During the fall of 2020, while the rest of the world was feeling stuck during the ongoing pandemic quarantine, Nicole Kumi felt empowered at home. She’d just given birth to her second child, he was eating well, and breastfeeding was going much more smoothly than it did while nursing her daughter three years earlier. But the tranquility was short-lived—after a few weeks, he became colicky, crying endlessly. 

“The deal was that I’d sleep from 8 p.m. to midnight, and my husband would sleep from midnight until 4 a.m.,” says Kumi, a behavioral health specialist who lives in Silver Spring. But when it came time for her to lie down, she couldn’t sleep. Her mind raced anxiously. One night, after she thought she heard a scratching noise in the kitchen, she took everything out of all the chests and drawers, convinced there would be evidence of a mouse. 

There wasn’t. 

The next morning, with the kitchen in complete disarray, Kumi and her husband acknowledged that she needed help. Kumi, who is 41 now and has shifted her behavioral health practice to counsel women with postpartum mood disorders, decided to contact her older daughter’s child care provider. Though her son was only 8 weeks old—and Kumi still had three weeks left of maternity leave—the woman who ran the child care center assured her that she and her staff would watch over the baby and that Kumi should get some sleep. 

“She was my savior,” Kumi says.

A dozen women listen to Kumi share this story and nod in understanding. All 12 work for Wonders Early Learning + Extended Day, a Bethesda-based child care center. They’re gathered for training on how to identify and help parents who experience a postpartum mood disorder. Such training previously targeted medical professionals who come in contact with new parents, but today’s is geared toward child care providers, who, experts are realizing, have a front-row seat to parents during a crucial postpartum period. 

“These [child care] professionals play a pivotal role in connecting and interacting with parents during such a vulnerable time,” Kumi says. 

Liza Pringle, the curriculum and instruction specialist at Wonders, opted to attend an online training session in postpartum mood disorders after sharing with Joanne Hurt, the executive director, that one pregnant mother didn’t seem like herself when dropping off an older child. After hearing about Pringle’s positive experience, Hurt contacted Mikah Goldman Berg, the chapters program manager for Postpartum Support International (PSI), a national organization with headquarters in Portland, Oregon. Berg connected Hurt with Kumi, who serves on the Maryland chapter’s board. 

PSI’s trainings on postpartum mood disorders are typically geared toward medical professionals, though some are open to anyone. The goal of the training at Wonders, Kumi says, is to ensure that child care providers understand the prevalence of postpartum mood disorders and how to provide resources. “These are people who are seeing the moms in vulnerable settings where they may have their guard down,” Kumi says. “Many parents can keep defenses high around friends and family, and then have their breakdown…in an unusual location, such as a child care drop-off or pickup.” 

During her training, Pringle was surprised to learn how often a pediatrician’s office assumed such postpartum mood disorder screenings were being done by OB-GYNs, and how often OB-GYNs thought the pediatrician’s office was doing them. “It made me realize how many women were being missed in this process, and that we had access to them and could play a role,” she says.

Only 20% of moms receive a screening, according to PSI data, despite one in five new moms and one in 10 new dads experiencing a postpartum mood disorder.

While early childhood educators can’t conduct screenings or provide diagnostic guidelines, they can be aware of signs to look for and how to intervene. “Postpartum mood disorders don’t discriminate,” Kumi says. “It can be just as prevalent in a government-funded day care as an affluent, prestigious preschool. It’s knowing what to look for that matters.”

Berg believes that training people who come in contact with new parents is one of the best ways to increase awareness of postpartum mood disorders and encourage those affected to seek help. Like Kumi, she knows this from firsthand experience following the births of her two daughters. It wasn’t until she found a support group through PSI that she understood she wasn’t alone. “Having people say, ‘You are not alone, you are not to blame, and, with help, you will be well,’ is what made a difference,” Berg says. “So many moms don’t know it’s so prevalent or where to look for help.” 

Following the training, Wonders is updating how it connects with parents who might have a postpartum mood disorder. PSI resources will be readily available to families and prominently posted, and its leadership team will incorporate check-in questions that teachers can use to aid parents. Wonders also plans to incorporate lessons learned from Kumi’s training into the routine training for teachers. 

“We can take this on,” Pringle says. “The parents can know they aren’t alone. We just need to be informed so we know the next steps to give them help.” 

This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.

