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Community Corner

Find a Moms Group, Find Your Tribe

Having a baby isn't time for lone wolf status, it's time to join a pack!

After I had my first baby back in 2003, I literally wandered around Silver Spring for six months with a huge smile and an adorable baby, hoping that I’d randomly make a mom friend. I knew exactly one other woman in the area with young children, and I didn't want to wear her out.

Yup, this busybody who plays a mom in the know on the internet was once fellow-mom friendless.

Sometimes I met my former coworkers and single friends for drinks at fashionable NW D.C. bars and brought Charlie along.  I nursed him in the middle of happy hours populated by young professionals, once was even officially hit on while I breastfed my baby beneath a pashmina. (I think the monkey-faced slippers sticking out in my lap finally clued the dude in.)

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Once a month or so I would tag along to my friend Jennifer's wonderfully inclusive playgroup of experienced moms with two children. Charlie and I took a Mommy and Me music class, and unlike college, I never once even considered ditching. Everyone I met was wonderful, but I felt like I was rushee trying to break into the sorority of together mothers. Or a frisky freshman boy trying to get a date with a cool junior girl for the prom.

Most evenings I sat on my front stoop all dressed up with my baby on my lap waiting for my husband to pull into the driveway at the end of the day while a delicious dinner sat warming on the stove. I was so I Love Lucy, all I needed were pearls and a perm. And then I regaled Chris with our wild adventures at Whole Foods! the Post Office!, Target! and tales of parks with bucket swings and many, many walks along Sligo Creek.

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It wasn’t until Charlie was seven months old that I found my tribe, my moms' group. The moms' group had monthly big meetings and activities every week, moms' nights out, and small weekly playgroups formed based on the children's ages.

All of a sudden, my dance card was effortlessly full of outings populated by other stay-at-home, part-time working or maternity-leave-taking mothers. And of course, their adorable children.

Soon my husband Chris was coming home some days to an empty house since I was off yucking it up with one mother or another and our kids. He started to hear at 6 p.m.,“Sorry honey, I have no freaking clue what’s for dinner. Isn’t it awesome?”

Often Chris would open the front door to catcalls and laughs from a living room full of kids gnawing on sippy cups and moms sipping Diet Coke and wine.

This year will find me jumping back in my uterine DeLorean time machine and again I'll be searching for a playgroup. Although I've kept my close buds from the playgroup days, so many of us now have gone back to work full time and/or have our days strictly dictated by our school-aged children's school and activities schedules. I'm kind of starting over.

Thankfully, this area has a wealth of great moms' clubs from which to choose!

  • My Asian Kid - DC - a great resource and community for parents who have adopted their children from Asia, started by fellow Silver Spring parent Priscilla Holberton
  • - for those of you looking for an online community, every week here on Wheaton Patch, the Moms Council discusses issues relevant to parenting
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