The loneliness of being a grownup today

Is it lonelier being a grownup today than it was in the past? I often ask this question to myself when I have to go to my sons’ friends’ birthday parties, which I had to do yesterday. Nothing makes me feel more lonely than being around other parents in a social environment that is centered around our kids. Whether it’s a birthday party. Or a Cub Scout meeting. Or a basketball practice. The social distance between me and the other grownups in the room seems insurmountable. Is it just me? Or is it something about the way social media has undermined real life social space?

When I look around at these parties, it seems like 2/3 of the parents in the room are disengaged. So I feel a sense of relief that I’m not the only one. It seems like our social networks are a lot weaker than they were for our parents. The party yesterday was for a kid in my son’s Tiger Cub Scout den. Usually my wife attends the Tiger Cub meetings. She’s much more extroverted than I am, so she probably has a completely different experience. Whenever I go, it seems like the parents sit quietly and watch the Den leader talk to our kids, swooping in whenever discipline is needed. I shake hands with the other parents sometimes. I asked most of them their names in the fall. I don’t want to ask their names again.

Most of the kids in our Cub Scout pack go to the same school, Lusher Academy, the elite public school in New Orleans that’s very hard to get into. My sons go to Encore Academy, which was the best school we could find with open slots when we moved here two summers ago. When I was a kid, we always had phone directories for our classmates. So we could call them and invite them over to play. But Encore Academy doesn’t have this. They’re a pretty young charter school, still trying to pull a lot of things together.

We love our sons’ teachers and Encore’s principal. They’re doing amazing work. But we don’t have any way to get to know their classmates’ parents. So we don’t have a community. Maybe the other Encore parents do. Most of them are black and we’re white. As much as we don’t want there to be an invisible wall, there is. If I had more time, I would try to invest in building those relationships. I wonder how many other parents do soccer, Cub Scouts, church, and school all with the same network of people. We don’t have any overlap between our different social networks, which is why we know very few other parents connected to our sons’ activities.

Our son’s soccer coach is a parent in our Tiger den. He was at the birthday party yesterday. He calls me “Dad” because he doesn’t know my name. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to tell him my name when he said “Dad” or if that would be embarrassing to him. I know his name because he’s Coach Sean. I was able to talk to him a little bit about football. I pretended to know what he was talking about when he started talking details about the different teams. When you don’t know what someone is talking about, you can still say things like “Aw man!” or “Seriously?” to keep the conversation going. We didn’t have anything else to talk about. So we watched a little bit of the Kansas City New England game in silence.

Every time I go to one of these birthday parties, I am determined not to be a recluse. I practice in my head, saying, “Hi, my name is Morgan. I’m Isaiah’s (or Matthew’s) dad. Which one is yours?” or something like that. But when I get there, I never can break through the awkwardness. Usually the other grownups are either engaged in chitchat with one other person whom they seem to know well. Or they’re looking at their phones. So I pull out my phone. At least the trampoline place yesterday had wifi. And a big screen TV with couches for the parents while their kids were jumping. Some of the parents were jumping with their kids. I should have done that, but I didn’t know if it would be presumptuous of me to use up one of the jumping passes that the birthday boy’s parents’ had bought.

Sometimes at these functions, I’ll walk over and start listening to someone else’s conversation to see if there’s a way to jump in. But that feels creepy and weird.  Usually they’re talking about particularities from their family lives and sports schedules. There doesn’t seem to be a good moment to say, “Hi, I don’t really have any grownup friends because I’m in full-time ministry and almost every night of my week is accounted for. Do you think we could look at our calendars and schedule a time for our families to get together? I realize I don’t know you from Adam but I’d like to have some grownup friends who live in the same city as me.”

I have over 3000 facebook friends, most of whom are random networking contacts through my blog. I feel very close to some people whom I’ve never met face to face. Right before I went to the birthday party yesterday, I got into a passionate Facebook debate with my best Calvinist friend whom I love like a brother. Whenever I finally get to meet him one day, I will give him a bear hug and I might get a little emotional. Why can’t I have people like that in my everyday life? I get to work with some incredible students, but it’s not the same as having friends who are my age to whom I don’t have to be a pastor.

I go to a church where every Sunday, I shake hands with lots of cool people who are doing really noble, creative things with their lives. I know some of their names. I’m not sure how to get to know them better. Because of how my wife and I have prioritized our time as full-time campus ministers, our house is not in a state where we could invite people over. I can’t imagine carving out enough time to prepare food and drinks for a party. We do that sort of thing for students at our ministry. And it’s super-exhausting.

In any case, my church is putting together a photo directory that will come out in a few weeks. I think I’m going to call some people who seem cool that I haven’t yet gotten to know. Our plan is to have some kind of gathering at our house on Mardi Gras. We’ve got a few weeks to clean up and get ready. I don’t know how to have grownup friends. But that’s one of my biggest goals for this year. If you live in New Orleans and you’re a grownup, can we be friends? I’m actually capable of having pretty interesting conversations one on one. I just suck at birthday parties.