3.1 Parent's Place
On the following Tuesday night I went to Parent’s Place, located in a little Victorian house with a meeting room and offices, on a busy thoroughfare. I had driven by this location hundreds of times, but I had never once before seen the words Parent’s Place over the front door. It was all a matter of attention. Now I felt reassured by its mere existence, by its residential facade. If I needed it, this place is here for me, I thought. I was impressed that the community was way ahead of me on this, that such resources even existed.
Inside, the house retained the feeling of a home. There was a narrow hallway with rooms on either side and a staircase at the far end of the hall. The bulletin board just inside the entrance was full of flyers and announcements for parents of young children, in exactly the place where a coat rack or family bulletin board might be. I wasn’t a mother, but I already felt I had pulled back the curtain and crossed into this world. I was peering through a window at motherly obsessions — day care, schools, play dates.
Up on the second floor, a group of women were seated on couches grouped in a horseshoe around three sides of a narrow room, probably a kid’s bedroom at one time. A rather striking woman in a suit with a brief case, eyes downcast, arrived right after me, and took the last chair. There were pockets of discussion and areas of silence in the already filled room. I was one of the quiet ones. The women were short, tall, thin, chunky, perfectly groomed or flowingly natural. The only thing that unified this group was that they were women and presumably they wanted to have a kid.