I’m going to a friend’s baby shower later this morning. While I know most of the women my age who’ll be there - and even though I’ve known most of them for over ten years - I’m an outsider.

These went to college together, had boyfriends in bands together, got married together, and they all have young children and babies together. While this may sound like a sorority girl mafia completely lacking in individuality, it isn’t. They’re fun to hang with - smrt, cool, excellent. It’s that I wasn’t here during the formative years of their group bond, and so I’ll always be “new”. There will always be details I don’t know, jokes I don’t get, loops I get left out of. My kids are older than theirs and so I’m dealing with completely different issues (for a long time I was the only one with kids). I’m sure, too, that when we arrived in 1996, we were all young enough and mostly unmarried enough for me to be eyed with some suspicion, especially since so much hearsay preceded my arrival. They made much more out of me than there was, but some of that has stuck.

I write about this not because I feel bad about it, but because I don’t feel bad about it. It is what it is.