As soon as I started thinking about becoming a stay-at-home mom, I worried about becoming socially isolated. Sure, I’d have a baby to take care of, but that’s nowhere near the same as adult interaction. I had a really rough summer after finishing graduate school a few years ago, and I know that loneliness and boredom do not agree with me in the least. Though I’m sure it will be different as a parent, those concerns are still there.

Add to that the fact that we really don’t have a lot of friends and family nearby. My family is in the midwest, my in-laws are in Florida. Several of our very good friends left Massachusetts for Washington, DC, a few years ago. The closest friends with kids are still an hour away. And while all of them will come visit and do the best they can, we do not have the built-in social support that we would if we were living near family.

I realized I would need to be really proactive. I looked up mom-and-baby groups, tried to think of activities, and was glad to find out my local YMCA offers free childcare to members.

And then I found out it was twins.

Oh, sure, you can do many of the same things, but it gets a little more complicated. For instance, can one mom bring two babies to a swim class at the Y? I’m also starting to realize that being a twin mom makes you something of a spectacle, wherever you go. If new moms are a magnet for strange people offering strange advice, twin moms are doubly so. I decided I needed to make sure I connected with people in the same position as me.

Last week, I joined my local Mothers of Twins club. In addition to monthly meetings and other benefits, they have a “big/little sister” program. This was exactly what I was looking for. Someone to talk to specifically about the strange and (hopefully) wonderful experience of being a twin mom. Someone who wouldn’t have to “get over” the fact that, yes, there will be two of them.

I met my “big sister” on Sunday at a nearby Starbucks. She brought her 9-week-old daughter, and left her boy twin to run errands with dad. She said it was sometimes nice to split them up like that, especially since going out with both of them can be such a circus of people coming up to you. We had a great time chatting. It’s nice that she’s about four months “ahead” of me. Enough that she’s got some experience under her belt, but not so much that she’s forgotten what the early days were like. We seem to have a lot in common (our boy/girl twins aside), and agreed on a lot of philosophical points. She’s breastfeeding, which I hope to do, but she’s not militant about it. She’s full of advice on tricks and tools she’s finding really helpful with newborn twins.

In some ways, it’s no substitute for having family and friends close by. But, at the same time, I also don’t have family and friends with twins who would be the most knowledgeable, anyways. Sure, I’ll still call my mom several times a week, and I’ll call my other friends with babies for all kinds of advice. But there really is something unique about having more than one baby at a time, and I’m really glad this resource is out there.

And hey, new friends have to come from somewhere, right?