Creating community

I have amazing friends. Some of them are scattered up and down the east coast, and others are around the DC area. Before having Ian, it didn’t seem too difficult to see out of state friends a few times a year. Our local friends, none of which really live in our area of DC, were easy to meet up with once we managed to mesh our busy schedules. I definitely complained that juggling schedules was annoying, and that we would have loved to see more of our friends. But over-all, I never felt that I was missing out on something by not having a neighborhood community of friends.

Everything has changed since we had Ian. Bennett and I knew we wanted parent friends that lived nearby, but we weren’t sure how to make that happen. With all of our challenges last year, we didn’t have a lot of time or energy reserves to invest in building a neighborhood community for ourselves. So now here we are, with an almost 18 month old, and still no local community. The fact that we have such amazing friends is still great, but it takes so much energy just to see our friends in the area (metro time traffic, dragging kids around on those commutes) that we truly do not see them enough.

When I chose to stay home with Ian, I knew that I would need neighborhood friends. I knew meeting people the way everyone suggested, through activities, just going to the park story time, would be very challenging for me. To meet people in those types of settings, you need to be able to see the people around you and recognize them the next time you see them somewhere else around the neighborhood. You need to be able to say hi and walk over to chat. If you are blind and can’t see them to do that, then the other person needs to intuitively understand that and do all of that for you. This almost never happens. So, although I have made some casual friends through play group and music class and such, I haven’t had the right environment for friend making.

The other week, Bennett and I decided that the neighborhood friend things weren’t just going to gradually happen; we needed to step it up and make it happen! We sent an email out over our Capitol Hill parent’s listserv seeing if anyone wants to make friends. Bennett and I jokingly call it our classified or dating profile because that is what it feels like. So, here is hoping that we will meet some new people soon that can become new friends!