- After moving to a new town, I had trouble making friends.
- I found pregnancy to be isolating, but once the baby was a bit older everything changed.
- Outings with my daughter led to important and meaningful connections with women just like me.
The debate of whether or not your spouse should be your best friend is, for me, a moot point. For the last few years, my husband has been my best friend by default. He earned the superlative not by any force of his own, or any consideration on my part; rather, he was my only friend.
We had moved to a new state, in the middle of the woods, during the pandemic. Though he’d held the top friendship spot in prior years — after all, I married him for a reason — since 2020, he hadn’t had much competition. But I longed for something more.
Pregnancy was isolating
If I hadn’t felt secluded before pregnancy (I did), I felt even more so during. In my first trimester, I didn’t tell a soul that I was pregnant (save the best friend), and it didn’t help that physically, I felt horrible. Getting into town, which was a 30-minute drive down a mountain that could induce nausea even in a non-expecting human, was made much more difficult by the fact that I spent most of my time with my head above the toilet bowl, or in bed, where fatigue and hormones rendered me immobile and sad.
The second trimester was better, as everyone said it would be, but between shopping for the baby and working to create a habitable womb-world of a nursery, I barely had time to catch my breath before the exhaustion set in again for the third trimester and my physical size encumbered me from getting out and about.
The fourth trimester, or the three months after the baby’s birth, were spent as expected — at home where one or both of us were sleeping or eating. It was the height of winter. When my husband returned to work, it was just me and my new best friend, who, lovely as she was, couldn’t participate in adult conversations. I missed having adult friends dearly. Dinners, drinks, gossip — all the stereotypical “Sex and the City” girlfriend-type stuff I’d happily perpetuated seemed to be a thing of the past. Sure, I caught up with friends on phone calls or during the occasional visit, but I couldn’t help but wonder — had I become a hermit?
The weather, and my luck, changed
As winter turned to spring, it felt natural to get outside, not only into the woods with its growing green buds, but into town, where people emerged along with the tulips and daffodils. My daughter loved the colors, birds, and fresh air. But her favorite thing? The hordes of babies, bursting into civilization after they too had spent months indoors. The burping, bundles of joy gravitated towards one another and offered their drool-covered fists in greeting and mutual admiration.
As infants tend to be accompanied by adults, it was only natural that I meet their handlers, baby gear-hauling pack mules known as mothers. Like me, the moms were tired, so very tired, and hungry. Hungry from all of the calorie-sucking breastfeeding and hungry, so very hungry, for companionship.
Connection, and then something more
We didn’t make it obvious at first (none of us were Samanthas after all), instead opting for a more casual approach. “Aww, so cute, what’s her name?” or “What a happy boy! How old is he?” we all said to one another. Our children were our currency as we bartered possible friendship.
It didn’t take long; our town is small. We kept running into each other at the library, the grocery store, and at the park, which is heaven on earth for children and parents alike — the kids get to run free and the parents get to sometimes sit on a bench. When we recognized another mom, we kept saying how sweet each other’s babies were, and started introducing ourselves, eventually asking for phone numbers.
Finding my people
Today, I belong to a few different groups of women that I can text on the regular, organizing get-togethers with the kids during the day and evenings out with wine after the kids go to bed.
As the saying goes, when you know you know. And we knew. We knew we needed each other. And the children who drew us inward for nine months were the same ones who drew us outward, toward each other, toward new friends.
