Twitter has brought me together with two amazing Richmond women—both happen to be moms—from two different perspectives, backgrounds, and family situations, in the last week.
Both of these women are smart, savvy, and are working while raising two children.
Both of these women had preconceived notions about me, as I did about them.
For example, I didn’t even realize that one of these ladies was even a mom. From her tweets (or online chat, for those of you not familiar with Twitter) focused mainly on her work life and social exchanges and not on her children, and she looks so darn young that when she laid it on me that she had two teenage kids, it floored me. I thought she was in her twenties, still spending her nights bar-hopping. “I thought that’s why you wanted to talk to me!” she said, surprised that I didn’t realize she was a mom, thinking I wanted to chat with her about motherhood and the issues that surround it.
Then she blew my mind sharing her experiences raising her kids as a single mom, dabbling in work that most would describe as salacious, but doing anything she could to keep the lights on. She told me about the men in her life that took out their anger on her, the parents who didn’t always support her, and the kids that have grown to be incredible young adults despite it all. As we met and talked, we unraveled layers of these notions, stereotypes, and images we’d built up about each other in our minds through our online conversations and email exchanges.
I shared with her my struggles in keeping my weight off, why I started organizing running teams to keep myself in shape (or attempt to). She thought I just loved fitness (ha!) because of my tweets about running with our 8K team, and I didn’t go into the fact that I was always the chubby kid until I got into sports in middle school (I was also one of the poor kids, and had terrible skin.). As our conversation unfurled and we dug down into who we are as women, we realized that although our pasts may be polar opposites and even our present situations were quite different, we both share the dream of having our writing impact women and are working hard to make that a reality. Neither of us have continually exuded with confidence.
I became one of her biggest fans that day all close-up and personal, whereas previously I admired her from afar.
The other Richmond mom, a west-end girl with whom I probably share a bit more in common, had a similar Starbucks meeting. As we sipped our coffee, we learned that, we are both accidental mompreneurs, we both struggle with dirty houses and frustrated kids as we work away inside our four walls. Although we have few Richmond friends in common and have never really run into each other at social events, we both grew up in the north, have husbands frustrated by our online friendships, and write to maintain our sanity. As we peeled off the layers, we realized that we share a family history of a disease that many are afraid of and avoid in public conversations: bipolar disorder. She is much braver than I, being more public about her experience as a way to work her way through it; I, much more privately, as a way to suppress family history.
Again, I became a fan, and I see us as allies in breaking down the stigmas behind mental illness.
At the outset we may seem very different: we don’t look at all alike. We don’t run in the same crowds. We don’t even live in the same neighborhoods.
Yet, we are all women in our thirties, living in Richmond. We are all hard-working, tax-paying moms who love our kids. We all love Twitter, cherish our friendships, and enjoy a good Social Media Club of Richmond night out. We’ve all had our hearts broken, struggled through this economy in our own relative terms, and write to live, for different reasons and in various places.
October is National Diversity Month. Diversity, like the photo attached to this article, doesn’t just mean ebony and ivory living together, but rather finding the sameness in others when you peel off the external layers that, in the end, don’t really matter much. It’s about forgetting about what someone looks like (for goodness sakes we all know this change change on a dime), who their friends are, how much money they have, and what they do for a living defining them. Twitter has exposed me to a diverse world inside of Richmond that I may not otherwise have discovered, certainly not within a few months’ time and not in such a unique and meaningful way.
So ladies–you know who you are–thank you for exposing me to another world outside of my own, for making me realize that I’m not so weird (alright, I’m still a little weird), and that although we’ve followed each other in the virtual world of Twitter, I now have a friend in you, even though we’ve just met IRL (in real life).
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