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The details came blaring through her radio headset: two-alarm house fire in Potomac. Backup needed. Search and rescue required. Not immediately known if anyone is trapped inside.

With her ponytail tucked inside her canvas overcoat, Emily Rogell, the mother of toddler twins, sat in the back of the speeding fire truck and noticed the firefighter next to her make the sign of the cross, something she’d never seen a colleague do before. We might not return from this fire alive, she thought.

The petite Rogell was the only female on the truck for that midday call to the Avenel neighborhood in the spring of 2012. She’d just returned to her volunteer position with the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad, and her firefighter gear fit differently than it had before she left to have her babies. The twins were home with her husband, Don Greene, a fellow firefighter. The two met at the rescue squad in 1999 and stayed together when Rogell moved away for veterinary school. After having Abby and Isaac, they decided not to ride together anymore because they couldn’t risk orphaning their children. In the front of the fire truck that day sat a man who attended their wedding.

In the burning house, Rogell moved from room to room on her belly and knees, sweat dripping into her eyes, thick black smoke in the air. Firefighters have to go through every foot of the house in teams of two to ensure that no one is trapped or unconscious. They cringe at the open floor plans that are common in newer houses—it’s harder to check the perimeter and center of each room.

Rogell passed through a doorway and spotted the teddy bears and patterned bedspread of a little girl’s room. The toys and stuffed animals were eerily similar to some of the baby gifts she’d received for Abby. But she didn’t see a little girl. She and her partner crawled to each corner of the room to make sure it was empty. They’d learn later that nobody was home when the fire broke out.

As the water began to flow from hoses, Rogell tore down hunks of ceiling and drywall in search of hot spots, hidden areas where the fire could still smolder. She later climbed onto the ladder truck to pull shingles off the roof to ventilate the house and prevent a rekindling. In the truck on the way back to Bethesda, the smell of smoke lingered. It’s an odor that firefighters learn to like, or at least get used to having on their skin and hair. At the station, a second call came in: The fire wasn’t completely out and backup was needed. Rogell, soaked in sweat, returned to the scene and pulled down more ceiling. Her shift was supposed to have ended long ago, but being a volunteer firefighter means staying until the call is done, no matter how long it takes.

At home that night, Rogell picked up each of her sleeping babies for a long hug, not caring if she woke them, taking in their smokeless scent with the teddy bears still fresh in her mind. In the 13 years she’d volunteered as a firefighter, she’d asked the question only a handful of times, and only since becoming a mom. That night, it went through her head again: Why do I do this?

The number of women serving as volunteer EMTs and firefighters for the Montgomery County Fire & Rescue Service is growing rapidly. Of the 2,700 combined career and volunteer personnel with MCFRS, Public Information Officer Pete Piringer estimates that 20 percent are female, and women make up a slightly higher percentage of volunteers. At the B-CC station, Chief Ned Shurburne estimates that nearly 30 percent of the 150 professionally trained volunteers are female, and in the last two years, close to half of the new members who joined the squad were women.

Like Rogell, a veterinarian, many women volunteer while earning paychecks elsewhere and taking care of kids at home. It’s a demanding, high-intensity commitment that comes with a set schedule and often involves overnight shifts. “The kids are kind of part of the reason [moms] feel such an anchor to the community,” says Brenda Mannix, 50, the mother of three and a six-year volunteer at the Rockville Volunteer Fire Department. “You have kids in the schools, you use the local parks, you are part of the moms’ groups. So you want to give back.”

Mannix and others at Rockville’s Station 3 put out a call for volunteers four times a year. They typically get 45 to 60 applications per quarter and accept between 15 and 20 volunteers, roughly a third of whom are women. There’s a wide range of ages: Applicants can be as young as 16, and many women volunteer well into their 50s. “We look for people who are going to be here [at least] two to three years,” says Mannix, who lives in Rockville and chairs the department’s membership committee.

The county covers the cost of volunteer training, which can be several thousand dollars, depending on the level. Most volunteers take a 200-hour EMT course, during which they spend 14 hours a week riding on ambulances to receive their certification; others are trained as paramedics, ambulance drivers or firefighters. Once certified, volunteers are expected to be on duty 60 to 80 hours a month, which usually includes at least one 12-hour overnight shift a week.

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Corbin Holloway has always been a dancer. His mother, Michelle Holloway, says that as a very young boy Corbin would watch an episode of the reality show Dance Moms and then replicate the moves in the basement of their Rockville home. Corbin performed tricks during halftime of his older brothers’ basketball games; he even taught himself a back handspring and aerial flip.

