I intended to go through grad school anonymously or nearly so. I didn’t need or seek friendships and hoped for the groups to be assigned by the professors rather than having to seek out a few normal faces and make small talk. My strategy rarely failed me – I looked for girls with wedding rings, hoping that they too, would have somewhere to rush and choose not to spend weekends working on some lame assignment in the library. I have to say, it worked for me – I recommend it. Beyond that, I didn’t make any friends, go out for drinks or attend the Grad Student social between classes, even though they served free booze.
Last summer I took a class and surprise – another pregnant girl struts in. We imme
diately spotted each other and smiled. Of course, because I am borderline socially inadequate, I thought “just because we are both pregnant doesn’t mean we have to be buddies.” So I didn’t make any small talk and looking back, that was stupid of me. This semester, we are taking another class together. When I walked in, she immediately asked me how everything went and congratulated me. She remembers my baby’s name and what shots she got at the last doctor’s appointment. She also told me I don’t have to feel like I sold my soul to the devil for supplementing with formula.
Mommies, it seems, have silently sprung up like mushrooms after the rain. They’ve been there before, I am sure, but now I am more aware. I am even more aware of how quiet they are about being mommies, how rarely it comes up that they have jobs and school and little babies waiting for them at home. I am amazed at how diligently they take notes, even when it’s just a guest speaker night… don’t babies put guest speakers into perspective? Or perhaps, that’s precisely why they are taking notes.
Yesterday, I got a note passed to me; I honestly cannot recall the last time that happened to me. A girl who had overheard me talking about taking independent study wanted to know how she too could pay full tuition and get no instruction. The note started like this: “Hi, I am a mom too…” The same day I was invited to work on group project by another mom; I couldn’t join, I was already part of a group with of girls with wedding rings I’d approached in the beginning of the semester.
P.S. Turns out many moms don’t wear wedding rings. Throwing me off like that…
1 comment:
I'm one of those nonringwearing moms. My hands started to swell up toward the end of my pregnancy so I took it off and got used to not wearing it. I used to think I would care--what if I looked like an unwed mother?--but I discovered that the first thing you lose when you become a mother is your vanity. (That's a v, not an s!)
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