When I became a mom, I knew that everything was going to change. I knew that I was in for sleepless nights, feeling anxious about everything possible and a lot of clothes covered in spit-up. What I did not expect to happen was that I would almost completely lose my social circle. I went on maternity leave, and that was a loss of a lot of people almost immediately. Not a lot of people consider their coworkers their friends, but these are people I saw every single day and yes, a lot of them were my friend.
I never really was one to have a large group of friends, I always had one or two best friends and that was about it. The one best friend I had also slowly started to disconnect from me. This loss did not happen right away, it was more a gradual event. It was understandable, I had a child now and had entered this parallel universe that she could no longer relate to. She still went to work and went out at night to have fun, and I was at home with a baby. Our problems were no longer similar, and neither were our interests.
I realized pretty quickly that I needed some mom friends, but where were they? At first it just seemed that I was unlucky. I found a “baby and mom” group, but no one came. It was just me and my daughter sitting in a room, waiting for people to come. Then I started taking my daughter to the park and I would longingly look at the other mom’s hoping that someone would start up a conversation. Niceties would be passed, but then we would go our separate ways and not a phone number or anything would be shared.
Why was this so hard for me? It seemed like, as a child, it was so easy to make new friends, but this was not so easy as an adult. I finally realized what the difference is between a child wanting to make a new friend and an adult, children do not judge like adults. I quickly realized that my fear of welcoming new moms into my life was my fear of being judged and ridiculed for how I choose to raise my children.
When mom’s have playdates, the conversation is typically around parenting and their children, and that’s amazing and how it should be. That’s why you want a mom friend, so that you can vent about how your children are behaving and how badly you need a break. However, I constantly worried that the mom’s I would find would not accept me for the mom I was and that they would judge me for how I was choosing to raise my child. That is why it was so hard to “seal the deal” on a new friendship and exchange numbers for a playdate.
My first child is now almost 5 and she has just started school. I am trying to make an active effort to make some friends while I am waiting to pick up my daughter. I am trying to get better at quality small-talk and hoping that it leads to more. For some reason, making mom friends is starting to sound a lot like the journey I went on to meet my husband, and I wonder if it is this hard for everyone. It seems like there should be an application everyone should fill out and they can be electronically matched with their “perfect mom friend” based on interests and parenting styles.
While I am getting better at putting myself out there in the hopes that I will find my mom bestie, it is a slower process than I imagined it would be. For now, I will have to stick to the online mom groups I am a part of and relish in the online relationships I have made with other moms.
It is nice to at least have this outlet to vent and meet people who have similar struggles as I do. At least when I talk to a woman online about mom stuff, I can’t see her reactions and she can roll her eyes behind the computer screen instead of in my face.