When
you become a new mother, you spend a lot of time talking about making
mom friends. I’ve written about it, as have countless others. We’ve
thought it about it honestly, earnestly, and some times desperately.
It’s as awkward as dating, it’s a necessary evil, and sometimes, in
lucky circumstances, lifelong relationships are formed, relationships
that can save us.But when we become new mothers, we don’t often talk about old friends.
These are the friends who are very well having children in step with you, friends who remember when you, yourself, were a child. Friends who know your parents and know your siblings and slept on the floor in your childhood bedroom and slept on the floor in your college dorm room and saw you with the hair-sprayed bangs and the bad skin and the skinned knees and the broken heart.
Yet, these friends now live in San Francisco and London and Chicago and New Jersey and Texas and Philadelphia and Colorado and Detroit. You are in New York and you are so overwhelmed you can’t pick up the phone to tell them that you’re overwhelmed but you love them. These friends have lives that in some ways resemble yours, but in many ways, don’t. Maybe these friends read different books or blogs. Maybe these friends aren’t readers at all. Maybe these friends don’t think about organic mosquito repellent. Maybe they do. Maybe these friends have spouses who aren’t Jewish. Maybe these friends have spouses who are way more Jewish. Maybe these friends have divorced. Maybe these friends don’t work, or maybe they do work, but you aren’t interested in their work, nor are they in yours. Maybe these friends let their kids watch TV. If you actually get to talking you’ll reveal that you sometimes do, too.
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