Photo by María Helena Carey
A few posts ago, I talked about dipping a toe in the vast MOtH waters. Silence followed.
It turns out that it is not easy to talk about MOtH, because it has become something greater than the sum of its members, for better and for… not exactly worse, really. I do find that discussing MOtH usually makes for interesting conversation with other local moms and dads.
Let me back up. To the uninitiated, MOtH stands for “Mothers on the Hill” although other family members are welcome. As a matter of fact, the “Hill” part of MOtH also seems to have become optional, since there are many members who have moved away from the DC area and yet continue to be constant users and contributors to the Yahoo! group. Currently, the group boasts 2837 members and adds more every week. While the people with whom I have spoken about MOtH seem to have joined after having children — a friend was invited to join when his son was already four years old– the trend now seems to indicate that people are joining more and more while pregnant. Going back and reading some of the older messages in the database, however, hints at the humbler and simpler origins of a community of mothers who were just trying to find common ground and providing support and friendship back at the beginning of the decade. (The database itself does not go back to the first original messages; it lingers around June of 2001 and can’t go farther back. I assume this to be a Yahoo! problem).
For instance, I came across a post from November 13, 2001 which boasted, “We now have something like 95 (!!!) members! WOW!” In light of the current membership, this is such a quaint comment. Many members in those older messages seemed aware that the group was getting a little bigger– some would even re-introduce themselves to the newer crowd, and welcome them. However, the impression that those early messages give this reader is that this was less a faceless community and more just a large group of friends who looked out for one another and who were going through the initial phases of growing pains. For those who are locals, MOtH is both a virtual network and a real community of people they may even see every day; but for those who’ve been tranisients here on the Hill, MOtH is an online community like few are to be found in many a new domicile– a place where you can not only get advice about parenting troubles and about local schools and children’s attractions and activities, but a place where you can pretty much ask a question and get any number of eager respondents, ready to voice opinions. The fact is that MOtH fills a niche like few others and, while there may be many a lively discussion or even an occasional heated argument within its virtual walls, it still is an unbeatable resource for getting from the most pedestrian to the most outlandish information, all in one place.