Twitter, Fandom friends vs. RL friends

[emmagrant01]

I've had a twitter account for almost 48 hours now, and I've been amazed at how much I'm using it already. It's like a nice blend of LJ and FB, somehow, and easy to use on my phone. :-D

For the last few years, I've been trying and failing to make RL Mommy friends. It wasn't a big deal before BG was born. All of my friends were either online or people I'd met through fandom who happened to live near me enough to become RL friends. And then BG (finally) came along, and of course having a baby alters your friendships with people who don't have children. You just can't hang out and do the things you did before, and that's fine.

I found some Mommy friends online in various places, which was cool, and then when BG got big enough to do Mommy&Me type activities, I thought I'd be able to make some RL Mommy friends. But it wasn't as easy as I expected, mostly because the only thing I seemed to have in common with those other moms was that we all had a child the same age. The similarities ended there, and when I tried to hang out with them, I found myself feeling really out of place.

My parenting philosophy is, to say the least non-traditional, and so that made it difficult to interact with other moms who were parenting in ways that were quite traditional. I just couldn't engage in conversations about how I handled Situation X or Y, because they would all look at me as if I were insane. There weren't any other moms who were remotely geeky, or who worked OOTH part-time, or who had graduate degrees, and so on and so on. All they wanted to talk about was what they found on sale at Target yesterday, and seriously? Seriously? No.

And then they all got pregnant again at the same time, which made it that much worse. Long story short: it took us 6 years to have BG and then he was born at 29 weeks under scary conditions, endangering my life, etc., and so DH and I decided we're "one and done". But that didn't make it any easier to be surrounded by all these pregnant women comparing pregnancy stories, then having new babies, and so on. It just made me feel even more ostracized, you know? I would hang out for a while and then make up an excuse to leave. I started to think I was just anti-social.

And then I went to lubricus2011 this past weekend and was reminded that I am anything but antisocial -- when I'm around people who are like me. And I'm not sure why this should surprise me, because I already knew this! For the decade that I've been in fandom, I've met so many awesome, fantastic, fun, smart, and creative people, and from the moment I realized fandom existed, I felt like I was home. Why should that change just because I bore offspring?

So I'm giving up on the whole RL friend thing. It's exhausting and disappointing, and I'm just as happy without it, to be honest. Besides, there are fandom folks who live within a reasonable distance of me, some of whom I haven't met yet (*looks pointedly at kitty_fic and bleedforyou1*). There's the small matter of a 3yo child who needs attending to, but hey -- he's already been to three HP cons in his life. He's cool. ;-)

So anyway, yeah. Fandom rocks, basically. :-D

Comments

[mania-regale.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on this one. I've made a few RL mommy friends, but my parenting style is very different from most of them. I've found support on-line instead (I've read your blog but not in a while but I think you know of both kellymom and tbw, right?). That said, I do try to go to some RL events just because I want my son to have the opportunity to play with other kids, but conversations with those moms tends to be pretty superficial, if not stilted. It's not the ideal situation, but I can deal with it since I look at it as fulfilling one of my goals for DS.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I'm super AP (and UP, actually), so yeah. Extended breastfeeding is only the beginning of the ways in which my parenting is non-traditional, LOL. So far my son (who's 3.5) is more interested in running around and digging in the dirt alone than in playing with other kids. If we go to a playgroup I often end up playing with him, and then I look around and wonder why we bothered to come at all, you know? I'm sure the social interaction part will be more important to him soon enough, and then I'll be the mom hanging out on the side reading porn on my phone...