In Search of Mommies Part Two...

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Friday, January 12, 2007

Ok, so my first LLL meeting didn't really deliver on the "mommies like me" front. Not one to give up, I decided to go ahead and hit the preschooler's play group that meets at my church. I'd been meaning to go for awhile anyway, but timing and scheduling just keeps getting in the way.

My concern had been that I wasn't going to "fit in" with a church group. Now obviously I have my faith in common with these women, and I've been actively involved with this denomination for six years now. Still, I've never joined or participated in a "women's" group. Why? Because it's generally been my experience that female groups at church are well...often quite lame. You know, you see in the bulletin that the women's conference is going to be a "tea" at the church while the men's conference is a weekend Whitewater rafting trip. Yeah. That's fair.

Anyway, I was a little more confident that this group might work out a bit better for me. After all, this is the church that specifically states that their nursing mothers room is for mothers "who PREFER privacy." In other words...nurse wherever you want, it's fine with us, but here's the room if you want to use it. I don't think a Sunday has gone by that I haven't nursed him in the sanctuary, the lobby or the cafe. I've never even gotten an odd look, I've even had conversations with most of the pastoral staff while nursing.

So off I went to see if this home birthing, lactivist mom would fit in.

There were five moms, a dad and I'd wager about ten kids. Two of the moms were pregnant, one due pretty much any day. Of course with pregnant women, the subject of birth comes up. Turns out that one of the pregnant moms had actually looked at transferring to a midwife and one of the non-pregnant moms told me that if she had any more, she planned to have them at home. Another member that wasn't there had a home birth with my midwife's backup.

I also overheard the other pregnant mom talking to someone else in the room. She went five days late with her first and the person was asking her if she was going to get induced if she went late again. The mom said that she wouldn't because "being induced increases your risk of c-section and I really want to avoid that." Sweet! That covered us on the birth front.

About 30 minutes into the play group Emmitt got hungry. I was sitting on the ground along the wall near another mom and I got Emmitt settled in to nurse. The mom next to me had a nine-month old. Her baby spotted Emmitt nursing and immediately wanted to nurse as well. (Not from me, lol...she went to her mom and made it pretty clear that she wanted some milk too.) So, there we sat nursing while the kids played.

It was a nice time. I didn't get a chance to have a lot of conversation with them, but it was only the first week and there was a lot of playing going on. (Plus arts and crafts and story time...it was a nice group.)

What's funny? I think I would have felt more comfortable inviting that group to a nurse-in than I would have inviting the LLL group to a nurse-in. Though it's admittedly a bit early to be making judgement calls on either group.

I'm not giving up on LLL quite yet, but I did think it was kind of funny that the church group seemed to fall more in line with my soggy granola tendencies than the LLL group did.

Labels: Life as a Mom

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