After one of Corbin’s youth football games at Georgetown Prep, Michelle, who teaches algebra 2 and calculus at Walt Whitman High School, took him up the street to see CityDance, part of the Strathmore Music Center in North Bethesda. Leaving the studio, Corbin said it was the best day of his life. He enrolled in CityDance at age 7, and by 9 he was training seriously. At 11, he is considered one of the best young ballet dancers in America.

“The first year, it was super hard,” Corbin says. “I was always goofing around. I didn’t really care.” Asked to choose which dance style he wanted to continue with at age 9, Corbin opted for ballet because “it was the hardest. Then, apparently, I got more serious,” he says.
Corbin is now the youngest dancer at CityDance Petite Conservatory, a select group of students, many of whom spend four to six hours a day in practice. During breaks, Corbin sits in the Strathmore café area and works on his online home-school program. The program gives him and a dozen other students the opportunity to practice with the conservatory’s ballet master, Stanislav Issaev, a two-time international gold medalist at the Varna and National Soviet Ballet competitions and a former principal dancer with the Moscow Classical Ballet.

Corbin is able to turn six or seven arabesque turns, or pirouettes with one leg extended (many dancers—including adults—can only do four). “It is very rare for a dancer to be able to turn seven,” Issaev says.

For Corbin, the chance to dance with Issaev made it worth leaving Burning Tree Elementary School in Bethesda. His hazel eyes light up when he describes his dance practice routine. When he speaks, he leans his thin, 4-foot-11-inch frame back in his chair, athletic sandals dangling off his socked feet. He’s wearing a T-shirt and athletic pants, which he will change out of before dancing in tights, ballet technique shoes and a cropped tee.

“Talent like Corbin comes along every 20 to 30 years,” says CityDance Artistic Director Lorraine Spiegler.

Corbin, who won the boys’ competition in his age group at the 2018 Youth America Grand Prix (YAGP), an international ballet competition, most recently landed the role of Fritz in the Kennedy Center’s December production of The Nutcracker. The role of Clara went to Makenzie Hymes, another conservatory dancer. She and Corbin are paired together for Nutcracker performances.

Spiegler had been hesitant for Corbin and Makenzie to audition for The Nutcracker, since they were working on other shows and competitions. “I said off the cuff, ‘If you get Fritz and Clara, then we’ll talk about it.’ The night of the audition I get a call, ‘Well, they got Fritz and Clara.’ ”

One of Corbin’s favorite things about the role was meeting the other young boy who played Fritz (two children were assigned to each role). At the studio, Corbin is one of the few boys, and most of the other students are three to five years older.

Corbin’s older brothers, who attend Whitman and St. Jane de Chantal Catholic School, come to all of his performances, and Michelle says they’ve encouraged his dancing. His father, Cornell, a former defensive back for the Indianapolis Colts, knows firsthand the pressure of being a star athlete, and he also finds Corbin’s talents astonishing.

Because of Corbin’s age, Michelle kept him at CityDance last summer rather than allowing him to study ballet in a different city. But plans are being discussed about where he might go this coming summer when he is 12. New York and Philadelphia are options. Corbin is currently preparing for CityDance conservatory’s winter showcase, “Creating the Magic” and YAGP in Philadelphia. His busy schedule meant he had to turn down the starring role in Billy Elliot at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia.

For Corbin, the chance to perform at the Opera House at the Kennedy Center made all of his efforts worth it. “I’ve never really performed on a stage as big as that,” he says, his face alight.

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It’s 7:30 p.m., nearly dark, and it’ll be at least another 15 minutes before the lights go on around the outdoor pool at Landon School in Bethesda. Twenty-two players from Walt Whitman High School’s club water polo team are getting ready for a scrimmage. “It’s freezing!” one girl yells. She’ll have to get used to it: This is only mid-September, and outdoor practice continues for another six weeks.

“They warm up when they’re in the water,” says Petar Solomun, Whitman’s first-year head coach. And the players do, for the most part swimming without complaints up and down the 25 yards of the pool, passing the ball around before someone lunges a hard shot toward the goal. One shot thwacks off the keeper’s chest. “It doesn’t hurt him,”
Solomun says.

