Mommy Panic Syndrome, or "I didn't inhale"

Mark and I went to watch the Pearl Jam 20th Anniversary Tour concert on Sunday, September 25th.  I was initially aghast to see my peers looking, well, a little older than I'd expected.  There was an awful lot of sensible shoes and receding hairlines.  There were mom jeans and pot bellies.  Those old plaid Lumberjack shirts were looking pretty long in the tooth.

At the T-shirt sales table, there were onesies along with the predictable rock concert gear.  "I guess they know their audience", Mark says.  Most of these grunge rockers from the 90s were coupled off, many wearing wedding rings and cooing over the spray-paint-can-adorned baby undershirts.   I found myself feeling a bit disappointed at the lack of anti-establishment rhetoric and the noticeable absence of teenage angst.

We made our way up to our seats.  Behind us to the right were a group of portly 30-something dudes wearing wrinkly T-shirts, faded jeans and thick glasses.  Between songs, the guy sitting next to me was scheduling meetings for the week on his Blackberry, sending e-vites to his fellow coworkers.

I should note, this was the first time that Mark and I had left Henry with non-family members.  They seemed like nice people and accepted spare change as payment, so we figured it was OK.  It was the first time I hadn't been with him when he went to sleep.  I found myself wondering how many other concert-goers were checking their watches between songs, wondering how their little ones were doing?  This was probably pretty different from what were doing when we first heard this music twenty years ago.

I enjoyed the music, but it was difficult not to reflect on what happens in the span of twenty years.  A lot of the music they played has been a constant in my existence, while everything else has changed and changed and changed.  I wondered how it was that we could all have been doing the same thing in the 90s and how that led us to sharing this moment two decades later.  I thought it was beautiful that these funny-looking 30-somethings could all jump up and down like children while Eddie belted out Alive.

Then I realized the guy three seats down was most of the way through his joint and I was likely high.

I did pretty well until the band came out for their second encore; the show dragging into the 2 1/2 hour mark. At that point, I could no longer ignore my Mommy-Panic.   I began wondering if Henry was sleeping well, if he thought I had abandoned him and was never coming back, or if dingos had carried him off into the temperate rainforest.


We had two cell phones (in case one of the fully charged batteries died) that I checked at regular intervals to see if the babysitters had started their trip to the hospital because of some awful diaper-changing-related accident.  I powered through the final song, and after begging Mark to pay an exorbitant amount of money for a cab, he talked me down and we took the bus home.

Upon our return, Henry was sleeping soundly, and had been since prior to the band even taking the stage.  He didn't even notice we were gone and Mark and I enjoyed a really lovely evening together.  All was well and the dingos retreated back into the night.