand me… I love our precious baby, and am convinced he is gifted beyond all measure. But it would never have occurred to me to place him on the floor in the general vicinity of a few other babies of approximately the same age and fecal output, and call it a 'play group'. That’s crazy talk!

Let's call it what it really is; New Parent Therapy.

This little bleat for help was actually saying that somewhere in our little town there is a newly minted parent who desperately needs the scheduled companionship of other similarly clueless new parents for an hour or three every couple of days. Right? Am I getting warm?

No harm in that… perfectly understandable!

I could see where the camaraderie of an intimate group of new mommies and daddies (let’s not be sexist) could wipe that slightly frantic look off the face of even the most colicky baby’s parent. There is something reassuring about knowing that other people are functioning on as little sleep as you… and that you’re not the only negligent parent whose baby scratched the hell out of him/herself because you went eight whole hours without clipping your little darling’s nails!

Of course, regular get-togethers of this sort never have much staying power. The event that inevitably heralds the demise of these little groups is the first hint that one of the little drooling lumps on the play mat can do ‘something' - 'anything' - that the other little drooling lumps are not presently capable of doing. From that point on, the get-togethers become ever-more-vicious sessions of ‘Can You Top This?’

“Did I tell you… my Jake is rolling over by himself!”

“How wonderful for you! Jared’s been doing that for a little while now, so we’ve started putting up gates near all the staircases. I can give you the name of the store where we bought ours."

“You did exactly the right thing! Last week when Gabriella started sitting up, we felt it was time to lower her crib mattress so she wouldn’t be tempted to climb out and hurt herself.”

“Oh, that reminds me… did I tell you all how Maya's potty training is going?”

And on-and-on-and-on-and-on…

…until three weeks after that initial moment when that first precocious lump raised a dimpled hand out of the primordial soup of the ‘activity mat’ … the last two parents still stubbornly attending the ‘play group’ find themselves standing toe-to-toe, nearly shrieking to gain the other’s attention… all the while waving applications for Ivy League Universities in each other's face.

As I continue deleting my way down the list of e-mails from the Chat List, I wondered (as I often do)… ‘why exactly did I subscribe to this thing?’