I went to my mothers group yesterday. It was our first solo flight – after the first five meetings at the early childhood centre, it is up to the group to sort itself out.
We met at a really big club, the type where members sign everyone else in. I normally avoid places like it on the grounds that I assume the type of people who go to clubs aren’t going to like the type of people who are like me. Of course when I think this, I am thinking of myself still as a teenager with braces I was paying for myself, purposely emphasising how unmainstream I was before the cool girls could do it for me.
I didn’t want to go to mothers group for similar reasons. They were all prettier than me, looking like they had lost all their pregnancy weight within minutes of looking at their newborn babies. Some looked better 10 weeks after giving birth than I did on my wedding day, with that knack for make up and hair which I have never mastered, partly through lack of practice and partly through defiance to mask my lack of practice.
But I had been told by a wise woman to treat the mothers group as your ” tribe.” “You don’t have to become best friends with the other women, judt think of it as meeting the other women at the well, exchanging information.”. So along I went, baby in tow, my ticket to belonging.
And it was….OK. We sat and chatted. Turns out that those other mums have no idea what they are doing either. One woman laughed, “Do you put your dishes back like this?” Pretending to put the plate away as quietly as possible. And we do that too! The woman was tall and pretty and wearing a size shorts I fit when I was 12. But it turned out we had more in common than I thought.