New City, New Mom Friends

Nearly a month has passed since we moved. We're still living in a hotel, so we're far from settled. Everything still seems new and temporary. But I'm trying to familiarize myself with the area and allow myself to ease into our new home town.

I'm a social extrovert. I love meeting and connecting with people! When we made the decision to move, one of the very first things I did was browse local groups to connect with: church-related, profession-related, and mom-related. After a few weeks of attending church- and profession-related events and not getting a chance to meet any other moms of babies, I decided to focus on that particular need.

Where I moved from, I also felt deficient in the area of mom friends. I would say I had one good mom friend whose baby appeared in this world 5 months before mine did. She helped guide me through my pregnancy and first months of motherhood. We grew close and it hurt to move away from her.

I tried to remain friends with the women I took birth classes with through our doula, but they didn't seem to want anything to do with me after classes were over. I tried to connect with other moms through a church group supporting breastfeeding women, but the group only met monthly and none of the moms were ever receptive to my invitations to hang out outside the group. I attended a moms group at a hospital once but the nurses who ran it focused on health-related Q&A and discouraged group socialization. I connected with two local moms groups on Meetup but was turned off by their policies. I mostly gave up trying.

Here, in a new town, I could reinvent myself and build a new circle of friends from the ground up. I decided it was worth it to pay a $25 membership fee to join the local MOMS Club. They seemed to have plenty of members with lots of activity. I also liked that the club is divided into tiny regions, so activities were likely to be very close and any mom friends made were also likely to be close. Convenient travel times makes it easier on everyone.

This morning, I attended my first playdate at a local playground. When I first arrived, I was surprised at how many moms and kids were present. I soon learned that none of them were part of the MOMS Club; they simply liked to visit the park at 10 AM on a sunny Friday morning. Josephine is still rather young for playgrounds, but she did enjoy being pushed in the baby swing. I struck up a conversation with the mom next to me pushing her toddler in the swing. It was pleasant.

After a few minutes, a mom approached me and introduced herself as the president of the club. We chatted as I sat on the grass with my little grass-eater. Josephine is a rapid crawler, but surrounded by so many people, she preferred to sit still, observe, and occasionally stick a freshly picked blade in her mouth. Another member of the club approached and made small talk. I didn't have an immediate BFF-at-first-sight with any of these women, but it was nice. I was laying the foundations.

Then, I got an unexpected urgent call which forced me away from the playground after only around 15 minutes of play. So goes life. I will try again another time.

Will I made any close friends through this group? I hope so.  

My Momblog Journey Thus Far: Tips & Annoyances

This is a photo of the recent Mercury transit, not blogging. I don't have a photo for every occasion.

I've just read Dear Mommy Blogger and I felt inspired to write the entry I was going to write anyway at some point. I started this blog a month and a half ago and the associated Twitter account shortly after that. The good news: I've finally found active mom bloggers! If you read my earlier entry on my struggle, I was coming up with inactive blogs or none at all, only articles on how to make money blogging. It was frustrating and lonely.

I started this blog because I couldn't find other work-at-home moms in professions. I wanted to know if such a feat was even possible and how those impressive working moms succeeded. I wanted advice on in-person meetings with children, phone calls with children, conferences with children, professional networking events with children, and sexual discrimination in the workplace. I couldn't find these mom bloggers, so I started my own blog in the hope that they'll find me. I haven't yet succeeded in my search. If you're out there, professional work-at-home moms, I'm still looking for you. I'm only 4 months into this work-at-home mom gig and I seek advice, tips, support, and feedback.

I have been successful in finding mom blogs of all sorts, though! I really should have used Twitter as a resource from the start. Ah Twitter, how I love thee. Twitter is how I connect with colleagues around the world, so it made sense that I'd connect with moms that way as well. Through Twitter hashtags and retweets, I've found women from all over the world. From links within blogs and guest posts, I've found even more.

Oddly, many of them are new like mine. There seems to be a high turn-over in mom blogging. Women blog for a short time, then stop. I've been blogging elsewhere for 14 years and my baby is young, so I'm in this for the long haul. I'm looking for others to connect with who also want lasting friendships through blogging.

Despite being a blogger for 14 years, I'm learning some new tricks. I've always been a fan of photodocumenting my life, but I can see the benefit to creating cute photo titles. Thanks for that tip. I dislike the proliferation of perfect stock photos and therefore only use my own imperfect photos. I tried to make my blog a bit more colorful and interesting with photos while still keeping it simple.

I always strive to be a better writer and communicator. I'm turning away from a more diary style and toward more a more themed style. Instead of recounting my days, I'll write about how I feel or what I've learned about a subject that may be of interest to others. By reading mom blogs, I've become a better blogger myself.

What I was surprised to find was the sheer amount of noise: blog entries and social media postings devoid of real content. While many blog entries were interesting and genuine, too many were sponsored product reviews or the same ten “interesting” tips I had read in 100 other places about newborns, baby sleeping, baby eating, etc. If a blog entry is just repeating what it read elsewhere, why wouldn't I read more original, educated sources on the matter instead?

Social media postings are full of nonsense and redundancy. Too many pleas for attention. Why are you stealing my time, my most precious resource, to ask me for the fifth time to read a blog entry I read the first time? Or to read an old Christmas entry in May? Or to subscribe and follow you on other social media platforms, despite the fact that I know how to find you on Facebook if I wanted to? Or to thank a complete stranger for following/liking/”interacting”? Each time I read one of those nonsense postings, a little bit of my life has been stolen from me.

