Coming and going

So I'm turning 35 this summer, and it's making me quite introspective (and oddly insecure). A great deal has changed in my life over the past few years. In particular, I'm noticing the transit of people coming in to my life, going out of my life. It has been a pretty fluid, though not entirely painless, set of transitions. This year there have been more transitions out than in, and for the first time in a long time, I feel disconnected. I spent an hour tonight thinking about this circumstance in detail while I blow-dried my hair. Here's what I've surmised.

Friendships before I had Nick are entirely, categorically different from those I would be interested in cultivating or maintaining now. Those people in my life who were "friends" but are not interested in being part of Nick's life, too, are gone - some by their own choosing, and some by mine. These would include a lot of my professorly friends who enjoy drinking expensive wine and thinking big thoughts and spending a lot of time on email. A breastfeeding mom does exactly none of those things anymore.

So once I started to lose/shed my professor friends, I thought, well, I'll go and find "baby" friends - via playgroups, or other baby-related connections. I've tried joining two playgroups. But those people are a whole other story; I find most of the women oddly competitive and the groups themselves quite cliquey. If you join too late you never become part of the whole. And if you differ philosophically on issues, well, you can imagine how that goes.

Another issue I have is that to my colleagues, I am "the new mom", but to playgroup people, I am "the professor". You can sense the inherent dilemma: I can't fit in with either of these potential/former groups of friends. I decided to seek some advice from one professor friend who is also a new mom (most female professors are childless) and she advised me not to join playgroups - that they are for women who "have no careers and thus must establish their entire social identity and intellectual worth vis-a-vis their new child." Did I admit to her that I'd tried to join these groups precisely to establish my identity relative to Nick? Huh, no.

For now I have decided to embrace the small circle of friends who don't pigeon-hole me, aren't super-competitive with their kids, and wouldn't judge me for being in limbo with my relationships as I try to reconcile my various identities.

Maybe once I actually turn 35 I'll figure all of this out!