Aug 23 Kindred Strangers

When we got back home after our summer hiatus, I randomly found a mom’s group in my area through meetup.com. I had never heard of that website before- but just happen to be doing a broad search for “moms clubs” and this site came up. After the rigmarole of “applying” to be part of the group- I suddenly had access to over 30 moms in my area and a shared online calendar where at least two events/play dates are planned each week. I’ll be honest…the idea of online relationships has always sort of given me the creeps… so I was skeptical to say the least… but I went to an outing two weeks ago- a play date at the park (which I figured was safe enough…) and I met some great ladies. Since then, Silas and I have been on 5 or 6 meetup outings, and earlier this week I mustered enough courage to go to the monthly Mom’s Night Out dinner, which happened to be at Olive Garden this month. While I was getting ready to go- I was somewhat nervous… I joked with Dave that I felt like I was going on a first date… what should I wear? What will we talk about? Will it be awkward? I’d say about 20 women showed up. We sat at a long table- and when I got there- the seats that remained vacant were by women I hadn’t met yet… so, I was thinking oh great- this is going to be so uncomfortable. But I was wrong… within moments of introducing ourselves (the other moms didn’t seem to know each other either) we started gabbing effortlessly. Before I knew it, three hours had gone by and the wait staff kept eyeing us like…are they ever going to leave?! It was great! When I got home, Dave wanted to hear all about it…and all I could say was that we were a group of kindred strangers. Sharing the one common bond of motherhood made us connect naturally, like puzzle pieces. And it gave me such a fresh perspective on the phrase it takes a village to raise a child. What I’ve discovered about that… is that the village is more for the mom than it is the child… there is comfort, encouragement, joy, and strength in the comradery of women raising children.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 5:40 pm and is filed under About Amy, Me as a Mom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.