I've been jonesing for a daddy group. To me, spending a day with Finn while talking about craft beer, fly-fishing and the Packers with a couple of dudes sounds like a perfect Sunday. If I could find a way to do this everyday, I would have the perfect work week!
Plus, you just can't do this stay at home gig all on your own. I don't mean in the single parent kind of way (and my hats off to you single parents, including my mom). I mean you have to have some adults in your life so that you can spend at least some part of your day talking in complete sentences with real words about things other than toys and/or poopies. Certainly, I spend some of my time with parent-friends talking about toys and/or poopies... Truth be told I spend a lot of my time talking with them about poopies. But I use complete sentences and very large words... like defecate, explosive-diarrhea, prostate-buster and poo-nami (rhymes with tsunami).
But dudes just don't congregate as easily as ladies. I can count the number of friends that I have made since graduating college that a) I talk to on a monthly basis and b) are not spouses of my high school friends. Zero. Am I a sad, lonely, misanthropic little troll? Nope, just a prototypical adult male. I am a wolfpack of one.
That being said, being a happy parent really does mean having support. This requires me to be much more social than I needed to be as a researcher. So, I am trying. I am learning how important it is to remember names, to play with other peoples babies, to make small talk and did I mention learning names? (Aside: Nothing really tells a parent you are not listening like forgetting their name, or worse, their kid's name. I think this is just an evolutionary adaptation that allows us to pick out who is the more useful set of eyes to hang out with. For example, screaming, "Hey, someone's kid is about to put his finger in that dogs keester," at the park is less effective than being able to really nail down the threat with a "Gena! Tommy's about to stink finger that feral chihuahua!")
I'm learning that I like having kids around too. Truth be told, while I want to work, it's going to be really hard to go back to the job force. I like wiping an errant snotty nose, sorting out who's drinking who's sippy cup, preventing accidental ingestion of glitter, encouraging sharing, clapping when they do and letting a stranger's little one use me as a prop for standing up. I like being part of a pack. So I am also learning that if I need daytime mental release, some new stimulation for Finn, another set of eyes so I can relax my vigilance a bit or simply someone to laugh with about the ridiculousness of child rearing, then what I need is a mommy group.
And I've got a good one. It's a group of women who all had babies at the same time as Finn and who met Danielle at the post-partum mommy luncheons our hospital hosted. I've got a support group of parents and a cohort of tykes all Finn's age already at my disposal. I've got a group of people to ask about the strange behaviors, missed milestones and teachable moments.
So they're not dudes. I just pretend I'm deaf when they talk about their women problems, try to figure out the niceties of mommy society and enjoy having so many dedicated parents around to chat with.
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