square peg in a triangle hole

It's looking like this blog is going to be about my social issues, which are many, but I guess that's just where I am right now.

Getting married means you make friends with other couples, because people don't usually want to be a "third wheel" and couples don't want to make a friend feel like they're being invited into a threesome or something. Kidding. When I got married I had a baby immediately after and we didn't have those couple friends yet. And when your husband and you have different friends to begin with and belong to different communities and are over a decade apart and your spouse doesn't rely on friends the way you do and neither of you drink anymore... common friends are pretty hard to come by. But we're newlyweds with an infant and two children, so we spend what very little "alone" time we have together. Which means we hardly have friends at all in the way we did before: the quantity time of sharing a house with other people and living in a small-town-feeling big city where you can run into friends everywhere. The quality time of drinking wine and getting heady with a group of friends on Sunday nights. Of weekend brunches and summer cookouts.
Thankfully there are a huge amount of wonderful, caring, intelligent ladies in my community who had babies around the same time as I did. They supported me through my pregnancy and gave me advice and support and gifts, even though I was hardly close to any of them before I got pregnant. And without any real effort, my single friends and I drifted apart. It happens. Having a baby changed my entire life and I had no idea how to relate to the person I was before I had her, let alone how to relate to the people I had lived a completely different life with.  And try as I might to keep connected, I can't figure out how to straddle the line of being a mother and being an individual.
I love hanging out with other parents. They bring wisdom and insight and they understand you, which at first is something you can't even do for yourself. But then I want to go to a bar and drink whiskey and not talk about what my baby eats now and the cute thing she did and how annoying breastfeeding can be. But then I try to and I realize that all I seem to know about the world anymore is what my damn baby is up to.

It's getting easier. The more independent little E gets, the more I can do as well. I can read the news and listen to music and catch up on the stack of books I've been trying to get around to. And maybe I'll be able to have a conversation without the word "boob" coming out of my mouth.  And maybe I'll start to accept that talking about being a mother is different than always talking about your baby, it's something that everyone can relate to, because we've all had one.