I may be an Alien, but won't you introduce me to your children?

My husband and I will celebrate our 19^th wedding anniversary on December 15^th.  And for at least a decade of that time we used no birth control but never had children.  And as long as we’ve been together, we’ve had “other” friends.  That is, since we never had children we were never included in gatherings with the families who had small children unless it was our own family.  If someone with a few kids was thinking about who to have for dinner, it wouldn’t be us because there would be no one for their kids to play with.  Our friends have always been pre-kid couples, or adult-kid couples.  And in most cases if we had pre-kid couples, we pretty much knew that once they started having children we’d drift away because they would want to hang out with people who had children to play with.  There would come a time when we were left out.  I have not minded this often in our ten years, after all, it is my “normal.”  But there have been times along the way when I’ve found it to be one of the unintentional painful aspects of infertility.

On the flip side, there is a woman at church with at least a dozen children.  It’s not really that many but it might as well be because they are unattended from the moment they get in the door till the time the family goes home.  (Ok, that’s an overstatement, but not by much.)  I’ve never had a conversation with her that she didn’t turn to something about her children.  She has no concept of my life and I find spending time with her to be an exercise in annoyances.  It wouldn’t occur to her to converse with me about something else, she may not have anything else to converse about.  So I wouldn’t be real interested in having dinner with their family, unless I was up for an evening at the circus.  Even then there would need to be an exit strategy for such an evening as loud projectile children cause me to seriously consider losing my pacifism.

Here’s the thing.  We’re planning on adopting some children.  Two, maybe even three.  Nothing like an instant family.  So I’m going to go from being the woman who doesn’t hang out with the young mothers to being one of them.  Well, except for the young part because the people around me with young children are usually quite a bit younger than I am by now. 

I happened to be standing in a hallway of church witnessing a conversation between two young mothers.  There was some talk of whose kid would marry who and I was surprised to find that the children were jokingly paired off.  And at least one of the little ones was talking to her parents about who she would marry.  It was a surprise to me, I don’t live in the world of young children.  I don’t know what happens there.  Then one mother turned to me and said that they were waiting to find out about my adopted children and to see how that changed the mix.  That struck me as very strange, and VERY funny!  No one in that group is into arranged marriages, but I am certain that none of them would mind if their children ended up together just because they knew and loved the other families so much.  Ok, that is a strange new thought in my head, but why not?  I was standing on the edge of that conversation joking with those women, knowing that I was on the outside getting a glimpse into a strange world.  I felt a little alien at that moment.  It made me curious about what else I may be missing.

I know that I’m going to need to do something to cross over before my children come home.  No doubt it will be a bit of a challenge to break into a strange new world of Mommies and their small children and their comfortable little social network.  I have no idea of the actual ages of the children of these women, much less their names.  The only ones that even exist on my radar are ones that are exceptional.  Exceptionally interesting or exceptionally annoying.  So I am wondering how this will evolve.  Am I ready for a world of cupcakes, parties where the average age is in the single digits and the chaos and noise level that seems to come with that?  I don’t know.  But my kids deserve a chance at a “normal” life, not MY "alien" normal of being on the outside observing… their normal – whatever that is.