Having moved to a new city in my mid-thirties, I entered a strange social abyss. People in Vancouver were friendly enough, but beyond polite conventions and niceties I wasn’t meeting many people in a manner of forming a permanent social circle. In short, friendship dating was slow. When I became pregnant soon after, a work colleague assured me that this would be a gateway to a whole new social world of mothers. This sounded good to me (although previously I had not expected a baby to be a social segue). However, I embraced the possibility by going to prenatal yoga, prenatal group classes, and surfing babyzone chat rooms. I should have clued in when no lasting connections panned out from this. Perhaps my mind was too clouded by the blissful pregnancy hormones coursing through my body to see the signs. I cheerfully kept at it after my daughter was born – at less than two weeks of age she was carted to drop-ins at health units and a little later to playgroups at community places. Yet, after exchanging the basic conversational checklist for newborns (How old? How much does he/she weigh? Does he/she ever sleep? ) I was at a standstill. Because the truth is, I am so much more than a ‘mother’ and although I am happy to share my experiences and hear about others’, once the topic of children has been exhausted there are other things I’d like to talk about. And the trap of parent-related conversations is that they sometimes unwittingly lead to judgements (You’re letting her/him eat that?, You let your baby cry to sleep?) further separating social groups into mom sub-cultures and sub-categories.

What I didn’t foresee was how becoming a mother would cut me off from certain social opportunities. This categorization has catapulted me into a realm where single or married childless people believe they have nothing in common with me. Wait, I was a person in that category for 36 years and I’ve only been in this one for a year and a half—I still relate! I still drink wine, I still care about what is going on in the world, I’m even back to reading (though admittedly it takes much longer to get through a book). This motherhood thing is starting to seem like a social wasteland! In the end I realize that I have ascribed to these biases myself in the past. Maybe I need to open myself up to the possibility of connecting with others with whom on the surface I may or may not appear to have common ground. And I just have to accept that I can be a social wallflower when it comes to small talk. But I’m still optimistic, I’m moving to a new neighbourhood soon and I’m already dreaming of the social opportunities once again – the Chardonnay is in the fridge!