‘Girls5eva’ Standout Song “New York Lonely Boy” Has Me Spiraling About Motherhood

The breakthrough joke of Peacock‘s new comedy series Girls5eva has nothing to do with throwback pop music and everything about a specific kind of childhood found only in New York. “New York Lonely Boy” is an austere ode to the legions of only children raised in NYC. While it’s meant to be a cautionary tale for Girls5eva‘s Dawn (Sara Bareilles), it had a different effect on me. Almost as soon as I finished chuckling at lines like “the Strand is his Disneyland,” I was overcome with a feeling I’ve been trying to outrun my whole life. Girls5eva‘s “New York Lonely Boy” made my biological clock start ticking.

Girls5eva follows four former pop stars — Wickie (Renée Elise Goldsberry), Summer (Busy Philipps), Gloria (Paula Pell), and the aforementioned Dawn — as they attempt to launch a comeback in their early 40s. Dawn is clearly the most grounded of all the members of Girls5eva. She lives in Queens where she helps manage her family’s Italian restaurant and has a stable marriage to the sweetly supportive Scott (Daniel Breaker). In Girls5eva Episode 3, however, the one source of real tension in Dawn and Scott’s marriage emerges. Scott is gung-ho about conceiving another child and Dawn is…apathetic. It’s only when Gloria points out that her son Max (Julius Concecaio) is a classic “New York Lonely Boy,” that Dawn has to confront the reasons why she’s not as enthusiastic about getting pregnant again.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. It’s only when Dawn starts noticing other “New York Lonely Boys” during a hilarious musical interlude that she begins to worry.

The beauty of “New York Lonely Boy” is twofold. It’s a picture perfect satire song, but it also digs into pervasive fears that a lot of women have about motherhood. In Dawn’s case, she’s worried that she’s raising a son doomed to be peculiar. In mine? The fact that I haven’t even started having kids yet and I maybe do want to raise a “New York Lonely Boy.”

For most of my life I’ve assumed that I would one day be a parent, but that I would wait until later in life, when I was financially stable and emotionally ready. I myself was a “late in marriage” baby and reaped the emotional benefits of my parents’ choice. When I started off 2020 single, I wasn’t feeling down about it, but excited for the prospect of a year of dating. Of course, the pandemic happened, quarantining me alone in my apartment for 14 months with only my elderly cat for company. Friends and family members had pandemic babies. Even if I had a partner, I would have resisted this course (because we were living in a pandemic, people!). However now over a full year has gone by. The city is reopening. I still live alone. I still love my life, my job, and my city, but there’s this worry that something is still missing from my life even if bars and movie theaters have reopened.

“New York Lonely Boy” entered my life at the exact moment when I was vulnerable. I was questioning my life choices and beginning to ponder what I wanted to happen next. Hell, I just moved across the street from an elementary school where I hear the giddy laughs of children playing every day. “New York Lonely Boy” didn’t hit my heart like a cautionary tale, but a future to be coveted. I would love to mother a cosmopolitan kid with spiffy pants and a taste for wasabi. I guess I would love to be a mom.

I’m fully aware that I shouldn’t make huge life decisions based on a 90 second joke song from a Peacock sitcom, but “New York Lonely Boy” has definitely made me reconsider my priorities for the next few years. Maybe I will become a mom. Maybe I won’t! Either way, I will still have “New York Lonely Boy” stuck in my head, gently teasing what could be.

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