My take on making new friends with other moms

Sarah, I totally hear you. It is HARD to make friends with other moms. And the park scene can be tough. And the women you were friends with before you had kids? Yeah, that's tough, too. Because, let's face it, motherhood is, arguably, the most life-changing transformation for a woman. And if your pre-kid friends haven't had kids yet or if one of you has, oh, say one kid and the other of you has, oh, say THREE, you probably haven't kept up with those girlfriends. Life has just changed too much to be chatting about office gossip or current movies or whatever else we moms used to talk about before kids became our primary topic of conversation.

And what about the women you met in birth class or in a baby group shortly before or after you had your first and were all aglow with eating, sleeping, breathing, talking everything baby? Do you still hang out, now that there's no sore nipples to empathize about? Or poop consistency to compare. Or birth stories to tell. Have your mommy-class friends had their second babies yet? Did they have their second babies at the same time as you did? Doubtful. Did any of them have, gasp, a THIRD.

When you don't have kids you can make friends with people because they like John Cusack and Barbara Kingsolver and Dirty Dancing. (For instance.) You can make friends with people because they like to work out at the same time as you do and you both run at the same pace and like to talk about what happened on ER last week. (Oh, ER how I miss you.) You can make friends and then unmake friends, and it may not be easy, but it's simple. When you have kids, making friends is complicated. Sarah gets it right: "There are too many factors. I have to like you. I have to like your kids. My kids have to like your kids. I have to like the way you parent your kids. You have to like the way I parent my kids."

And that's why it's so hard. Yes, we mothers at the park have that in common. We are all mothers. We all have one child. Many of us have two. A few have three. Fewer still have more. But the roads we have taken to get to where we are now are different. The timing is different. The reasons are different. And now here we are, mothers. And yet that may very well be the only thing we have in common. Even if our kids have the same name and are both entering kindergarten in the fall. That just may not be enough.