Solomun, 30, describes water polo as a combination of basketball, rugby and football. Whitman is the only public high school in Montgomery County that fields a community team—the team is not affiliated with Montgomery County Public Schools—but Miras Jelic, the assistant coach of Landon’s water polo team, says the sport is growing in popularity. (Landon is one of a handful of local private schools that have water polo teams; Whitman rents time at Landon’s heated pool for practice.) Players and parents like it because it’s a physically demanding team sport with a much lower risk of injury than contact sports. But Jelic cautions that water polo and swimming are not the same.

“Water polo is twice as hard,” he says. Players have to tread water throughout the 32-minute games. In practice, Solomun estimates that students swim between 1,500 and 3,000 yards, the latter of which is nearly 2 miles.

Whitman’s team was started by two sets of parents who were looking for an alternative to football. “In the two years Nick was on the [football] team, he played a total of 3 minutes,” says Audrey King, whose son graduated from the Bethesda high school five years ago. The team had 120 players; competition for playing time was intense. “He wasn’t having any fun.”

When Nick said he wanted to play water polo instead, a sport he’d picked up during summer swim practice, King approached Walt Bartman, the head of Landon’s water polo team, who arranged for pool time and began asking around for a coach.

Whitman had its first club team in the fall of 2011. King and Ellen Rogers, another player’s mother, had rounded up 11 players. The team spent weekends traveling to regional tournaments, often in Maryland or Pennsylvania. “We lost every game for the next two years straight,” King says. “We were so inexperienced.”

Some students started playing in the offseason, taking advantage of the opportunity to train with competitive teams like the Capital Water Polo Club in Arlington, Virginia, where both Solomun and Jelic coach. Eventually they started winning games.

This season, Solomun has 30 players. “We have one of the rare coed high school teams,” he says. For Maia Kotelanski, a junior at Whitman and one of two girls playing varsity water polo—there are six girls on the JV team—being on a coed team is part of the appeal. “I think the environment would be really different if it was just boys or just girls,” she says. She gets up for school at 6 a.m., eats lunch during class, and leaves at 12:50 p.m. each day for an internship at the National Institutes of Health. Water polo is a way she can socialize with other kids while staying in shape.

Sophomore Lukas Einberg wasn’t much of a swimmer when he first participated in a water polo clinic in eighth grade, something Whitman offers to students at Thomas W. Pyle Middle School (which feeds into Whitman) to generate interest in the sport. After that, Einberg was hooked, though it took him two weeks after joining the Whitman team to master the “eggbeater” position, when players swim vertically—treading water while moving forward, both hands in the air. “The seniors helped me,” he says. “They showed me the right way to move my feet.”

Solomun, who has coached water polo in his home country of Serbia as well as in Paris, sees Whitman as a model for how a public high school without a pool can field a competitive team. Some Whitman students have gone on to play water polo at Division I schools, including Villanova University and the University of Virginia.

“Every year it’s just more kids,” Solomun says, gesturing toward the pool. Even in the dim light of practice, he calls out a player’s name. “I can tell who they are just by their strokes.”

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Josh Hafkin knows what it means to be competitive. A top-ranked swimmer at Georgetown Prep and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he competed in the 2012 Olympic trials.

Exhausted after swim practices, he and his teammates would play “esports,” a form of competition using video games, often with multiple players on teams. Growing up in Potomac, Hafkin loved playing with a Game Boy and his older brother’s Game Gear. But unlike in swimming, there was no infrastructure to support kids who excelled at video games.

He wondered why not, and whether he could be the one to create it.

So in May, Hafkin, 30, left his job at video game publisher Bethesda Softworks to open The Game Gym, the region’s first esports training center.

The windowless room of The Game Gym at the Cabin John Shopping Center in Potomac is bright, with multicolor decorations on the walls and a music and art corner. There are couches and screens, and a private room with rows of computers. One set of couches is reserved for parents to use while the kids take lessons with one of the six staff members.

The gym’s membership rate of $150 per month includes time for free play and two group lessons a week. The Game Gym is designed for kids ages 10-18.

“I want parents to know what their kids are playing, and who they are playing with,” Hafkin says. “We had to take this out of the basements,” he says, where kids often play games by themselves.

At 6 p.m. on a Tuesday in July, Chris Cardno, 43, sits in the parents area as his 12-year-old son, Allan, gets a 90-minute lesson on the computer game League of Legends, the most popular game for The Game Gym coaching. Cardno, a television producer who lives in Potomac, remembers playing video games with his friends—including Double Dragon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—while growing up in the U.K.

