Apparently friendships are built on shared experiences. And the more intense those shared experiences (say, backpacking through Eastern Europe together or surviving a plane crash) the stronger the friendship. So it makes perfect sense that as a new mum your mothers’ group is going to be an awesome place to find new friends. Because, let’s face it, having a baby and surviving the first few months together with the help of other mums is pretty much like being on the reality series “Survivor”. You don’t know when you’re going to eat, shower or sleep next and you are constantly on the brink of a melt-down. Except, unlike the reality series, there is no hope of being voted off the island or making a quick exit on a speedboat. Nope, your two choices are survive or die.
I figure the best way to survive is to surround yourself with people who are doing it just as tough as you are.
Feel like you are the only one going crazy and not getting any sleep? Best way to get a reality check is to hang out with other mums! There is always someone getting less sleep than you. Feel like your child is the only one not eating properly? Hang out with other mums and watch their little darlings refuse to eat anything that resembles a vegetable and feel better about feeding your child banana and yoghurt three times a day. Feel like your husband does jack shit around the house and has no idea what it’s like to be-at-home-all-day-with-a-screaming-baby? Hang out with other mums and whinge about your respective partners over coffee and cake. Or even better, do an outdoor group training session together with a PT, and bitch about hubby during a workout. So much more efficient.
Because if there is one thing mothers’ groups give you is the assurance that you are not the crazy one. Oh no. It’s everyone else. It’s the loser at the shopping centre who took the last car park specifically designated for prams and mosied out of his car without a freakin’ pram in sight. It’s the asshole neighbour who waltzes right past you when you’re struggling to carry 17 bags of groceries (and a screaming baby) up the stars to your apartment and doesn’t offer to help. It’s basically everyone in the ENTIRE WORLD who doesn’t get how freakin’ hard it can be just to get to the shops to buy toilet paper. And that’s why you need a mothers’ group. Because no-one else cares about that shit. Unless you are right in the middle of it, you wouldn’t either. But every other new mother will nod and listen, and enthusiastically agree that the world is pretty much against them, because that’s how it feels. Until, that is, you have your first night out as a mothers group, get trashed, and remember that there is a life outside of babies, vomit and poo, and realise that it’s pretty fucking awesome, but that life with a baby is also pretty fucking awesome, and without that little baby you wouldn’t have met all the amazing women in your mothers group. Amen.
*ActiveMumma is a pseudonym for an otherwise ordinary person who has daily existential struggles with the responsibilities of parenthood and who has the occasional overwhelming urge to run away (with a good book, or at the very least the latest season of KUWTK) and never return. But, of course, she loves her adorable and perfect little angels way too much to ever abandon them, at least on any long-term basis.