My (Online) Community

Off Our Backs, 2006 by Rock, Lindsey

I looked up "Community" in the thesaurus. I love the thesaurus. It tells me that a community is an association, a body politic, a brotherhood (sisterhood), a center, a colony, a neighborhood, a locality, a nation, people, populace, a state, turf. A community is where home is, literally in terms of a geographic location, and, too, a group of like minded people who care for one another. Home is described as being the location of a family, a site, the motherland. The motherland, I like that. Can motherland, a sisterhood, a home, a place to belong, exist in that vast space called cyber? Can community be out there where you can't 0see it, or touch it? I know I certainly feel it. I believe mine is there, out there.

Have you ever met a pen pal? Ever hook up with a local book club Are you on meetup.com? Had a date with someone you met online? Arranged a play date for your kid via a message board? It seems a bit absurd or geeky to spend so much time online that you find "home" out there. We all know meeting people from cyberland can indeed be dangerous. That is no joke. Well, I guess I'm really trusting, or I don't feel threatened, or find need to put up my guard when it comes to meeting women from my community...my online community, in the real world.

This past July, I got to meet my online community, in real life, finally. (Not just one or two women from the community, but a whole bunch of them!) My online community is far more than just an online community; the term "online" does not seem to do it justice. My online community is my community. See, in the past three years of being a mother, many of my closest friendships have developed over the internet. And I'm not talking about a local message board. My community is comprised of like minded "girlmoms" who are scattered across North America. Very few of us have ever met before. I met up with one girlmom in Vancouver last April. Aside from wonderful meet-up with Opal, I had never met any of these women before I arrived at an event called the Mama Gathering in Minneapolis this past July.

Prior to becoming a mama, I had a fantastic real life community. And it's not that they abandoned me, I left them all back in New York City when I found myself pregnant. I moved back to Canada where I could enjoy free health care. And hey, its home, you know? I went back to my roots. My hometown community, in sans-child circles, consists of some amazing artists and musicians. They are mainly single male friends from high school, now in their mid- to late-20's, who are now all doting "uncles" to my kid; the only kid they've been around since the 80's, if you know what I mean. "The Dudes," as we affectionately call them, infortunately are not mamas. Motherhood can be a bit isolating.

So there I found myself, a young new mama, back in my hometown, feeling like a newcomer, and aching for a community of other mamas. Of which I knew none. I tried looking locally, really I did! I did the rounds at playgroups, mommy-n-me type classes, found a web group for local moms. I never felt like I really fit into any of those real life mama groups. I like discussing politics, current events, and pop culture. I'm not really into conversations about rice cereal and burping.

I can't lie; there are a few local mamas I like. But they aren't my "best-est" friends. I still felt a lack of mama community. I wanted more in common with my peers than simply being a mother. I needed a sense of sisterhood, solidarity, a home. With "The Dudes," mothering is the one thing we don't have in common. I mean, having a kid is a big deal, but life doesn't end there. There is still art, music, film, heck I even plug my way through a few books a me, diapering isn't the be all and end all.

In case you don't know about mothering, it can be a bit like high school. All those bullshit cliques, all over again. Mother pitted against mother over breastfeeding, bottle-feeding, co-sleeping, immunizations, television, homebirth, hospital birth, public school, catholic school, home school. And it's not just the "issues" that make finding friends hard. I felt like a "tween" all over again, stuck between two categories of motherhood that seemed so obvious-between being a teen mama and an adult mama. I suppose for some people getting pregnant at 21 is young, to others it is normal. It is not on any end of the extremes. I like that I'm slightly left of center. I wouldn't change things, ever.

So why, you may ask, would one even make the decisions to turn to cyberland in hopes of finding community? Because anyone can log onto the internet and find someone with similar interest. It was worth a shot. There is a message board for every type of person. Gun owners are uniting, religious groups congregating, pet owners adoring, secrets revealing, gamers gaining. People are trading, swapping, and selling. Sex is happening, opinions are forming, gossip is spreading and friendships are aligning. Communities are being built.

Maybe I'm a big loser, but I looked up "parenting" on MSN. I found so many groups and subgroups it made my head spin. Same thing happened on Yahoo, and Google. If you look up "Parenting" on Google you will get 8,610,000 research results. Single parents, married parents, Latter Day Saints mamas, middle-aged mamas, welfare mamas, teens mamas, lesbian mamas, Canadian mamas...the list goes on and on. I wasn't religious, I wasn't pregnant anymore, I didn't have twins, I wasn't married, nor was I single. I identify as straight, and sure I'm "Canadian" but that seemed a bit broad. And frankly, I don't identify myself solely as a mother, so that seemed a bit limiting.