Friendship in Motherhood
Friendship in motherhood is strange and sacred, illusive yet essential and, perhaps above all else, complicated.
It's hours of conversation that used to happen on the front stoop at a house party or the kitchen floor of a shared apartment all squeezed into ten-minute WhatsApp audios punctuated by babies screaming and profuse apologizing. It's keeping track of which friends are still on Facebook, who hates video calls, who never manages to listen or respond to voice notes and who lives for them.
Sometimes, it means meeting a new version of a woman you've loved through many lifetimes. Your college roommate who once held your hair back while you puked your guts out into a stranger's toilet, now texts you parenting advice at similarly odd hours of the late night and early morning. Travel buddies from your twenties send you boxes of hand-me-downs or Amazon packages from your son's Christmas wishlist.
Other times, you're forced to forge love in the trenches. This new love finds a way despite never having known versions of each other with those crisp edges that once separated you from other sentient beings.
She's only known this messy, melted version of you with two heads; the one that cries so much and sleeps so little. You've never once sat together in a café for hours with nowhere to go. Your friendship wasn't built on a foundation of drunken heart-to-hearts, middle school memories, or cross-continent bus rides.
Instead, you scoured for signs of potential compatibility at your local playground. You scanned through a vast sea of black yoga pants and messy mom buns for a cool band shirt, an intriguing tattoo, or an interesting book peering out optimistically from the top of a diaper bag.
I once met a mom in the park who I connected with immediately. While our toddlers took turns throwing pebbles into gopher holes, it took her all of ten minutes to peer straight into my soul and offer up the exact advice I desperately needed. She lived a bit far away but we made a point to stay in touch. We attended each other's kids' birthday parties. We set aside little gifts that we knew the other would like.
One evening, my husband, son and I drove into Tijuana to attend her birthday dinner. With some cajoling, another friend of hers convinced her to pull out her guitar and, in an instant, her tiny kitchen was transformed into one of the most powerful and intimate live music venues I've ever experienced. My jaw dropped. I never even knew she played let alone that she made a living doing so before her kids were born.
I turned to her six-year-old and asked him if he could please continue telling me his favorite movie scene by scene in a few minutes when his mom finished singing. The small audience was spellbound. Between the bridge and chorus, her younger son interrupts to ask if they can have fruit and yogurt for breakfast the next day. It feels like glass breaking.
She smiles sweetly and puts her guitar down. "SÃ, amor," she says. They can have yogurt.
On the ride home, I thought to myself, "Maybe that's it."
Maybe the most important thing about friendship in motherhood is holding a simple truth for each other— a reminder that a whole universe of a human being still exists inside each of us. Maybe all of the women who saw our souls in various chapters of life are with us now in one form or another, along with all of the women we have been.
Friendship in motherhood may mean feeling connected to someone for years before you discover certain basic truths about who they are and what their life looked like before kids. Some of those connections may extend beyond this chapter of early care-taking and unfold into something different. Some will stay in this moment, crystalized by the power of bearing witness to your matrescence.
Friendship in motherhood is bathing your kids in each other's bathtubs. It's soup left on your doorstep when you've had an impossibly hard day. It's someone else putting your kids' shoes back on when they fall off. And in those moments when it feels like motherhood itself is hellbent on robbing us of our personhood, it's holding up and reflecting back this simple truth: I see you.