New Friend for Mom?
I knew someone would see me. It was a couple days after Easter and I was standing way too long in front of the half-priced Easter candy looking for jelly beans. “Really? No more jelly beans…,” I thought as I sifted through the discounted candy one last time.
That’s when I heard someone say my name. It was one of the moms from my kids’ new playgroup-the really pretty one. Here I was scavenging for candy, wearing sweats no less. Oh, and carrying glycerin enemas, pediatric enemas for my sick kid at home, but enemas nonetheless. In a word: Awesome.
Making new friends as an adult was always kind of seamless for me; grad school and jobs provided easy ways to meet new people. Once I got married, we had more couple friends to add to the mix. Then motherhood came and everything I knew about making friends seemed to fly out the window.
First, there’s the massive new time constraint on everything I do. I barely talk to my old friends, who has time for new ones? Second, does anyone without kids around the same age as my own really even want to be friends with me? No. I wouldn’t. My kids are still young-not babies, but not talking yet either-so they really dictate my schedule. If I’m not with my kids, I’m paying someone else a lot of money to be with them, so I treat my time away from them like gold. I go to the gym, run errands, pay bills, and clean our apartment–alas, not a lot of time leftover to cultivate new, fun friends!
The playground or other kid-centered activity would appear to be the simple fix: just make friends with the other parents also in attendance. I’ve tried that as we’re sitting around watching our kids in the sandbox. It’s difficult to forge a friendship when they don’t say anything after their kid just ripped the shovel from my son’s hands.
My ob/gyn was nice. I sure saw her a lot when I was pregnant. She’d make a nice new friend. We once talked about getting together with our spouses to play some tennis… On second thought, I don’t want to be friends with my gynecologist.
I like my kids’ pediatrician a tremendous amount. She’s smart, funny, and down-to-earth. Maybe new friend material? What would that even look like? Me: “Hey, Dr. Miller, want to grab coffee with the kids and me?” Her: “No, no, a thousand times no, and stop asking me if they are drinking enough milk.”
When I started new jobs in the past, I used to look for people who were slightly smirking in a meeting when something outrageous or stupid was said. I always made sure to seek them out afterward because I love nothing more than a colleague with whom I can share a good laugh. And I guess that still holds true.
The mom who caught me sorting through the after-Easter sale candy, while holding boxes of enemas, actually laughed when I told her how embarrassed I was that she’d seen me. She shrugged, we scheduled a new play date, and then she asked me if there were any malted chocolate eggs left. My kind of friend.
Helen Smolinski is a mother of young twins and once sat behind Madonna at a movie.
