Facebook communities permeated and represented their lived experiences to an extent where Dania no longer made sense of them as tools or places, but rather, together, her way of being. Nowhere is it clearer than within the City-Specific Facebook Baby Community, where the internet as a tool and place most obviously collide. Listening to how Dania describes the City Specific Facebook Baby Community, it becomes obvious that it was a community online, as opposed to an online community. Of course, members utilized the community as a tool for scheduling and updating others regarding meet-ups, events, and gatherings in physical, material places. However, in the process, these scheduling ←56 | 57→conversations turned a tool into a place for a much-needed chat or where one could vent and be heard. “Let’s do the park tomorrow. It looks like the weather will hold for another day and I am sure there will be plenty of rainy days to come where we need to stay indoors” could invite a response as simple as: “we’ll be there x” to: “looks like we won’t make it today …. struck down with a bug have fun x” to “A couple of our kids are still coughing and wheezing badly after getting through another virus or flu … any experiences on what help them …” As suggested by Markham (2003) these tools for reaching others transformed into a place (and places) to be, hang out, and have a chat. The transition is fluid and natural, not one way. So one could return back to the understanding that this was a conduit or even a prosthesis.
Through seemingly simple observations, Dania and others entered deep explorations of what it meant to be raising their “ ‘Israeli’ kids” while navigating motherhood as a transnational settler (Hirsch & Lee, 2018) in Israel. “What is it with our ‘Israeli’ kids” Dania once posted: “… none of them, including ours, eat potatoes … which are a huge staple of British kids’ diets. …weird. …just an observation!” Talk such as this made the communities into places of belonging, wherein similar observations would make sense, be understood, perhaps even eagerly welcomed, as they allowed the members to briefly pause and focus on their experiences of mothering in a new place, maybe sprinkle it with some comic relief. So, when one of Dania’s peers, who was new to Israel and its preschool system, turned to her trusted community with how “mortified” she was by the language her child was picking up in preschool, Dania responded with the curse word related confession that started this piece. She shared, cared, and provided some comic relief to a mother who was, in that moment, struggling with the newness of it all.
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1 Gan—transliterated Hebrew word for daycare/preschool/Pre-K/ Kindergarten.
2 Transnational Settler denotes transnational living patterns in which permanency in the current transnational living situation is a factor but not a given, i.e. a return to the country of origin and/or additional host countries is possible. Transnational settlers maintain significant relationships in countries of origin and/or prior countries of residence, while forging new relationships and viewing their current host country/living situation as potentially permanent (cf. Hirsch and Lee, 2018).
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