Member-only story
Is it harder to make friends when you’re a parent?
For me, it is
This morning, I opened my email and saw the latest NYT Parenting newsletter, this one aptly titled, “Are Mom Friends Necessary?” The editor, Jessica Grose, usually writes a little blurb about the topic of the week (it varies each week, but all related to parenting, of course), and for this week’s newsletter, she talked about her experience having her first kid at 29 years old and being the youngest person in her group of friends to have children and the experiences that followed after having children. I felt like she was talking directly to me, for my own experience is nearly identical to hers.
She poses the question as a way to say, “Perhaps we do, perhaps we don’t.” She has a solid network of moms and friends who understands her experience as a parent. But for me, though, while I do have my mom and my husband and a small handful of my own family members in my circle of support, many times I have felt this lingering sense of loneliness and being left out, because I don’t have any “mom friends,” or specifically, women who belong in the same generation cohort as me (millennials) and who had children around the same time that I had my kids.
I do have a friend who’s close to my mom’s age (they’re both Baby Boomers) and awhile back, I had an email conversation with her in which we talked about…
