Blog From A Broad

aaaaand relax

Today was our first baby massage class. I very cleverly plugged the address into TomTom so that TomTom lady could tell me how to get there, but didn't realise that TomTom doesn't display the house number after you've entered it in. BadBad TomTom. So I'm sitting in my car on the road where the class is held, with no idea which house to go to. I ended up calling Caroline to ask her to look up the web site and see if there was a postal address, which annoyingly, there wasn't. I saw a lady get out of the car in front of me carrying a baby and asked if she was going to baby massage, and thankfully she was and told me the house number. So, feeling stressed and more than a little bit dorky, I finally made it to class.

For the very first time, I found a group of mums who don't look at me like I'm a lunatic when I try to make friendly small talk. These mums talked to me! Some of them spoke to me first! Oh happy days. The class was lovely, very calming and interesting. Mia loved being massaged and spent most of the time checking out the two younger men on either side of her. At the end of the class, we spent a few minutes chatting with each other. I talked to one mum about c-sections and reflux (the latter I know nothing about, but that never usually stops me from giving unsolicited advice), and demonstrated my sling for another. It was a fantastic morning.

One of the main reasons why I am hesitant to join any mother/baby groups is due to my past experience with snooty mums. In Jack's swimming class, none of the mums chatted with me and it was made worse by the "clique" mentality of the mothers who had been taking swimming classes together longer. It still happens to this day when I go to Jack's nursery. A couple of the mums are really lovely, but on the most part, they never speak to me or return my smile. One of them really hacks me off because her daughter not only goes to Jack's nursery, but she was in Jack's swimming class - they've known each other since Jack was 4 months old, but the mother still barely manages to look at me when I see her.

I'm a nice lady, really. I promise that when I smile at you or try to chat with you, it's not because I'm insane or trying to convince you to join my religion. Come on, ladies of Britain! I know you can do it!