Among my tribe

I only have two local friends with babies, and I only see one of them regularly. This past Friday, I had an invitation to an informal get-together that a couple I hung out with in college put together for another couple I didn't know very well back in the day as a celebration of the impending birth of their second daughter. I waffled all day about going, feeling kind of wallflower-y and awkward, but decided I didn't really have anything to lose. I packed up Nico (MB was teaching) and stopped in, figuring if it sucked I could use the baby as an excuse to bail. And you know what? We ended up staying for about two and a half hours.

There were almost a dozen kids running around the house and a six-month-old boy riding around on his mother's hip. I hovered around the periphery for a bit, but before I realized what was happening, I found myself standing around the dining room table chatting with five other young hippie-ish mothers. When Nico got hungry, I contemplated leaving, but then retreated to an out-of-the-way armchair and nursed him under a cover while the six-month-old's mother nursed him in a chair nearby. Solidarity! After he ate I got called into the kitchen by the host, the guy who was my lab partner in quite a few classes in college, and ended up talking birth stories with another girl I've known casually for several years.

The people who read this who don't have kids probably think this all sounds lame, but I felt like I'd found my tribe and was among my people at last. This is why playgroups exist, I suspect, because even when you're committed to live a life that isn't All Baby All the Time, sometimes you just need to talk to someone else who really gets it, someone else who is in the trenches with you, changing the diapers and committing to breastfeeding even when it sucks (ha!) and taking the bad with the good in this crazy, wonderful, sometimes overwhelming but always worthwhile whirlwind.