19 Week Old Baby Reader Story 💡
How We Build Community Living on the Road
Baby Week to Week 19 Mama Natural Mom and daughter stop to take a picture together.
My husband, infant daughter, and I are always on the move. We don’t own a stick of furniture. We mostly live out of suitcases, and we don’t have a permanent address. Instead we bounce around between France (where he works), Texas (where I’m from), and England (where we met).
“Community” in the traditional sense is an elusive, beautiful concept. And, in it’s more commonplace definition, is something we don’t necessarily have. But motherhood has proven its own community. It’s international, instantaneous, and always welcoming to new members.
I’ve learned to cherish even the briefest of connections—a moment spent chatting about our daughters with the owner of a store in France, a cup of tea with a mother from Germany, a walk with my own mother, or a museum visit with my mother-in-law. But the most stedfast of these communities is the one provided by my birth center, which has opened its doors to its various new mothers, and under the pretext of a yoga class, allows us to gather for hours every week to talk, commiserate, cry, and laugh a lot. Perhaps best of all, it provides us with a chance to watch each other grow as mothers, as our babies grow into the most remarkable little humans.