I became a mom before most of my closest friends did. It wasn’t a race; it’s just how my timeline unfolded. I was 29 when it happened—considered old for my parents’ generation, still young for mine.
In those early months, my best friends couldn’t really help me. And it’s not because they didn’t want to—they just hadn’t been there yet. It was my work colleagues, the ones who’d had babies before me, who talked me through the chaos of those first weeks and months: the sleep deprivation, the feeding struggles, the specific, disorienting feeling of no longer being entirely your own person. I was grateful for them in a way I hadn’t expected to need.
“Having a baby is a shock,” I remember my former boss telling me. It really was. And it’s not really something you can just explain to someone who hasn’t been through it, and expect her to understand. The same goes for many of the harder things in life, I guess. Like heartbreak and grief. You have to live through it to get it. So as much as I wanted to call my best friends in the middle of the night and cry, “My nipples are on fire,” I didn’t. I cried to my poor husband instead. At least we were sleep-deprived together, and he could relate to much of my frustration.
I wasn’t pretending to be strong or to have it all together, which is what some assumed. I didn’t have it all together. I just didn’t want to burden them or to make motherhood sound scarier than it had to.
It took a few years for my closest friends to have babies on their own, and when they did, it was also right around when I had my second. Suddenly, we were all in it together. Finally, I had my people to talk to—to mother with. The loneliness of being the first lifted.
But not all my friends became mothers. Some are child-free by circumstance. Some by choice. And we’re still friends. We still talk, still make time for each other, even if it’s a twice-a-year sushi date. Our conversations have somehow changed, of course—they ask about the kids, I ask about their adventures—but mostly we still talk about the same stuff we used to: gossip, boys, TV shows, and lately, aging aches and pains. I’m grateful for this kind of friendship that doesn’t require us to be living the same life. It just requires us to keep showing up.
The Divide is Real
I admit, though: Once you’re in the motherhood bubble, you don’t really leave it—not even when you’re with people who aren’t in it. Sometimes I forget I’m not amongst mothers and say a very mom thing, and when I’m met with silence or confusion, I remember: wrong room. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just the gap that forms when your daily lives stop overlapping.
Maybe this is why some women feel like they can no longer belong to their friends who are neck-deep in diapers and school runs. That there’s nothing left to talk about. On the flip side, the same is true for mothers. Sometimes, we feel like we’ve been quietly edged out of a club we didn’t ask to leave, just because we have kids to go home early to or schedules that need months of pre-booking to get into. (We’re sorry!)
I also hate how society frames this as a competition. Moms are supposed to wear their motherhood like a badge of honor. Women who are not mothers are expected to want that badge as soon as possible. And then there are those who’ve decided they don’t want it at all—and that’s totally fine, especially with all the craziness that’s happening these days. It’s a choice us moms actually understand more than most people think, especially when we’re wide awake at night thinking about all the kids’ expenses and the uncertainties of the future, wondering, “What world had I gotten my kids into?”
What bothers me is when that choice gets treated like a verdict—when not being a mom becomes a superiority, proof of a cleaner, less complicated life. Mothers do it too, in the other direction. But the “I chose better” energy, from either side, is exhausting. I’m online enough to know it’s not rare—and the more we engage with it, the more it looks like a war neither side actually wants to fight.
“It’s just being human—curious about the roads you didn’t take, wondering how green the grass looks from the other side. But still choosing to stay on yours.”
What If I Did, What If I Didn’t
I absolutely love being a mom, and if you know me personally, you’d know motherhood has been 90% of my personality for the last 11 years. But still, there are rare occasions when I’d wonder what I would have done differently, what version of myself exists in a life where I delayed motherhood—just delayed—and kept more time for myself. For my husband. For my friends. Would I have gone Eat, Pray, Love-ing across countries? Would I have been able to go on that writers’ retreat I’ve long been wanting to go? Would my closet be filled with more fancy stuff, and my nails perpetually polished because I actually had time?
I know it doesn’t make me a bad mom to think about these things, especially on the days I’m touched out or have heard “Mama!” a hundred times before noon. It’s just being human—curious about the roads you didn’t take, wondering how green the grass looks from the other side. But still choosing to stay on yours.
Maybe my friends have their own version of this wondering. Maybe on some quiet night, they ask themselves what they’d be like with kids—or maybe they don’t. We’ve never really talked about it, and maybe we should.
But whether we do or don’t, I already know what holds us together. The friendship survives when neither side is keeping score.
