The life of an at-home mom is both extraordinary and mundane. (It’s similar to pregnancy in that respect. On a personal level, it is the most daunting, exciting and wondrous thing you’ve ever experienced. But millions of woman have been through the exact same thing.)

On the one hand, I get to spend my days witnessing the development of a new human being of my very own. Each day brings with it some new discovery, revelation or delightful behavior, which keeps me in an almost constant state of awe and amusement.

On the other hand, I find myself inevitably sucked in to an existence obsessed with exceedingly banal details, e.g. which brand of sippy cup is free of BHA and pthalates but won’t leak all over my diaper bag, what type of stroller will make my day-to-day life easier and still meet my child’s needs, how can I get my kid to eat more vegetables, what’s the most effective way to deal with temper tantrums, the list could go on for pages and pages. These types of questions occupy a great deal of my mental energy, and inevitably monopolize my conversations with other mothers who have children close to the same age. And just because these concerns are so common as to be practically universal among new parents doesn’t make them any less of a preoccupation in my life.

While this is hardly an issue to lose sleep over, it creates a minor identity crisis for me from time to time. I simply don’t like being like everyone else. I’d rather see myself as different, special, somehow above the commonplace concerns of every other mother. 

For example, here’s a scenario from my trip to the park one morning with Donovan. Three women, obviously friends, were chatting together as their toddlers played on the playground. One said “Let me know anytime you want to go to the gym. I go to LA Fitness…I tried taking Riley to the childcare once, but he melted down completely. He just didn’t like the woman there. She was the only one watching all of the children, and it turns out she wasn’t even CPR certified.” They chatted a little longer about this and that, and then the gym-going mother rounded up her toddler and got ready to leave, ending the conversation with, “and let’s all get together for a girls’ night next week.”

Here’s why I was inwardly cringing throughout this conversation. I too belong to LA Fitness. I too have made half-hearted attempts to become “workout buddies” with a couple of the other moms I know who belong to the same gym. I too had given up on the daycare at the gym because Donovan freaked out on the two occasions that I tried to leave him there, and I wasn’t crazy about the girl who worked there either (incidentally, the last time I gave it a shot was when Donovan was about six months old. At this point, he was over a year and I was still using it as an excuse not to go to the gym). The girls night thing was the clincher. Just the evening before, I had sent out an Evite to the mothers in my play group about getting together for happy hour. I had thankfully stopped short of referring to it as a “girls night,” but let’s face it: that’s exactly what it was. (A side note about the term “girls night”: I had no problem at all using this term to refer to evenings out with my other over-thirty-year-old girlfriends before I had a child, but something about using it on a group of mothers just seems a little forced to me, so I declared a personal moratorium on the phrase.)

So rather than fight it, I’m trying to embrace the pedestrian aspects of my new life and accept them as part of the in-many-other-ways-amazing experience of being a new mother. To this end, I promise myself that the next time I overhear a conversation that sounds exactly like one I’ve had a dozen times before, I will try to see the humor in it, rather than react instinctively with a minor feeling of self disgust. I’m still working on it…