Is It Harder to Make Mom Friends As An Adult? What I Learned As A New Mom In A New Town
I’m leaning against my dented minivan last Tuesday, holding a half-melted blue popsicle for my 4-year-old, scrolling mindlessly through my email while I wait for preschool pickup. A group of four other moms clusters 10 feet away, laughing about a backyard birthday party they all attended over the weekend. I recognize all their faces; I’ve nodded at them through the pickup line every week for eight months. I finish sorting my junk email, shift my weight from one foot to the other, and still don’t walk over.
When I had my first son five years ago, I still lived in the college town where I grew up. Three of my closest roommates from school had babies within six months of my due date. We did messy playdates at the city playground, drank boxed wine on each other’s porches after the kids went to bed, and texted each other 10 times a day about diaper rash and nap strikes. Then my husband got a job offer two states away, we moved when my oldest was two, and my second son was born six months after we arrived. Suddenly, I was starting over.
I’d heard all the generic advice: join the local mom group on Facebook, sign up for a mommy-and-me yoga class, go to mom’s night out. I did all of it. Last month, I got invited to a mom’s night at a wine bar near the community park. I paid $12 for a glass of pinot grigio, sat in a circle of 10 women, and listened to them catch up on their 10-year-old neighborhood book club and the upcoming elementary school fundraiser they’d all been planning for months. I tried to chime in when I could— I mentioned I’d worked at a public library before kids, which felt like a safe, relatable topic. One woman nodded and said “that’s nice,” then the conversation shifted right back to the book club. I left after an hour, stopped for a $5 soft serve on the drive home, ate it in my parking spot outside the house, and didn’t text anyone about going back.
I started bringing it up in the rare lulls in conversation when I did meet other new moms, and almost all of them said the same thing: it feels way harder to make friends now than it did before kids, or when we were in school. When you’re a kid, you’re thrown in a room with the same 20 people your age every day, for years. When you’re in college, you live down the hall from people who have the same free time and the same general schedule as you. As an adult mom, your time is split between work, kid appointments, cooking, cleaning, and the 10 minutes a day you get to shower alone. No one has extra bandwidth for forced small talk with a stranger. Add to that how many of us move away from our hometowns for work, how scattered kids’ activities are across different towns and different schedules, and it’s no wonder most of us leave playgroup feeling more lonely than when we arrived. Social media doesn’t help, either— it’s easy to scroll through Instagram and see everyone else posting photos of their mom friend group trips and think you’re the only one standing alone in the pickup line.
After a year of feeling awkward at every big group event, I started trying small, low-stakes things instead, and some of them have actually stuck. The first thing I changed was I stopped working up the courage to “make friends” and started just commenting on the thing we’re both already doing. Last month, I was waiting outside my oldest’s soccer practice, sitting on a bench with my toddler, when another mom with a toddler sat down next to me. She had a full iced coffee next to her that she wasn’t drinking, and I’d just finished mine. Instead of just putting my headphones in, I said, “Is that coffee still cold? I’d buy half of it from you if you don’t want it.” She laughed, gave it to me, and we ended up talking for 25 minutes about how soccer practice always runs 10 minutes late and how our toddlers think playground mulch is a snack. We exchanged numbers, and we’ve been meeting there every week since.
I also stopped looking for a whole group of friends and started just looking for one person who shares one small thing with me. I saw another mom in the waiting room of my son’s speech therapy every Wednesday for three weeks. We both sat scrolling our phones, both gave our kids the same brand of gummy bears to keep them quiet, both complained quietly about the Wi-Fi never working. One week I just said, “Do you want to grab tacos after this next week? I’m sick of eating granola bars in my car in the parking lot.” She said yes, and we went. We don’t have the same parenting philosophy or the same hobbies, but we both hate waiting 45 minutes for therapy appointments, and that’s enough.
It’s still awkward most of the time. I still leave most interactions thinking I said something weird. I still don’t have a big group of mom friends to go on weekend getaways with, like the ones I see online. But this week, the mom I met at speech therapy texted me and asked if I wanted to bring the kids to the zoo this Saturday. We’re just getting the cheap general admission, we’ll probably leave after an hour and a half because someone will need a nap, and that’s fine. I don’t know if it’s always going to feel this hard, or if I’ll ever have that tight group of close friends I had when I was younger. But for now, having two people I can text to bring me Gatorade when I’m sick, or pick up an extra cookie at the preschool bake sale when I can’t make it, is enough.
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