“These were all two-, three-, or four-player games,” he says. “You got together at someone’s house or an arcade to play.”

He and his wife came up with a rule for Allan: no first-person shooter games, such as Call of Duty. “We wanted him to have a character to associate with,” Cardno says.

And since Allan, a seventh-grader at Cabin John Middle School, has been coming to The Game Gym, he’s talked nonstop about the different characters and strategies of League of Legends.
“There is a depth to the game that has sucked him in,” Cardno says.

Maya Kushner, The Game Gym’s chief operating officer and an attorney in the District, says places like The Game Gym will encourage kids to see the positive side of the gaming culture, with its strategies, intricacies and community. Contrary to stereotypes about gaming being an isolating endeavor, Kushner says the community she’s found in gaming has led to close friendships. In addition to coaching League of Legends, Kushner coaches and participates in international Pokémon competitions. At her D.C. job, she stays quiet about her involvement in gaming.

“In the legal profession, people will think it’s childish, like ‘you should stop playing games,’ ” she says. “But I don’t think that’s the case. I think you should always have interesting hobbies.”

Super Smash Bros. from Nintendo is the other popular game for coaching at The Game Gym, and it happens to be Hafkin’s favorite. His gaming name is “ExtraBBQ,” which he was assigned when he purchased an Xbox.

Hafkin decided that Fortnite would not be permitted at The Game Gym. He says parents he’s spoken to are wary of the game, and he sees fewer career opportunities for kids associated with it. “League of Legends has nearly 3,000 employees,” he says, referring to the designers, engineers, artists and storytellers who work at Riot Games, which produces League of Legends. He wants kids coming to The Game Gym to see esports as something on which to build a career. Some colleges now offer scholarships for kids to play in a gaming league. The U.S. video-game industry revenue now tops $36 billion, according to the Entertainment Software Association. That figure is expected to increase.

Hafkin compares learning the intricacies of a video game with learning a new skill, such as playing the guitar, which he’s teaching himself now. “Anything done in balance can be good in your life,” he says.

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Grace Lee, executive director of the National Park Trust, with students on a field trip to Rock Creek Park in D.C. Photo by Liz Lynch.

Grace Lee still remembers the black Chrysler station wagon, without air conditioning, that her parents would fill with camping equipment every summer. They’d put her and her brother, Richard, in the back seat and drive across the country, stopping at every national park they could. 

“We’d take the northern route out west and the southern route back home,” says Lee, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. When Lee was growing up in Newark, New Jersey, her parents didn’t have much money but did have an affinity for national parks—inexpensive vacation destinations with breathtaking views. “I can still remember the smell of the smoke when we’d cook food outdoors, and every evening the national park rangers put on a program. I loved that.”

For years, Lee and her husband, Kenneth, a cardiologist at MedStar Heart & Vascular Institute in D.C., made it a point to take their children, Bethany and Brian, to national parks. The Potomac couple has photos in their kitchen of the family white-water rafting on the Snake River in the Tetons. But plenty of people don’t get the opportunity to experience the parks, which is something Lee, now executive director of the Rockville-based National Park Trust (NPT), hopes to change. “In 2016, there were over 330 million visits to the national parks—most of the visitors [were] older and white,” she says. “By 2044, the census tells us that we are going to be a majority-minority country. If we don’t start building that pipeline now of young people that care about the parks, there aren’t going to be enough people left that care about it.” 

Lee, 59, came to NPT in 2006 after her younger child, Brian, now 28, graduated from high school. The stay-at-home mom, who has a background in chemistry, had served on the board of trustees at the Bullis School in Potomac, which her kids attended. Dick Jung, a former headmaster there, later served as a consultant to NPT. He’d seen Lee help craft strategic plans and raise money for scholarships and professional development at Bullis, and suggested that she bring those skills to NPT. Within a year, she was executive director. 

Since NPT was established in 1983, its primary focus had been to acquire land and donate it to the National Park Service for permanent preservation. But Lee wanted to diversify that mission. The parks needed generational support to succeed long term, she realized. There were too many kids who had never been to a national park, even children in the D.C. area who lived a couple of miles from one. 

