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their spouses, with motherhood, with the balancing act. It feels like we’re living the same lives. Even though I see them less, it reminds me of when we were all single and freaking out about being single.”
    And speaking of single, obviously not all Formerlies are part of a pair. If you’re not—by choice or by default—you might, like my friend Rhonda, find yourself counting quite a few non-Formerlies among your friends. This is, of course, because single people may also be child-free, which means they can actually leave their homes after dark and meet up for dinner or drinks or (gasp!) both, even when it’s not their birthday. Younger people are likewise able to do this, plus you might just plain have more in common with them thanyou do with someone who talks about poopy diapers like it’s not totally gross. Rhonda is one of my closest friends and Auntie Rhonda to my girls. We spend loads of time together, often with my kids. But if my girls weren’t mine, I don’t think I’d want to stick around for chicken nuggets with us and call it a rockin’ Saturday night, either. We are each other’s road not taken.
    Talking to Rhonda about hanging with her younger friends made me realize I don’t have any non-Formerly friends. Everyone I come into meaningful contact with is a Formerly. Like living in a relatively homogeneous community in which everyone shares your religious or political outlook, it’s comfortable and easy to assume a certain foundation of understanding. So when I do on occasion have a real conversation with an adult in her, say, late 20s, everything goes along just fine until I say something that earns me a blank stare. That’s my signal that I used a catchphrase or made reference to something that is so anachronistic as to have moved beyond lame to completely irrelevant, thus highlighting the vast generational divide between us. It’s worse if you try to explain yourself. Once I found myself singing the Enjoli perfume song (“‘I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan …’ I’m sure it’s on YouTube!”) to a tableful of dumbstruck hipsters who so wished I’d stop. I really wanted to. I just couldn’t.
    To be sure, Rhonda sometimes feels a bit out of sync with her non-Formerly friends, but she loves that they’ve actually heard Lady Gaga’s music, not just her name. “Sometimes Ilook around and am one of the older people in the bar,” says Rhonda, who is 42. “How I feel about it depends on my mood.” Sometimes she’s a bit wistful; Rhonda watches the ritual hair tosses and wingman maneuvers and cock blocks and women pretending to receive texts from boyfriends waiting at home who don’t exist. “Once in a while I wish I could have those moments and chances again,” she says, experiencing them for the first time as a young person. On the other hand, she has the wisdom and experience to know that she doesn’t have to put up with the insecurity and will-he-call awfulness of dating in your 20s. “Sometimes it’s like,
Thank God I don’t have to endure this just because everyone expects me to. If I’m not having fun, I can just go home!
”
    Right. Would it have killed someone to tell me that I was free to go home at any time, back when I was in my 20s? Then again, I should have been able to figure it out. I was a smart young woman with two feet and subway fare. Why did I think there was some rule that said I had to stay until the last loser had fallen off the bar stool, because that’s what I was “supposed” to be doing at my age? I can remember feeling bored and annoyed at so many parties, but laughing a little too loudly and pretending to have “the BEST time!” afraid to leave because I thought I’d miss something. This was my youth! What if “the time of my life” took place right after I left? I felt like all my friends were in on some big joke or vital nugget of information that gave them the appropriate amount of youthful insouciance, while I was, as often