I once heard a wise saying: Things happen when you get out of the house. It’s simple, but it’s true: You’re a lot more likely to meet your neighbor if you’re in your front yard instead of your kitchen. You won’t meet the love of your life if you hunker down on your couch to watch reruns, but you might if you go to that party you were invited to. If you don’t go downtown, you won’t see the “Help Wanted” sign that leads you to your dream job. If you put yourself out there, you never know what might happen.
In 2005, I had two little kids, and I wasn’t getting out of the house (alone) nearly as much as I wanted to. I loved my kids, but I craved the company of like-minded moms. I had recently seen a link to a blog in one of my favorite magazines. I followed the link. I loved the blog. I started one of my own. As I wrote, I began to read. I played “blogscotch,” finding a blog I liked and then visiting blogs in that blog’s blogroll, and so on and so on. One day I saw a link to a blog called “Been There.” It was even better than I’d hoped—not one, but two women: smart, funny, sympathetic. They really had been where I was; they got it. Then came my “getting out of the house” moment. Instead of just reading, I left a comment.
Through that comment, one of the women, Cooper, found and commented on my blog. That reaching back was the start of an online friendship between me and Cooper and her co-blogger, Emily, too. They were the kind of mom, the kind of friend, that I wanted to be. And they made it feel like it was possible.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, I sent a check to the Red Cross. I sat in my house, wringing my hands, wishing there were more I could do. Cooper and Emily DID something. They started the “Been There Clearinghouse.” If someone who fled New Orleans needed a crib, or clothes, or anything, Cooper and Emily found a way to connect them with people who had those things to give away. If someone had something to offer, Cooper and Emily connected them with someone who needed it. Here I was just trying to get out of the house, for Pete’s sake; they were helping people who no longer had houses to get out of.
One day I got an e-mail from Emily: would I be willing to give her my phone number and actually talk on the phone? Of course, I said, despite my husband’s mutterings about Internet safety and his suspicions that “Cooper and Emily” was really an ex-con in a stained undershirt who lured unsuspecting suburban moms to his paneled basement lair. I gave my number, and soon I was hearing the real voices of these women I already loved and admired (or the surprisingly convincing voices of two women the ex-con had imprisoned in his basement as part of his diabolical plan).
It was really them, though—and they had a very non-diabolical plan of their own: a website for moms, a place to gather, share ideas, learn, talk, laugh, support each other, maybe even change the world. A virtual neighborhood—a Motherhood. It barely seemed possible to me; I mean, I was having a hard enough time getting the laundry done. Run a website? One that would really matter? Well, if anyone could do it, my money would have been on Emily and Cooper. I listened to them, laughing with delight and anticipation as they talked about their plans. Did I want in, to participate in some way? Of course I did. Who wouldn’t?
The Motherhood has been a lot of different things to me, just as “real life” friendships are. I have to put that phrase in quotes, because the friendships I’ve developed with Cooper and Emily and other women through the Motherhood are no less real or substantive than the friendship I have with my neighbor across the street.
Whether I was feeling grateful, fearful or hopeful, the Motherhood gave me a place to share. If I was in a valley and cried out, other voices, kinder ones, echoed back at me. When I decided I wanted to donate diapers to a local clinic for homeless women and their children, the Motherhood encouraged me (and Cooper and Emily were the first to send diapers—big boxes of them!). After almost seven years of being a stay-at-home mom, I decided to start my own family law practice. On the days I doubted I could do it, guess where some of my best encouragement came from? I had a Motherhood behind me, believing in me. So I believed in myself. The practice flourished, so much so that I was too exhausted at night to get online much. When I did make it to The Motherhood, the welcome was always warm. And when I had to close my practice so my husband could take a new job out of state, The Motherhood provided a place to voice my excitement at a new adventure, and the grief of leaving home.
Who would have thought all of that could spring from one little comment on a blog? I stepped outside of my “house,” my comfort zone, that day, and talked to a “stranger,” and things did indeed happen: I found new friends and a place that still feels like home.