In 2008, longtime NPT donor Pat Simons sent Lee some photos from her national park trips, and the pictures showed Simons holding a small stuffed bison toy she’d received as a gift from NPT. As Lee looked at the photos, she realized she’d found a hook. The following year she helped launch the Buddy Bison School Program, which centered on NPT-sponsored field trips to national parks for students at low-income schools. Each child gets a Buddy Bison T-shirt and small stuffed animal to clip onto a backpack or belt loop, and NPT provides teachers with an educational curriculum that matches their students’ grade level. “We know kids love to collect things. We thought if we could inspire them to take ‘Buddy Bison’ to parks, they’d want to come back,” Lee says. 

Now in its 10th year, the program partners with 65 Title I schools across the country—including three in Montgomery County—and most of the money to underwrite the trips comes from donations to NPT. “I tell people, ‘For $10, you can send one kid to a national park,’ ” Lee says.

Marisela Campbell, a teacher at Harmony Hills Elementary School in Silver Spring, used to take her second-graders on NPT field trips to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, where they walked the trails to learn more about insects, fauna and birds they’d been studying in class. Now Campbell is teaching kindergarten, and this year her students will go to the National Mall to look for American symbols. “We take three trips per year, and the park ranger comes to the classroom to pass out the T-shirts and give out the little Buddy Bison,” Campbell says. “They see him five to six times throughout the year, and we really know him well by the end of it.”

Lee helped launch the Buddy Bison School Program, which centers on field trips to national parks for students at low-income schools. Park visits have included Piscataway Park in Accokeek, Maryland, and the National Mall and Memorial Parks in D.C.  Photos courtesy of National Park Trust.

After the success of the Buddy Bison program, Lee decided she wanted to do more. “I said, ‘Let’s go for broke—how can we get a bigger megaphone?’ ” she recalls. She decided to start a “Kids to Parks Day,” celebrated on the third Saturday of May, with programming at participating national parks across the country. In 2011, its first year, 18,000 people participated; in 2017, there were more than 1 million participants. 

Even as the Trump administration considers increasing fees to visit some of the most popular national parks, Lee remains undeterred. Organizations like NPT are “critically important,” she says, “not only to preserve and protect our national parks, but also to provide access to these places for our youth.” She points to a lesson on D.C.’s Anacostia River, where students on an NPT-sponsored field trip picked up litter from the water and put it in the canoes they were using. Says Lee, “We’re creating the next generation of park stewards.”

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There are 17 of us—twice that many including babies—sitting cross-legged on the floor of Kidville on Bethesda Row. Some babies sit in our laps, others sleep in car seats parked on the carpet next to us. A few infants are crying, the mothers quick to shush and soothe. “This is a nursing-friendly environment,” says Robyn Cohen Churilla, who leads the group. The oldest baby is 7 months, and the youngest, at 5 weeks, is my own son, Ezra. When the music starts for the “Wee Wiggle” program, Ezra perks up—this is the most stimulation he’s had in his young life.

For many of us, this is the first time we’re meeting, but it won’t be the last. We’re part of Mamas Link, a Bethesda-based moms group founded in 2007 by Churilla, a former Montgomery County teacher, after her son, Shane, was born. “I saw how important it was to connect with other moms going through the same thing at the same time,” she says.

I heard about Mamas Link from another first-time mother, who found it helpful to spend time with other moms and babies while she was on maternity leave. We meet every week in the Bethesda or Rockville area. With babies in tow, we take music and yoga classes, paint ceramic tiles and meet with family therapists. We even have a professional photo shoot.

“I remember waking up the day of the photo shoot and thinking it was a great day,” says Rockville mom Laurie Ehrlich, director of marketing and communications at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, who joined the group with her son, Jake. “I could straighten my hair and put on makeup.”

Mamas Link is one of many moms groups in the area that has seen a steady rise in enrollment in recent years. The benefits are clear: Joining a group gets new moms like me out of the house and helps us meet other new moms. We get to vent about everything from feeding and sleep schedules to adjusting to our post-baby bodies.

“You can prepare yourself all you want, but if it’s your first child, you have no idea what you’re doing,” says Amanda Kaiser, a Potomac resident who participated in Mamas Link with her son, Liam. “Some kids were already sleeping through the night; Liam wasn’t. I needed that sounding board to know that I am figuring it out and not doing such a bad job. I needed to know I’m doing OK as a mom—and as a new mom.”

Lynne McIntyre, a psychotherapist who lives in Cleveland Park, joined Parenting and Childhood Education (PACE) nine years ago when her son Calvin was 3 months old. PACE is a discussion-centered organization, founded in Montgomery County in 1973, that offers educational and emotional support for moms. Its leaders have graduate degrees in education, social work, psychology or counseling. Each group meets for eight two-hour sessions with an assigned discussion topic, such as eating, sleeping or crying.

