![\"Abby](\"https:\/\/thebadassbreastfeeder.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/20131006_151547.jpg\")
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\u201cGo! This! Way!\u201d he yelled. He spiked each syllable with a jerking full-body wiggle in the direction of the closest exit. (He views me primarily as a mule he can steer with his wiggles.) I tried to stand my ground for a moment and took a four-second video of my sneakers.<\/p>\n
<\/em><\/p>\n And that\u2019s about all I was able to capture in terms of visual documentation of my wife\u2019s appearance as a featured speaker at the record-breaking<\/a> MommyCon gathering in Los Angeles. However, the event, unlike almost all events in my daily life since Jack\u2019s arrival, has not faded entirely from my increasingly porous memory, so I jotted down a few notes:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dust<\/i><\/p>\n My one qualm with MommyCon was that it was pretty dusty. This doesn\u2019t show up in any of my blurry pictures, or even in any of the other focused pictures I\u2019ve seen from the event, but it had to have been dusty, because I kept getting something stuck in my eye. This first happened a few minutes after we arrived. A woman carrying her baby on her chest approached my wife hesitantly.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re Abby,\u201d she said. Her voice was shaking.<\/p>\n \u201cHi!\u201d my wife said.<\/p>\n \u201cI just want to tell you how much you mean to me,\u201d the woman said. She described how she had moved 3,000 miles away from her family just before she had her baby. There were tears in her eyes as she expressed how grateful she was for the support and sense of community she got from The Badass Breastfeeder page. My wife\u2019s eyes were wet, too. As the two mamas hugged, I stood there in a manly, rock-jawed fashion with no tears whatsoever, but as mentioned earlier there seems to be an issue with dust in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Someone should look into this.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Lifesaver<\/i><\/p>\n Versions of this with other mamas kept repeating throughout the day. Sometimes Abby was approached by groups of women who had traveled together to the conference and who were part of local support groups that had been launched on The Badass Breastfeeder private group. This made me particularly proud of my wife. When Jack was in the first few months of his life, Abby saw how powerful it was to be a part of a local group of other like-minded moms, and on her blog and her Facebook page she encouraged everyone to find their own \u201cMama Tribe.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s a lonely time to be living on earth. The dominant economic and political systems we live in aren\u2019t set up to foster human connection. For most of my life, I\u2019ve resigned myself to being a loner, powerless to do much about the way things are.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got to fight,\u201d my wife said at one point during her speech. These are words she lives by. She doesn\u2019t do resignation. She fights by speaking out about what she believes in and by helping to build communities.<\/p>\n She\u2019s not alone, of course, which is the point. The building was packed with mommas fighting the tendency in our culture to separate everyone from everyone. I was particularly moved by the warm welcome we got from two other crusading writer-mothers at the conference, Jen from Our Muddy Boots<\/a> and January from Birth Without Fear<\/a>. Kevin, the husband of the conference founder, Xza, was also very nice to both of us. (Xza herself, in constant motion, was experienced by me primarily as a benevolent blur.)<\/p>\n But I\u2019m prone to thinking that my wife is something special. This tendency on my part became clear when a woman walking by us said this to Abby:<\/p>\n \u201cYou saved my life!\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019d already heard a lot of glowing words lobbed toward my wife, but this was the topper. My jaw hung open as I looked at Abby.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re . . . you\u2019re like some kind of superher\u2014\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, relax,\u201d she said. \u201cI got her a coffee when I went to Starbucks.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Really, Really Far <\/i><\/p>\n To be honest, I\u2019m not really qualified as a reliable MommyCon correspondent, as the majority of my day was spent outside the conference, playing with Jack. His favorite thing was a wide hallway with high ceilings and a sloping ramp. I sat at the bottom of the ramp and he walked up it again and again, a few steps at first, than farther and farther. On each of his walks he stopped for a second before starting back toward me. I put my arms out, and he ran toward them and knocked me onto the ground. He understood that each time he was getting farther and farther away.<\/p>\n \u201cReally, really far,\u201d he said after one of his runs.<\/p>\n \u201cReally, really, really<\/i> far,\u201d he said after the following run.<\/p>\n On his next run he went all the way to the top of the long down-sloping passageway. If he went any farther, he\u2019d have been out of my sight altogether. It was the farthest he\u2019d ever been from me without being with Abby. He looked very small, a baby. An instant later he was tumbling into my arms, knocking me flat on my back, a full-grown boy. Where did this boy come from? Where was my baby? I held him up in the air and he laughed down at me.<\/p>\n \u201cReally, really, really, really,\u201d he said. His words dissolved into more laughs. I wanted to hold onto him longer, but he wriggled out of my arms and started running again.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sky hook<\/i><\/p>\n Okay, I did get one photo on the day of MommyCon that I liked. At one point during the day, the battery on Abby\u2019s phone started running out, and I went with Jack to our hotel room to change his diaper and get a phone charger. On the way back to the conference center, I set Jack down by a statue of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar outside the Staples Center and stepped away quickly to take a photo of him standing beside it. He wanted to climb it. (He wants to climb everything.) In the photo, it looks like he\u2019s putting his arms up to try to defend Kareem\u2019s sky hook.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n