Mothers' Groups: Reasons to hate them

This afternoon Kate and I tried to have a quiet lunch at Miss Marie in Rosanna - my favourite local cafe. Kate has started studying a Bachelor of Laws at Latrobe University, which is right near my house, so she popped in between classes so I could mock her choice of degrees from the position of an evangelical ex-law student who couldn't believe her friend hadn't heeded her warnings about choosing the law as a profession.

Turns out midday on a Wednesday is not a good time to visit Miss Marie if you're sensitive about your dead baby. There were not one, not two, but three separate mothers' groups in attendance, all arriving whilst we were in the middle of our meal and turning the whole place into a tetris-like spectacle as they tried to make room for giant prams and inflated egos that put a distinct scent in the air of 'make way for me! I'm a very important person with a very important baby!'.

Mothers' groups have always pissed me off, long before I ever got pregnant. I'm instantly suspicious of people who travel in packs, as no one could have that many people that they genuinely enjoy hanging out with on a regular basis. Secondly, those groups always seem to claim celebrity status and insist on taking over the places they gather, leaving other paying patrons who'd planned to spend a quiet hour reading their book scuttling for cover. Thirdly, if I want to see nipples in public I'd rather go buy a titty magazine where at least I'd be guaranteed that said nipple would be a worthy specimen.

Smug bitches take a over cafe to compete for the title of
'who's had the least amount of sleep but looks the most fabulous?'
Source: http://www.123rf.com

Today they arrived one by one like a trail of giant ants. The largest group took literally fifteen minutes to settle at the table by the time they negotiated who was going to sit next to whom, and how they could arrange their giant prams to cause maximum inconvenience to all the other patrons. There was clearly one 'head girl' who arranged the whole thing and sat at the business end of the table to set discussion topics. Today's topic from that group centred around sleep and how little of it they were getting because their babies kept waking up. Now, I know sleep deprivation is a nasty thing, and I know it causes new mothers lots of distress. But surely its preferable to not be able to sleep because your baby wants attention than to not be able to sleep because you can't get the nightmare images of his dead body out of your mind.

I find it hard to have any empathy towards such mundane matters of pregnancy and parenting anymore and I have a lot of anger towards those expressing what seem to me now like such minor complaints. I feel conflicted about my position, as I know I also found pregnancy difficult because I was so sick for pretty much all of it, and depressed a great deal of the time too. I feel so stupid that I could have ever been so naive and self-indulgent to complain about it, and if I had my time again I would take all of those complaints back and realise how bloody lucky I was, if only for a short time. I know that at times my attitude towards all this will be unfair as I perhaps I can't expect other women to be able to relate to my experience or to realise how fortunate they are and shut the fuck up. But their being around in my face all the time isn't that fair either. I try to get out of the house for some peace and they rampage all over me. Poor excuse for my vitriol, but that's how it feels.

A woman from one of the smaller groups left her baby asleep in a pram at the other end of the cafe. It was so crowded with prams that she wasn't able to get hers anywhere near her table. How could she let that precious baby out of her sight for even a second? Part of me want to roll the damn thing out of the shop just to scare her when she turned around and realised the child was missing. That'll teach her for being so blase; for being so confident that nothing bad was going to happen to her baby.

These feelings of fury are all-consuming, and I don't know what position these feelings will put me in if I am ever pregnant again, but they are my reality right now - my messy, mixed up, sore and scabby reality, and these gatherings of smug mothers are the salt being rubbed into my wounds. Can't they just go to Northland and hang out at Gloria Jeans which already is awful and can't be ruined by their presence?!