While walking my son to his second day at zoo camp, a woman fell in stride with us. Her son looked about the same age as mine, and she began to ask him questions while smiling at me.

I stared at her in disbelief and bit my tongue so I wouldn’t say, “Wow, you’re still doing that?”

“Doing that” is trying to elicit a bond merely because we are both mothers. I fiendishly “did that” when my son was first born. I didn’t have any friends with babies, worked from home and felt incredibly isolated.

I attended a few mommy groups, would talk to any mother I saw at a park or in the grocery store, but I rarely if ever felt a connection with them. They seemed glazed over or too peppy, and eventually I deemed myself a mommy group flunky and quit trying.

I wrote a lot about this conundrum because I thought it was unique to me. I had moved constantly as a young adult, changed jobs frequently and was always able to make friends easily and quickly, so I didn’t understand why it felt so difficult to connect with other moms.

An editor at "Literary Mama" burst my bubble when she wrote to me, “I like your story, but out of all of the topics mothers can write about I get more ‘Why don’t I fit in with the other moms?’ stories than any other. If you can reframe yours, I’ll take it.”

What? Other moms feel this way too? Where are they? I wondered.

A friend recommended I start a zine as a way to find these other misfits, and it worked. I met and heard from many other like-minded mothers and many of them have become my closest friends and support network.

We bonded over our feelings of not fitting in, and therefore I stopped feeling as if I didn’t fit in and no longer analyzed what caused those original outcast feelings.

My encounter with the mom at the zoo shamed me and alerted me to the fact that now I may be one of those mothers that is perpetuating the cycle of stonewalling other mothers.

I wiped the incredulous look off of my face and began to engage with her, which is when she quickly turned away. That’s weird, I thought to myself. She certainly was chatty a second ago.

My mind went through the numerous possible offenses: the fact that I hadn’t showered, my coffee breath, that I was still wearing my pajamas but was hoping they looked like sweat pants.

When I started to analyze the all of five words I said to her, I stopped myself. I always have bedhead in the morning, I am usually tired either because I stayed up late working or because I stayed up late having fun, so I will nod and smile hello, but I probably won’t be able to communicate articulately and I will never be peppy.

I no longer want to worry or even think about if these things are problems for others because after years of wondering why I wasn’t connecting with other mothers, I have learned to let myself be who I am. This doesn’t mean I’ll stonewall moms, but I also won’t try to pretend I’m something I’m not.

I am the kind of mom who will watch, care for and love my friend’s kids while they are at my house, but I also will give those kids enough free reign (or maybe I’m just distracted by a phone call) that they may jump off a bed and get hurt, climb a tree and get scraped, or make mud soup until they are covered in it.

I will not spend the entire time monitoring them or even playing with them, but I will be there if they need me. My kids and I will welcome them, and they will undoubtedly have fun at our house, but I may still be unshowered and drinking a glass of wine when they pick their child up at 6 p.m.

My friends understand and accept this about me, and if you too can look past my pajamas, I am more than happy to include you and your children into our mommy world.

Corbin Lewars (www.corbinlewars.com) is a writing mentor, the founder of Reality Mom (www.realitymomzine.blogspot.com) and author of "Creating a Life" (Catalyst Book Press, 2010) and the forthcoming "After Glow." She will be teaching a "momoir" writing class in Ballard starting in September. Contact her for details.