There's some exceptionally bad advice out there. I read one mom blogger advising other mom bloggers to follow 2000 users, unfollow whoever doesn't follow you back, then follow thousands more! If you're following users to gain more followers, you're not a genuine follower and your new followers likely won't be genuine. You aren't reading your followers' content and they're not reading yours. What's the point? I block anyone who pulls that stunt.

I also unfollow anyone who repeatedly posts the same entry or link over and over and over. All scheduled, of course. When questioned, they say that Twitter posts have a life of 20 minutes. No. Twitter posts have an indefinite life, and if you think your followers don't know how to scroll down, you're part of the problem. So much clutter. So much unnecessary noise.

I'm enjoying writing my mom blogging and Twitter microblogging so far. It's an outlet for words I don't want to put on social media attached to my name. But it's flawed. It's tiresome to sort through the trash. I'll probably deal with it until I reach a breaking point, then purge the irrelevant noise-creators.

On a positive note, so far I have found around 100 interesting moms (and a few dads!) to follow. I'm slowly going through their blog archives and subscribing for new entries. It is nice to know that there is a mom community out there online for me, even if an imperfect one.

In Search of the Mythical Moms Group

Many ideas popped into my head last year when I discovered that I was pregnant. Among them, not at the top but somewhere down the line, I thought that I might have the opportunity to make mom friends in a way I wasn't able to do as a childless woman.

My mom made lifelong mom friends when I was a baby. Every July when I was growing up, we'd attend a picnic hosted by one of the couples. Another mom who attended told me every year about how she and my mom were pregnant together. These women are are unlike each other and took different paths in life, but they shared pregnancy and young children in common and remained friends throughout the decades.

One of the first things I did was look into the large “birthing circle” in the area, a group for mothers who want to nurse and parent more naturally. I joined their Facebook group and planned to attend one of their monthly meetings. However, that plan only lasted a few days.

My first red flag was when group organizers openly promoted amber teething necklaces, a fraudulent product based on fake science meant to steal money from desperate parents. Several moms responded about how much they love their amber teething necklaces. I was the lone voice of reason on that thread to even suggest an alternate point of view. I didn't argue, but I was shocked by the mass ignorance and could not believe that the organizers of this group were irresponsible enough to promote fraud.

The nail in the coffin for this mom group was an even bigger irresponsibility: not taking a stand against a fraud so large that it has claimed the lives of many children. One of the moms on that group posted her anti childhood vaccination viewpoint. The anti-vaxxer mentality has killed and continues to kill children in the developed world and is 100% based on a lie. I asked the group leaders whether they take a stand against anti-vaxxers. They responded that they're neutral on the issue. I left the group immediately and never looked back.

Next I looked into another popular mom group: the local La Leche League. I wanted to breastfeed my child if I could and it seemed like a good place to find like-minded moms. I joined their Facebook group with the intention of attended a meeting. I didn't last long there, either.

It wasn't anything that they did wrong, exactly. But there was one post after another almost militantly declaring their intention to fight anyone who thinks that toddlers and young children are too old to be breastfed. Each post was accompanied by a photo of a toddler or young child breastfeeding. I'm all for breastfeeding for a year, or two, or whatever is medically necessary. But there's a line where it turns from sweet to creepy for me, and several of those posts crossed that line. I didn't fit there.

I then turned to Meet-up and found two local groups for moms with young kids. Both required approval to join. The first one got back to me immediately and looked really promising, until they told me that there was an annual membership fee and a requirement to host an event every month. Not only would I be too busy as a new mom to host an event every month, but I also didn't want to join a group where all the members hosted events every month. That would mean events nearly every day, and likely low turn-out at each event.

When the other Meet-up group finally got back to me, they informed me of an annual membership fee even higher than the other group. I didn't see the need to pay for friends when sororities were recruiting in college and I don't see the need to pay for friends now. What do those membership fees go to, anyway? I'd rather directly pay for something that I want, rather than someone take my money and choose for me. The whole concept turned me off.

I took a free birthing class at my local hospital. The other pregnant moms in attendance were teenagers, some attending with their moms. I was 31-years-old. I didn't have anything in common with those young ladies except conceiving a child. There was no class introduction or chance to mingle with the other moms, so I didn't get to know any of them.

I took a multi-week birthing class taught by my doula attended by two other couples. We were all planning home births and using the same midwife-doula team. This seemed like the best opportunity to make mom friends. And we even connected with each other on Facebook after! But I haven't seen or talked to one mom since the last birthing class. The other one I've run into three or four times unplanned, and each time she acts awkward around me. So much for that idea.

At the end of my second trimester, I connected with the Catholic Nursing Mother's League. I'm Catholic, and I've found a lot of my friends through Catholic groups, so I figured I'd try it. I was pleasantly surprised! Even though I didn't know any of them and my baby wasn't even born yet, I was welcomed with open arms by supportive, knowledgeable young mothers who I could connect with. There's still hints of crazy at times – twice I've seen amber teething necklaces on babies – but there has never been any official promotion of crazy. There's no drama, no gossip, no tension. The mothers all seem sane, warm, and friendly. I've been attending ever since.

The group only meets monthly and it's difficult to get to know the ladies well in a short time, but I connect with most of the regulars on Facebook to get to know them better. A lot of the moms with older kids get together for playdates, field trips, and even a homeschool co-op. When my baby is older, I'll be able to hang out with them that way. Most of the moms live a little far from me so this isn't the kind of moms group where I can casually hang out on the local playground or take stroller walks, but that's okay. I'm just happy to have connected with other young women who also call themselves mom!

May's Catholic Nursing Mothers League meeting. Older kids were running around out-of-shot.