bonds

I guess I was about eight or nine, waiting in line at Waldemeer for the Bump, and my mom pointed to a little girl about my size running from the Wacky Shack to the Spider, her mom reluctantly trailing behind her. I know this is lost on any non-Erieites, but that isn't the point of the story.

My mom told me that little girl and I share the same birthday.

"How do you know?", I wondered. I had never seen that girl in my life.
"Because we labored together at Doctor's (Hospital)".

I never got that. How nine years later you would recognize someone you saw for a day and never spoke to again.

When I got pregnant I was desperate for peers. Few of my friends had kids, and certainly none of them were pregnant when I was. I launched a full-on assault to gather as many pregnant people as I could find. I lurked in maternity departments and pounced on anyone who looked mildly bloated, stalked people in the OB's waiting room, the grocery, the street. I got online and built me a brand new social circle of people just like me. Smart girls who listened to what the doctors had to say about what you were supposed to do with yourself when you were pregnant, all due between November and May and all having their first baby. Because that matters. When you are pregnant you don't want to hear conflicting views or be brushed off, especially when you are not of the "anything goes" or "been there done that" clubs.

We built ourselves a mini-army of comrades. We listened to each other, we asked embarrassing questions of one another about buttholes and vagina sizes and boob leakage and other nastiness that you don't find in regular conversations. We kept in touch, we blogged, we read, we cared. I was lucky enough to have Val, Susan, and Amy Jo living nearby. Even if we didn't see each other often, we knew we were out there for each other, going through things that our husbands didn't understand, that our mother's didn't know about thirty years ago, and our friends didn't want to hear.

My mommy friends are different than my other friends. I love them differently . We've been through the war together. We didn't share childhoods, we didn't go to college together, we never worked together, we never partied together. We don't know everything about each other, we don't know each other's families and friends, we don't bother with the minutiae. We have other friends for that. We share the stuff you don't find in the books, the stuff you can't bother the doctor with, that no one else can answer. The "holy crap is this normal or am I the worst mother ever and am I totally ruining my child or is my child totally ruining me" stuff.

Amy Jo and Susan came by for dinner last night with their boys. It was amazing to see them together, the last time they saw each other they had no interest in other little babies and now they were trying to share and play together. I wish Jake was there too, but he's jetsetting across the state and missed out on seeing the boys he's known since the belly. Though it's been almost years since we sat in the same room together, it seems like about four days have passed since we met. If time swallows us up and a decade passes before I see them again I know that nothing would change and we would dive right back in to frantically talking about everything and nothing between bites of pasta and cheese and bread and cake and it would probably be tenfold because we wouldn't have any mouths to wipe or boo boos to kiss.