Monday, March 28, 2011

Spark

It takes a village. I am not used to the village.


I was raised to be self-sufficient. My father grew up in the Great Depression in Detroit and my mother grew up in post-World War II Germany. They are bootstraps kind of people. And I am anything but.

About 5 years ago, I met a group of women online, all of whom had a child born in September 2006. Luckily, Brody arrived 7 weeks early, and I wound up in this group on IVillage.

After about 2 years, we moved away from IVillage, and friended each other on Facebook. By sheer accident, a few months ago, a group of the 66 of us was formed on Facebook of just the SF (stands for Sunflower, which is what we call our September 2006 babies) moms go. It’s secret, and no one sees our posts but us. (We’ve googled to make sure). It’s …. It’s like a permanent happy hour. We confide our secrets, share our joys, vent our frustrations, celebrate our victories, discuss sex, illnesses, in-laws, mahjong, knitting and money, and even, on occasion, share parenting tips and advice. We are from the US and Canada, and we are composed of all incomes, ages, marital statuses, sexual orientations, educational backgrounds, religions, and political parties.

And although several of them have met in real life, I’ve never met any of these women in person.

Naturally, I posted to the group the bad news about Liam’s growing clot.

And then someone suggested opening an Etsy store, selling homemade, handmade items, and giving Liam the proceeds. And then a sub-secret Facebook group was formed, called Little Liam Loves, just like the name of the Etsy store. That was two weeks ago.For two weeks, they have made and donated their works of art, emailed pics to a centralized email, then the 3 designee administrators of the shop then post the items, and keep track of sales in the spreadsheet open to everyone in LLL. The Grand Opening was yesterday, and there are 78 items for sale. As a result of their promotions, already 21 sales have been made, including random donations to a paypal account these women set up. They even created a thank you card jpeg at the end of this post to be printed out and mailed along with the items purchased.

I love these friends of mine. I am blessed for reasons I do not understand. For goodness sakes, I stumbled upon this group of women purely by the randomness of our children’s birth month, which, by the way, Brody was not even scheduled to be born in. And yet, there they are, behind us, holding us up, devoting their time, energy and resources, not to mention money. The posts in the LLL group average 5 an hour. Ideas for new products, new promotions, compliments on the items for sale.

But here’s the thing.

I’m not the only one of the group struggling right now. In our group are women going through divorces, illnesses, financial calamity, new babies. Hell, Dante’s mom is part of this group. She’s 39 weeks pregnant and sewed this amazingness in like a day.

The hell? Why me? Why would these women do this for us?

I just feel unworthy. It boils down to that. It’s uncomfortable to me to be the recipient of this much…..muchness. I can’t reconcile how I feel.

I’m so completely indebted to and humbled by these women that it’s almost spiritual.





3 comments:

Unknown said...

Love you. <3

Someday it'll be someone else's turn, and you will be right there ready.

SaRaH said...

Look at that sleeping baby. He definitely deserves this much muchness.

And so does his mama.

JJ said...

Hi Christine. I come to you from Enty's site. So much in common.

My little girl is a September 05 babe who led me to the Sept 05 birth group on FF, which moved to a private site and then FB. We've gotten together many times across the country. It's a beautiful thing.

I'll be following you, if you don't mind!