“Washington is such a transient area—most people do not have family nearby,” says PACE President Judy Itkin. “They don’t have the support of grandmas, aunts and uncles down the street.”

When McIntyre joined, she was suffering from postpartum depression and anxiety. She had terrible insomnia that pushed her to her breaking point. “It’s one of the worst feelings I’ve ever had,” she says. She could no longer eat or take pleasure in things she had once enjoyed, such as listening to music or visits from family and friends.

“These groups are important to create the community that we wouldn’t otherwise have,” says McIntyre, now a facilitator for Postpartum Support International (PSI), a drop-in support group for new mothers that meets in Silver Spring, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia. “When new mothers create that community from the beginning, they are less likely to suffer from that depression and anxiety. A lot of that comes from isolation.”

McIntyre credits PACE with saving her life. “I was suicidal,” she says. “I remember my group leader said, ‘This is really hard, and for some of you it’s going to feel extra hard. There is help, there are resources, and I can connect you to them if you feel like you need more.’ I don’t know what would have happened to me if she hadn’t opened that door.”

New moms often ask McIntyre, “Why did this happen to me?” She says groups like PACE and PSI help mothers realize they aren’t alone in feeling this way.

“The single most helpful feedback for moms with postpartum depression and anxiety is to sit in a room with other new mothers who say, ‘I love my baby, I love my partner, I have support, and I’m totally miserable. I can’t stop crying and I don’t know why,’ ” she says. “And they have other mothers who nod and say, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’ It’s a safe place to articulate what they are experiencing.”

Jenny Rittberg, who moved to Potomac from Brooklyn, N.Y., a year before her daughter, Amalia, was born, says PACE meetings helped her connect with people as she was getting adjusted to a new area.  

“The format where you are talking about emotional things, opening yourself up and being vulnerable, allowed us to connect in a meaningful way in a very short period,” says Rittberg, a math specialist at the Norwood School in Bethesda. “Every single week, someone talked about breastfeeding—either having trouble with it or being hesitant to switch to formula, and someone who did switch to formula feeling guilty about doing so. What was beautiful was that everyone was affirming of each person’s decisions. They said, ‘That’s OK, you’re doing your best. You can’t push yourself too hard, you have to do what feels right.’ ”

Feeding is a common topic at La Leche League, a monthly moms group that meets to promote and support breastfeeding, with locations in Kensington, Takoma Park and Silver Spring. I went to a La Leche meeting when Ezra was 4 months old and I was transitioning back to work at Roll Call. The other moms were incredibly supportive, sharing their personal tips on how and when to pump. “We encourage mothers to recognize that they are the experts on their babies,” says Marie Beam, a La Leche League leader with the Kensington group who counsels women struggling with breastfeeding. “Mothers learn to trust themselves.”

Judy Itkin recently heard from a PACE group that celebrated 25 years together. They’ve stayed close through confirmations, bar and bat mitzvahs, high school graduations, even weddings. “One PACE group has been meeting for 38 or 39 years,” she says.

The first group of women Churilla worked with at Mamas Link still vacations together. Ehrlich turned to her moms group friends when she was struggling with the decision to go back to work. “I felt less alone with the idea of leaving Jake all day, knowing that there were others in the group having the same experience,” she says. Rittberg still meets with her PACE group, both for moms’ only brunch dates and trips to a playground in Potomac.

“We tell women, ‘Reach out to the person next to you and invite them to lunch,’ ” says Pat Shelly, founder of the Breastfeeding Center for Greater Washington, which offers weekly group drop-in meetings. “We make a special effort to make the new people feel at home.”

After the end of our six-week Mamas Link session, our group stayed in touch. Some formed weekly playgroups, others organized a monthly moms’ night out, and sent invitations for first birthday parties. We’re no longer strangers with infants, but mothers of toddlers who are walking, talking, even sleeping through the night.

“I talk to some of these girls every day,” says Kaiser, who still organizes group dinners. “Liam will be going to school with some of their kids. I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything.”

Rebecca Gale is an editor and reporter at Roll Call and author of Hill Navigator, a workplace advice column. She lives in Bethesda with her husband and son. To comment on this story, e-mail com ments@moco360.media.

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