The Importance of Meeting Moms

Being a military wife was relatively rough moving place to place and having to leave your life behind to basically start over in a new place and make new friends. That said, I feel I at least had a leg up when we moved to San Antonio. At least I was already used to the change. However what made this move especially difficult was having a two year old daughter. My daughter was born during our tour in Spain and we never got a chance to bring her back to the states, so our move was very traumatic on her: moving to a different country, different people, and leaving everything she knew behind. We had friends in Spain we consider family. This move was especially difficult on all of us.

In addition to the move, we had to deal with the fact that we were in a different place in our lives as well, we were now civilians. We no longer had the military community to help us pick up our lives and find our place in the community. It was no longer our community. We once again forged on to the civilian community we had not been a part of in almost a decade. And boy have things changed!

Being relatively "internet savvy" I had been a part of numerous "mom groups" on websites across the web such as AOL, Cafemom, and Yahoo. I found these to be a source of comfort and friendship during pregnancy and the infancy of my daughter. So once again, I turned to these familiar places to start my journey of starting over.

While going through Cafemom (cafemom.com), I found someone posting a site for local moms in the San Antonio area to meet up for playgroups. The website was Meetup.com. While being a skeptic person, mostly for the safety of my child, I was a little hesitant, but I thought why not join the site and see what it has to offer. After all, my daughter was going through a rough stage and we had no friends here, either of us.

I signed up for the site, and lo and behold I found a group of moms, both stay at home and working moms, who have children my daughter's age that simply have playgroups so that both kids and moms can socialize. I thought why not give it a try, so I joined a group and got the information for the meetup.

I want to make a note here: Please proceed with caution when using the internet to meet people. Make sure you do things safely and be cautious about when and where you meet people. There are as many ill intentioned people as there are nice, friendly people lurking about. If it doesn't seem or sound right it probably isn't. Use that parental instinct and stick to your guns about it.

I made sure that the meetup was in a public place (for the safety of my child) and that way if things weren't going well, I could make a quick exit without it being awkward.

I attended the meetup, found the other women and their children to be wonderful! Finally! A chance to make friends, for both me and my daughter!It was wonderful to be accepted by these women, and I have been going to playgroup with them for over a month now. It worked out really well for me and my daughter that I ended up dropping all applications to other groups because we found our niche. And I hope to develop lasting friendships with these women and their families because I haven't met a single one I didn't like!

Becoming a part of a group of people with similar interests and goals during a time of change can drastically help your perspective on life. It can make the hard times bearable, or just give you the break you need to refocus and recoup. Getting out and reinvigorating yourself can be quite liberating, even if it is something small like getting together for a stroller walk through the mall or taking the kids to the park, or meeting for a book club.

There are lots of sites out there to promote socialization of this kind, however, as I noted before, proceed with caution. There are sites for moms, dads, single parents, disabilities, support groups, local groups, and pretty much anything you can think of!

Get off the computer, get out there and make some friends!



Note about Meetup.com:
Meetup.com is a free to register site, however membership in groups is not always free, make note while searching for groups of any membership fees (annual fee, monthly fee, event fees). Some groups charge a small fee to cover small group costs, however I found some charge a rather substantial fee to take part in their activities. Decide how active you want to be when joining (and paying) but take note that most groups require at least once a month participation to remain a member of the group.

Other options for sites include but are not limited to:
AOL (message boards are fairly unreliable as they are taken down and replaced repeatedly)
Yahoo (I left them because of the insane amount of drama on those boards - but to each their own)
Cafemom (this is a site specifically for women with various groups and free of charge)

These are the groups that I have had experience with. If you have a favorite site, feel free to leave it in the comment section.