30 Days of Thanks: Day 5

The cool thing about being a mom is the mom community. I have all different kinds of mom friends in my life. I have the working moms (full time and part time). The stay at home moms (you ladies are amazing!). The single working moms (that's me!) and the moms that don't quite fall into any of those categories.

I used to be that last mom. When I became a mom I was a grad student; I didn't have a job, but I did attend school full time. I certainly didn't fit in with the new stay at home moms, and working moms didn't relate to my school struggles. It was a pretty lonely period from the mom-friend standpoint. On top of that I was the only grad student my age at that time that was a new parent. The other grad students were newlyweds, single/dating or at least 10 years my senior. It really set me apart from that group of peers as well. Then it didn't help that I kept popping out babies in grad school, so much so that I was once introduced at a major meeting for our department as the perpetually pregnant one.....

Anyhow, I've lost my track a bit here. See the thing about being a mom is that we're all moms just trying to not screw up our kids. We all want the best for them; we just do it differently. The one thing I've learned over my last 12.5 years of doing this is that none of our kids come with instructions and they're never a one size fits all approach. When you find the right Mom community things just click. Whether you're the Pinterest mom, soccer mom, dance mom, no activity mom, free-range mom, etc. we're all still just Moms at our core. I belong to a very select group of Mom groups on facebook, as so many I had joined weren't for me. This is even more so post-divorce. I don't want to listen to how your significant other did not clean up the vomit at 3am to your Martha Stewart standards, when you need to be grateful you had the assistance. And the reverse is true that those groups don't want to listen to me whine about doing it all myself with minimal help. Thus I consider myself blessed to have my 2 special communities, as well as my in-person friends.

I'm thankful for my mom friends that come in all different shapes, sizes and styles.