Four women sit on a bench, catching up as women have been known to do. Three talk animatedly about their children, how they’re dealing with school, with friends, with life. One seems distracted. She’s got other things on her mind today, which is why the others are there…and will be there…
Thirteen years ago these women sat on another bench, this one outside in the warm spring sun in a neighborhood park. Sweet bird songs and youthful shrieks of joy danced on the breeze as they talked animatedly about their children, watching their little ones play and wondering aloud about how they’d deal with school, with friends, with life. At the time, motherhood linked them. Now friendship binds them. And so they sit, talking animatedly about their children…moms committed to a Lifelong Involvement in Nurturing Kids. MomsLINK. That was the name of the mothers group they started a lifetime ago when their babies were babies, not tweens and teens.
Yet that LINK still connects them. So much so that the three were there for the one as she sat on the bench in the skin-paling fluorescent light of the concrete-walled county courthouse, anxiously waiting for her divorce trial to begin. Who knew that thirteen years ago conversations about coupons and crafts and diapers and discipline would lead to this kind of loyalty…this kind of love?
I knew. Or at least I hoped, desperately, that’s what MomsLINK would do for its members. We Founding Mothers, as we called ourselves, used to joke that we needed friends so badly we were willing to put an ad in the newspaper to look for other lost souls who were hungry for coherent conversation and a little moral support. It wasn’t too far from the truth. Very few MomsLINKers knew each other before joining, yet friendships blossomed that quickly connected women to other women, at all ages and stages of motherhood, those working in the home and out, and what a good thing it was.
It was a good thing to have another mom point out that you had a colicky baby, not just an awful, caterwauling baby, and tell you that your beautiful baby would outgrow this stage, just wait, and here, let me walk with her a while so you can rest.
It was a good thing to have two weeks’ worth of women lined up to provide meals for one of their own who’d just had a baby or just lost their mom to cancer or just had a child come home from the hospital.
It was a good thing to have park play days, mom and tot outings and monthly evening meetings where you got to pretend you were a real grown up for a while (until the clock struck noon or nine and the minivan turned back into a pumpkin and you were relegated to Cinderella status once again).
For ten years, MomsLINK was a very good thing. Sadly, all good things must come to an end; yet the end of MomsLINK wasn’t really an ending, more like a new beginning. Friendships that developed because of the group’s creation continued in spite of the group’s evolutionary conclusion.
So that years later, those same women who sat on the park bench sharing life’s joys and concerns can now sit on the courthouse bench sharing life’s joys and concerns, literally. And that, most definitely, is a good thing…
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