Last night we were at this hip local coffee shop here in Richmond (before we went to this really incredible old theatre that plays second-run movies...we saw Slumdog Millionaire on a big screen for $1.99 a person!!), and they had a "community library" with books you could read while hanging out or, we assume, that you could check and and bring back.
We were killing some time there (Slumdog didn't start until 9:30, which is a late night for folks like us!), so Coleman grabbed some books off the shelf for us. He very sweetly and insightfully got me The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding - a book put out by the La Leche League, so it looked fantastic (anybody read it?). I only got to read two pages of it, though, because a woman sitting across from me started telling me what a great book it was, which led to further conversation ("When are you due? Is this your first, etc?"). Then her friend came to meet her, and she joined in conversation with us, too.
I'm telling you, we talked for over an hour about everything: breastfeeding (strategies, duration, support for, benefits of), labor, midwives, doulas, VBACs, c-sections, yoga, constructed gender identity (especially as it pertains to girls), water labor, mom support in a new town, vaccinations, books I should read, pediatricians...everything! These women were telling me their (quite personal) birth stories and they didn't even know me!
A little more than halfway through this conversation, a local doula overhears us and comes over to introduce herself. She wanted to join the chat, too.
I had an hour-long, sincere, and personal conversation with two (and later three) women that I did not know and will likely never see again. This didn't (usually) happen to me before, but somehow my bulging belly (and my reading material) is (are) my ticket in to meeting other women. The ladies in my Zumba class are the same way. Apparently moms everywhere have this little circle of support, conversation, and camaraderie that I have yet been privy to, but now I'm being welcomed in with warmth and kindness...and lots of advice! It seems that once you've been in the trenches, you form a bond - even if you don't know anything more about each other than that this person has (or soon will have) gone through the same primal process that you have and now has the battle scars to prove it, it's enough to form a bond.
I'm sure the same goes for future conversations about the struggles and trials of actually raising this child, but I'm not in that circle yet!
As a woman who feels that relationships with other women are some of the primary, formational relationships we can have, this is a wonderful new development and I am grateful for women everywhere who reach out, support each other, and know each other in this way that only women can.
More on Richmond in a future post...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment