I am nervous about a Mother's Day Breakfast my littlest has invited me to attend next week at school. While my friends are excited about attending the event, I'm already in a panic, inventing phantom reasons I can't attend.

I have to admit that I am not good in crowds. Bad in malls, worse at school events, and I even have trouble at family reunions. My muscles tighten, and my stress levels climb to a crescendo as I start eyeing the exits, preferring the calm insanity of a high school pep rally, filled with hormones and mascots to people in my bodily vector-space.

Now, put me in a sports arena and I can cope. Maybe it's because there's no pressure on me to perform on a personal level, or to schmooze, or to commit feats of hilarity or hoping for good first impressions with purses clutched to our chests on clammy lunch room tables at a school breakfast. I can go to a major sports event and yell at the pitcher, blow kisses to the quarterback, slap shot the goalie with my handbag, and I instantly have the same thing in common with 25,000 other people in the immediate vicinity: we all love our team (no matter which one it happens to be).

I can stand in line with 400 other women, all waiting for restrooms at the 7th inning stretch (and powder) and we can make miraculous small talk with ease (though it's usually about having to use the bathroom), and we all smile and wave at each other as soon as some lucky new participant enters the stall.

I can pay too much for food at a Colorado Rockies game and not mind, show excitement over a bobblehead doll of the rookie player on fan night, and feel pride as I walk the corridors with thousands of other people bobbling down the concourses. I can yell, scream, do the wave, howl, "CHARGE!" as a response to the organ's cue. In front of thousands of instant friends-- people with whom I have never met-- I can boo the opposing team's players when they end zone boogie. I can paint my face and know I'm not the only overweight person there who will be wearing the Denver Broncos blue and orange beverage hat (with straw and cooling face fan) on any given day.

I enjoy a heightened sense of team spirit and rousing cacophonous comfort of these strangers instantly; yet, put me into a room with 100 mothers I barely know, and my throat constricts. My hair sweats. My eyebrows furrow into frustrated caterpillars.

I've had to think this Mother's Breakfast through to a solution which will not disappoint my daughter while I hold tight what little thread of clarity I still possess. She expects me to attend with her, clutching hope to her chest like that gold, foil-lined envelope that arrived with the invitation and sprawling, child's handwriting. And then I had an epiphany.

Maybe as I place myself in that lunch room, echoing with sound and reverberations of friendly chatting, it is in that moment I will look at those strangers brushing elbows with my wide hips and imagine them all fans in a stadium, like me. Fans of motherhood, even when the team is on a losing streak--because that's when we need each other most (even if only to rally verbally against the referees). Fans of the game of community, because it is not always participatory, but amenable to spectatorship and support, even when there's debate about the salary caps. Fans of the atmosphere, the electricity and the excitement at knowing that, at the end of the day, as the push brooms are freed from custodial closets everywhere, the area still echoes with the promise of another animated hoard of ticket holders, ready to take up the gauntlet once again for those players they love and support.

Maybe during the serving of lukewarm breakfast offerings on Friday I will place myself back in the comforting memories of the Seattle Kingdome (before the roof began falling in) and revisit those foam finger waving days, smiling over corny dogs and $12 nachos and stepping in yellow puddles of what I hoped was beer.

Maybe as I huddle in next to dozens of strange new faces, I'll try to picture all of us there for the same reason: 12-24 hours of difficult labor for those expectant glows of six year old angels, how we panted like puppies through the difficult moments in the delivery room, and that all of us in that cafeteria, over questionable cinnamon buns and Wilson Farm pints of milks, are instantly on the same side; on the same team--and that we all probably need to use the rest room.

Maybe as those little, wriggling bodies eagerly serve us in pride, gaping, gapping smiles of teeth just wiggled free from their gums and gleaming across those too-short flickering candles of childhood, stand up to tell us how much they love us, I will think of my daughter rounding third base, sliding for home.

Maybe, and just maybe, as tears well up in eyes, and those dabbing bits of Kleenex and napkins come from purses and pockets and lunch trays throughout the room in sniffling silence, I will find that my discomfort isn't really in crowds, but in my never before finding enough in common with the people in them for the right reasons.

Maybe, finally maybe, in that moment of pregnant pauses and weeping women, I shall lapse back to standing on snow-capped bleachers during the final moments when the WSU Cougars defeated the Huskies to clinch the Apple Cup on a frigid Washington afternoon in November. I could, on Friday, likewise, stand up from my bench in much the same way, and, (throwing caution to the wind like that game-winning pigskin) in that quiet cafeteria, I may create a surprising moment of sudden, meaningful solidarity:

And I'll do the wave.