Before Ergobaby Aura Wraps, Wild Rumpus Avocado Food Pouches and Urban Glider 2 Strollers, I craved the kind of niche language that motherhood could offer and hadn’t yet offered to me. Back then, I found what I was looking for at Eustace Kenyon Convention Center, where for a season in my early twenties, I spent most of my weekends and many evenings. If it was free, I went: a workshop on Asian fermentation, a lecture series on tomato cultivation in space, a dahlia bulb sale where tribes were formed based on pronunciation. D-ah-lia? Friend. Day-lia? Foe.

      I began to attend ticketed events too, without a ticket. At a miniature-dog panel, while fumbling in my purse for a badge I didn’t have, the door-guy said, “This moderator barks at late- comers. Just go in.” No group interested me more than another: ornithologists, sex-toy fanatics, celiacs (and people who desperately wanted to be celiac), and those paying tribute to John Wayne. I was drawn, not by topic, but by the prospect of adoption. The assumption—if you were there, you belonged. Shared nomenclature made even arguing intimate. “I’m sorry,” said one panelist. “But even the Paris patisseries are using psyllium husks instead of arrowroot. Have you truly not read, Ergon Essen’s The Wheat-Free Bond?”

      Being the only child of parents who had themselves been only children, I missed out on an Uncle Zee saying “Lola, would you cut the damn canary. It really niggles my drum.” I felt deprived of being publicly scolded in a private language. So began my habit of crashing conventions and joining the extended families of natural pet-food enthusiasts, Jewish film- makers, and Doctor Spock revivalists alike.

      It took very little to convince other attendees I was one of them, and even less to convince myself. Upon arrival at Frida Kahlo’s birthday one Saturday, I ducked into the bathroom to apply a unibrow with eyeliner. A dab of Maybelline, ultra-black, was all it took to avoid exposure. The day I won an Advent calendar kibble sampler, I half expected to come home to a dog. During the closing ceremony of Save the Songbird Summit, I waited for the host’s count of three and then joined the chorus of a thousand others singing: Maids! Maids! Maids! Hang up your tea kettle-ettle-ettle-ettle—the call of the New Bedford sparrow as recorded in Thoreau’s journals.

      The avid sparrowist beside me clarified. “Actually, the dialect in this city translates closer to Mom! Mom! Mom! Help me find my mitten-itten-itten-itten.”

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      The week after attending the Arboreal Conservation Convention and Book Fair, my then boyfriend, now husband, asked me, “So, what did you learn about rice?”

      “Rice?” I said. “Rice doesn’t even grow on trees.”

      He’d thought I’d said Arborio Convention. “Well,” he said, a bit defensively, “it’s not like you haven’t gone that niche before.”

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