A Foreigner Among Peers
The scene before me looked innocent enough – women sitting on blankets arrayed around a jungle gym set in a city park in Dublin – so why was my heart racing and my breathing bordering on hyperventilation?
The intimidating group fussing with children ranged in age from late 20s to mid-40s. Some were thin, while others were a few meals ahead of themselves. They wore everything from black slacks, sweater sets and ballet flats to Mom’s jeans, oversized sweatshirts and athletic shoes that had never participated in an athletic event.
As I approached them, I tried to disguise my dread by arranging my face in a casual and friendly look, though I think Ionly managed to appear constipated. I was an outsider, sure, but it wasn’t that they were all Irish and I was American.
It was that they were all mothers and I was not.
I was escorting my eight-year-old niece to a last-day-of-school picnic organized by the mothers of her classmates. My sister-in-law had passed away two years earlier from cancer, so I was the proxy while my brother-in-law accompanied my nephew to his primary school graduation. Abandoned within minutes by my niece, who led a gaggle of girls into a game of make-believe in a tree fort a hundred yards away, I was on my own, a foreigner among peers.
My story, the auntie in town for a surprise visit associated with a business trip to London, only filled up the first 10 minutes. I had two more hours to go. Jet lag, California versus Ireland, Bay area tourist destinations, and the upcoming U.S. presidential election allowed me to make sufficient small talk, but the gulf between them and me was far greater than an ocean, a continent, and a nine hour time difference. When the conversation drifted as I expected it would to infant feeding schedules, daycare deficiencies and Laura’s recent pregnancy announcement, I felt conspicuous from my inability to participate.
My heart clenched some as I fretted over the inadequate lunch I had haphazardly thrown together in a kitchen lacking a mom. The demanding day-long meeting awaiting me in London, where I would be a lone female in the company of men, suddenly felt like a day at the beach compared with the awkwardness I felt sitting on this fleece blanket in the park.
A part of me wanted to know how many of my peers might have had trouble conceiving, to acknowledge that I had once harbored fragile dreams of pregnancy and motherhood, but this otherwise pleasant afternoon was not about me. It was about making my niece feel, for one afternoon, that she was like all of her other classmates, complete with a doting relative offering a juice box and a cookie.
If she could find the emotional stamina to solider on, then I could, too.