New Baby, New Friends
You meet so many people when you become a parent, but how do you know which ones will become the friends you want to keep?
When you have a baby in non-pandemic times, the blur of people you meet can be overwhelming. Once you have dived into the world of parenting groups and playgroups, it’s like Freshers’ Week at university — you talk to everyone to begin with and then spend the next few years trying to avoid those you don’t like while engineering occasions to bump into those you do.
And yet it is worth pursuing those friendships, for when you find one that works it makes the whole process of parenting so much smoother. If you find friends with whom you can just be you, with no competitive parenting or justifying your feeding decisions, just an acceptance of the fact that when you are together you are both present but not present, so occupied are you with the needs of the baby, everything gets a bit easier. It is the shared experience of overwhelming love and overwhelming exhaustion.
When my first child was a few months old, I went to a local coffee morning for new parents, organised by another mum. (Sorry, I mean mom. I am British.) These mums were firmly middle-class — it was all about organic slings and reusable wipes, looks of disgust when biscuits were passed around, and raised eyebrows if anyone fed their baby with formula. The over-riding feeling was not one of having found my tribe, but of being judged. I was unlikely to make friends here, I thought.
Then in walked another new mum, K, and we continued to make small talk. This small talk turned to local cafes, and which we each preferred. I like Cafe X, I offered, naming a small ‘greasy spoon’ in a nearby park, where the owner was friendly, the English breakfasts were large, and where they didn't mind watching your baby while you used the facilities. “It doesn’t offer many herbal teas though does it?” said one of the women, before moving the discussion on the the organic flapjacks available at another nearby park cafe. K caught my eye and she addressed the group: “I like Cafe X too, they do great bacon sandwiches.”
I liked her immediately, and was still thinking of ways to ask the host for her number without having to attend any more of these awful stilted coffee mornings hoping to bump into her, when one morning walking down the street I bumped into K and was able to ask for it myself.
We became firm friends — my husband and I, K and her wife, and our kids — meeting each other’s friends and spending the next few years on each other’s sofas and in parks. I never felt judged by her when I let my child have a biscuit, or scoffed the whole packet myself, or when I turned up with stained clothes and unshowered, exhausted from a night of no sleep.
I had found a friend who I was not just sharing a phase of my life with, both learning to parent at the same time, but who I genuinely liked.
A little while into our friendship, K told me she had been vegetarian for many years. The bacon sandwich comment? She said she’d made it as a gesture of solidarity, because the other women had been so dismissive.
It’s almost ten years since the day we met, and our lives have gone in different directions so that now, currently living in different countries, and having resumed our careers and waved goodbye to maternity leave, we no longer spend time on each other’s sofas. But when a new parent at the school gate recently said that she had been exploring the area and liked a particular cafe, one where in the collective opinion of the school gate mothers the coffee is disgusting, I remembered K and the bacon sandwich, and agreed that yes, that was indeed a nice place to get coffee.
I think we are going to be friends.
