I propose a minute of silence for all the whatsapp groups that died more than a year ago and lie in the memory of our mobile phones.

Nowadays, any combination, no matter how simple and restricted, is entitled to its whatsapp group, a group that invariably debuts with the message “This is easier”. Is it?

I still have the Easter vacation group from 4 years ago in Serra da Estrela, Tomás’ baby shower group, who turned 6 last month, a bachelorette party group from a friend who has already divorced, another from 2017 with the name “Dinner today. Who aligns?”, and in this lengthy research I also discovered that the Eurovision group was not erased either: “Operation Kiev” from its name, and over the years this name has become a little dangerous, it would be better to erase it. The point is this, I should delete them all, but I don’t, not out of nostalgia (God help me I’m still too young to be nostalgic), but because I don’t remember doing it.

I’m sure there are those out there who are reading and thinking “I do a monthly cleaning to always have my whatsapp fresh and airy”. Well, I don’t. Mine has a lot of out-of-date groups.

When I do duo concerts outside Portugal, the first thing my road manager does is a new group with the name of the country or, when he’s more inspired, a phrase (changing the title of an old one is out of the question). When we went to play Mallorca, for example, the name of the group was “Vamos a la playa” which misled me and made me carry a suitcase with only shorts and t-shirts. It was January. I died of cold for 3 days. I know it was my stupidity, but I blame the name of the group anyway.

Only from working groups I have the “Concertos quartet”, “Concertos Luísa” “Luísa Sobral”, “LS Tour”, “DanSando” and “Summer Tour”. It’s crazy! If I have something important to say, I don’t even know where to do it.

But I have to confess that all this was just a pretext to reach a very specific type of group, the worst plague of our times, within the first world problems, of course. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but I wanted you to get excited about the reveal. I’m talking about the parents’ groups. It’s true, this scourge of modern society where there are those who document with photographs Ritinha’s day-to-day life with chickenpox, where a mother asks if someone accidentally took Santiago’s jacket and the twenty-two parents answer “It’s not here at home” (the same happens with the get-well messages), where every year we receive Christmas photos with the children very well dressed next to the tree, once again followed by twenty-two messages of “Merry Christmas to you too”, a group where the school and the decisions of the teachers are judged without ever talking to them, as if we were from different teams.

A few months ago, the mother of a boy in my youngest son’s class, with the best of intentions, asked me if I wanted to be added to the parent group. My son is two years old. What is a group of parents of two-year-olds for? Trying not to be impolite, I declined the offer and proposed that we talk about it again in the first cycle.

Another thing that annoys me in parent groups is that the name itself is a fallacy. It would be better to call themselves what they are, “mothers’ groups”, and on average (yes, I’ve been doing calculations) only 10% of fathers in fathers’ groups are, effectively, fathers (male parents).

“And why am I part of these groups if I criticize them so much?”, you ask, or maybe you don’t ask, however, I think it’s important to clarify. I fear that my children will be left out if I do not receive the messages, that they will not receive the invitation to some important event, that they will be the ones to suffer the consequences of this irritation that is only mine. So I stay. I wish a merry Christmas to the plaid family, I say that I don’t have Santiago’s jacket, I wish well to those who have otitis during the summer holidays and I put hearts in the random and completely decontextualized photographs that appear there. Because being a mother is doing most of the things we swore never to do. It’s making “You can’t beat them, join them” in our life motto. It is “eating groups” while they eat us.