When my husband and I first discovered we were pregnant, I jumped up and down for joy.
Later, I discovered you shouldn’t jump when pregnant. Little did I know, this was the first of many “rules,” or guidelines that were already out in the universe that you learn from googling incessantly when you are pregnant and/or have a child.
I have been in the workforce since 2 days after I graduated college in 2013. For those of you who don’t love math as much as I do, that’s nearly a decade. In those years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many strong women and equally as strong men. Majority of these amazing humans have children that they are raising at home.
Whenever I can ask someone in the workplace about their kids, I do. I’m very close to both of my parents, and family is so important to me. It humanizes even the strongest personalities both in and out of work. Usually, my question is met with a funny story that a kid has done recently, or a recent nugget of learning from the parent/coworker.
In all of the years of asking about kids, I have never been met with such an underground community as when I uttered the words “I’m pregnant,” both at work and on social media.
Moms all of a sudden were telling me their birth stories, products used, etc. Do you want to know how they ended every sentence, too? “You can do this. You’ve got it.”
Every time pregnancy became a little bit hard (please keep in mind, I had a very easy and fortunate pregnancy), I had a community which I could lean on and they rallied by my side.
All the while this was happening, I was thinking, “Why aren’t these stories talked about BEFORE someone becomes pregnant?” Surely, other subjects in our society are commonly spoken about. Hell, I know more about men’s beard growth than I ever cared to imagine. So, why, I wondered, was a subject as natural and hard and life-changing such as pregnancy and child-rearing, not?
Well, gang, we are breaking out from the underground. Moms: This is your cue.
No longer will we be whispering positive affirmations and telling our stories once we know that a fellow woman is going through conception, pregnancy, or child-rearing.
This is our story. And we are taking it Above Ground.
Prepare yourself, society. These beautiful, factual, and heart-felt stories will be told. Not whispered. Not provoked.
Welcome to The Above Ground Mom’s Society.
The Above Ground Moms' Society 