The Mom Squad

So I remember when I was childless and had just moved to Seattle and was thinking about how just truely awesome it would be if I had a child, if not for the soul purpose of, instant friends! I moved to Seattle six months before I turned 30 and the longer you are out of college, making good friends just gets harder and harder. I believe this was because the majority of college was spent drinking or studying, with the occasional shift at the coffee shop thrown in there. You had time, energy and desire for making friends. And then after college you start climbing ladders, getting married and buying houses.  To me it seemed simple, if you had children you would have to then be friends with your children’s friends parents.....

And then I became a mom. And whoever knew there was so many ways to be a good mom? I sure didn’t. I quickly found out that being a mom was much like working on your career. Cut throat. Now before I go any further I must say I am very fortunate in the fact that I found a very welcoming and non-judgemental group of moms. Whom I wake up everyday and am so incredibly greatful for having them grace my life. And since these are the first moms I met, Walter was only 2 weeks old, I kinda assumed all moms were like this.

Oh how wrong I was.

I have come to find out that moms are some of the most judgemental people around. Its almost like high school all over again. You have the designer moms who bring their Fendi and Prada to the parks in stelletos and forget it if your child isn’t dressed in Bon Bon Bebe, they aren’t allowed to play with your child. Then you have the working and mothering moms on their Blackberries as their children play alone in the park who can’t believe that there are some mommies out there that have sacrificed their careers for raising their children. Then there are the moms that go crunch that woudn’t serve anything but organic and breastmilk to their child and consider formula a crime.

Okay so weren’t we supposed to be the role models here? I never knew that mothering was so controversial AND a few steps backward into high school. I think it has something to do with the fact that in today’s world women have to be so many things to so many people and its just plain stressful when it comes to being the main caretaker of this little being that counts on you for everything. So when you see another mom that does something diffrently than you do, your first knee jerk reaction is “thats not the way I am doing it, so it must be wrong, my little Addison won’t play with her little Mckenzie”.

Like I said I feel so fortunate that I have a great, solid group of mommy friends. We formula feed, breast feed, dress our children in whatever was the best bargain, work, stay at home, but we respect each other because we know at the end of the day this really is the toughest job around and whatever works for their family must be working well because they have such happy and healthy children.