When my pregnancy test stick turned positive two years ago, I had two reactions: “Holy shit, we did it!” and “I need mom friends.” Visions of doing Mommy and Me yoga in a circle of sweaty new moms swirled through my head. I felt giddy thinking about how my social life was about to expand. “This time, making friends will be easier,” I thought.
After my husband and I moved to San Francisco, it took us several years of “friend dating” to piece together a fulfilling patchwork-quilt social life. The problem was that none of my close friends were parents yet.
While I was pregnant, it was fun to update my friends on the weird food cravings I had (oranges and milk — tons of it) or lament about how the smell of brown rice suddenly made me nauseous. But I knew that the gaps in understanding would only get bigger with my growing belly. I figured that like a magic charm, being pregnant would attract a new group of women into my life — and that all I had to do was sign up for mom groups, and we’d be braiding each other’s hair in no time.
Ten days after my son, Everet, was born, I limped — sore nether regions and all — back to the hospital where I delivered. I started attending a new parent group with a wonderful moderator, but she was the only constant. Over the weeks, new moms came and went, and none of them seemed as overwhelmed as I felt. Or at least they didn’t admit to it.
There was one traumatic morning after a 40-day stretch of no consistent sleep, when I started bawling and said, “If I could send my son away for a month, I totally would!” One mom shed silent tears of agreement, and the group moderator said all the right, supportive things. But most of the women stared at me, a chasm of judgement opening up between us.
I felt like a middle-schooler again, a tagalong to an existing friend group.
Next, I tried a new mom group at a popular parenting center in Oakland, dropping a couple hundred bucks for six sessions. This was a moderated “sit around and cry” group, which was exactly what I needed — in concept. In practice, however, it kind of sucked. The chairs were hard and uncomfortable, and we were never allowed to say, “Oh my gosh, me too!” in the middle of someone’s share, because interrupting was against the rules. We were just supposed to wiggle our fingers if we could relate to someone’s experience.
I’m all for having boundaries, but when you spill your guts into a silent void of wiggling fingers while breastfeeding and rocking a fussy baby, it makes you wonder why you bothered spending 40 minutes packing the diaper bag, finding parking, and dragging yourself there in the first place. It would have been worth it if I’d clicked with some moms, but there was nothing sticky to keep us together for more than a coffee date after the sessions ended.
Taking a page out of my single friends’ book, I next tried Peanut, a swipe-right-or-left app for connecting with moms in your area. I was excited to “wave” at and “match” with moms,but we were sleep-deprived ships passing in the night. Weeks would pass between messages, and if we tried to meet up, our babies’ nap schedules would thwart our attempts. When I finally managed to meet a mom face-to-face, we had a nice time chatting about our birth stories, but we weren’t instant besties. “She’d be a great addition to a larger friend group,” I thought after our mom date, saving her number. But I didn’t have the energy for more one-off dates to build said friend group.
My most harrowing experience was when I tried to join a group of moms who walked around Lake Merritt. A mom I’d met in prenatal yoga invited me to the weekly walks before she inconveniently moved away. On the morning of my first attempt to link up with the walkers, I arrived early to squeeze in a feeding session. By the time I found parking and navigated through the goose poop to the correct meeting spot, I was running behind. Once I got to the meeting spot, my son blew out his diaper, and I had to quickly change it while the moms waited with polite, tight smiles. Finally, we were off walking, and you’d think there was a starting gun. Half-jogging to keep up, I tried to engage in conversation, but the women chatted on without me. I felt like a middle-schooler again, a tagalong to an existing friend group.
I found myself hanging back alongside a mom who spoke in a tranquil tone and was walking slowly because of her recent C-section. We fell into pleasant conversation while the speed moms left us in the dust. She told me she was also a newbie to the group that morning and that she was raising her daughter alone: no partner, no mom friends, no hired help, and no family to speak of. Totally alone. I balked privately, wondering how she could pull that off while appearing calm. A moment later, it hit me that she wasn’t calm—she was numb.
Her stories of isolation and difficulty should have been an entrée for us to bond, but instead, they frightened me. I felt alone with the horror of it all, incapable of offering reassurance and needing some myself. What we needed was a larger body of women to dissolve into and feel supported by. Something like… a walking group.
When the others lapped us, I tried and failed once more to engage them in conversation and went home feeling stung. In my haste to put the whole morning behind me, I didn’t even ask for my one walking buddy’s number. When I texted my yoga friend about the experience, she replied, “Weird! We usually walk slowly.”
New moms don’t have the time or energy to eat out and go hipster bowling. We’re too damn tired.
After that, I tried several more groups, two of which gave my inbox an ongoing thread of play dates. A critical mass of moms went back to work at the six-month mark, and the get-togethers fizzled. I immersed my son and me in music classes, swimming, Gymboree, and story times. Like laying Band-Aids on a wound, I put activities in my Google calendar — they did an okay job of covering up my loneliness.
Gradually, I began to recognize familiar faces and collect phone numbers of moms whom I clicked with. By the time my son turned one, I had a handful of moms (and their babies) to invite to his birthday party. I felt proud, even though I couldn’t call this collection of moms a “community.” Especially because many were planning to leave the Bay Area for better housing markets.
Momhood didn’t come with a key to the community kingdom — but not because of diaper blowouts and erratic nap schedules. The lack of social stickiness I found in the mom world is the same thing I battled when I moved to the Bay Area after college, when I had to eat, drink, and indoor-miniature-golf my way to deeper friendships.
That’s the thing about the Bay Area. It’s so easy to get swept up in the romance of living here, losing ourselves in the grown-up playground of trendy restaurants, bespoke design stores, craft breweries, and top-notch coffee shops, that we forget to focus on what we need most: quality relationships. New moms don’t have the time or energy to eat out and go hipster bowling. We’re too damn tired.
Today, I look to where my disparate mom tribe gathers — my Google calendar — and find an expanding web of support. Recently, I connected with a mom I met months ago in baby music class; it turns out that we’re neighbors, which we learned when we ran into each other at the local deli. Our sons are both new to walking and toddler tantrums. We’ve since had play dates at each other’s houses and swapped stories — not just about our babies, but about ourselves too — and she has offered to introduce me to more moms. I left our last hangout in her toy-strewn living room feeling buoyed. Finally, I could stop holding my breath.
