NewMom: Friends at Work
I don’t think I realized how much my work was my social network until now. Here I am on leave. Everything is wonderful, and frightening, and new. NewGirl is precious, but isn’t much of a conversationalist and also sleeps a lot. I have so many questions to ask my fellow mom friends, so many thoughts to share, and, surprisingly, the time to do it. So why are all my friends so busy with their jobs?
I feel I may need to start sending Outlook meeting invites just to keep up a social network. I’m not feeling isolated. Lots of friends and family have been coming to visit, and NewGirl and I get around, but I feel I’ve lost all ability to have spontaneous social conversation. I’ve heard that it’s tough for Moms to who plan to return to work to join neighborhood “Mommy and Me” groups while on leave because they tend to be geared toward SAHMs who are in it for the long haul. Do any of you have experience joining moms groups just temporarily while on maternity leave or have other thoughts about keeping up a social network while on leave?
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3 comments:
You may try signing up for some of your local park district activities centered around mommy and me type classes such as infant massage or post natal yoga classes. This worked for me - they are typically scheduled for 6 - 8 weeks so they work well for moms on temporary leaves. I've even managed to stay in touch with a few of the mom friends that I made via those type of classes. Local churches often have small groups as well.
I can't speak to temporarily joining moms groups while on leave but my daughter and I did take yoga when she was very young. It was a wonderful class and gave me a chance to meet other moms. She was only 7 weeks when we started and the yoga was surprisingly much more about her doing yoga than me (who would have thought a 7 week old could do so much!)
But here I am back at work and VERY interested in meeting other moms. I just moved to a town that has a "fabulous" moms club (or so I've been told by just about everyone I meet.) I'm experiencing the SAHM issue. The literature on the club must use the term "at-home mother" about a 1/2 dozen times in the first paragraph. By the second paragraph it talks about how the get togethers are specifically designed for the "at-home child". The term "at-home" is used throughout the whole brochure. Are they trying to tell me something? I can't believe I'm being excluded from a moms group because I work. I feel your pain. Meeting new moms is definitely a challenge - more so than I ever thought!
I belong to the MOMS (Moms Offering Moms Support) Club chapter in my town. The chapter is part of the international MOMS Club organization. True, it was started by and for SAHM's. The organization charter and all the online information stress that. But, my neighbor, a SAHM, really encouraged me to join. She insisted that our particular chapter is supportive all mothers, working and not. She was right. In fact, I later found out that 75% of my chapter's membership works at least part time. True, most of the activities are daytime ones that I can't participate in. But on a monthly basis there is a "Moms' Night Out" gathering, and there are frequently holiday parties for the kids that take place on weekends. I joined about 6 months before my second child was born. I soon found out that some of the working members had formed their own spinoff working mothers' support group. So now there is a group of about a dozen of us who have evening meetings every other week. While I was on maternity leave I did a daytime MOMS Club activity at least once a week. It was wonderful and I regretted losing those experiences when I went back to work. But, I am still a member, I still go to the working mothers meetings, and I make it when I can to weekend events and have even been known to schedule a vacation day when there is something good during the week that I want to do with my kids. You could try googling MOMS Club for your area. Or, you could start your own club for working mothers. Your Bright Horizons center is a great place to start. Ask the Center Director if you can put up a notice in your child's classroom soliciting interested parents. If your Center is employer based, your employer might even be willing to help stimulate interest in other employee working parents who don't have children at your Center. You can also do what the woman who started my working mothers' group did: post flyers around town and try to stimulate interest in your community. Once our group got going, a lot of new members were attracted by word of mouth. There are way too many people like us out there for us to have to go it alone.
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