A Socially Inept Mom's Guide to Making Mom Friends
I kept hearing moms were lonely, so why wouldn't they text me back? Here's what I learned, trying to make mom friends and (eventually) succeeding.
I am the expert in friend-making, not because I’m so good at it, but because I’m so bad at it. You know when you were in third grade and your mom told you that you had to invite your entire class to your birthday party, even that one weird kid who you begged her not to invite? Yeah, that kid was me.
I don’t need to get into the details since I’ve covered it so many times before, but socialization doesn’t come naturally to me even though I’m an extrovert. So many times, I’ve had what I believed to be a great conversation at a gathering, but it was actually me doing extended standup comedy at an unsuspecting woman who was trying to find every excuse to leave (“I’m going to go mingle now,” is accurate, not-mean, and yet sends a very clear message that this conversation is over. Respect to all the women who have used that on me.) I am fully aware of my social deficits: I talk too much, I talk too much about myself, I spill my weirdest OCD intrusive thoughts to people who don’t give a shit, I keep transitioning in and out of a listless Trump impression…whatever. (When I said I was “so tremendously talented and yet treated unfairly by the losers and haters” I was doing a bit, dammit!) Anyway, I’m at the point where I’ve mostly been able to keep these tendencies at bay, and the degree of self-control required to do that is why I no longer drink.
But while I figured out how to present a better version of myself, I still struggled with the logistics of making friends. Last year, I was at the point where I was confident I was (mostly) not behaving in a friend-repellant manner, but I still had fewer friends and social engagements than I wanted. I speculated that this was largely a strategic issue, not related to my conversational handicaps.
At this point in my life (married, with kids) I am really looking for one specific type of friend: fellow moms, although I’m also open to childfree women too. Why only women? Because I am abiding by my own, self-imposed version of Sharia law. I do not make friends with random straight men, even if it’s completely innocent. If my kid makes a friend, and that kid’s dad seems cool, I give him my husband’s phone number (although realistically speaking, this is all hypothetical- a random dad has never asked for my phone number!)
Would I befriend a gay dad? Yes, but I almost never meet them. In fact, I have met exactly one gay dad, and that just so happened to be the first time that I chose not to do the good libbed-out thing and say “your spouse.” Instead, like some kind of NAZI, I said “What does your wife do?” (Hey, at least I assumed the imaginary wife worked.) Why did I choose him, of all people, to impose my heteronormative agenda, when in hindsight there were some fairly obvious signs he was not straight? I have no idea. But either way, he wasn’t exactly begging to be my friend, so right now the whole “gay dad friend” thing is also a hypothetical.
Anyway, my big social resolution for 2025 was to see friends in person at least once a month, which I managed to achieve. But once a month was a pretty low bar, and even if I exceeded it, I noticed a huge discrepancy between the amount of social invitations I was sending out, the amount I was receiving (almost none) and the amount of times that people canceled on me for some seemingly-real reason, but then never rescheduled (almost every fucking time.) It didn’t make me feel good, but I had a feeling there was more to it than “nobody likes me.”
(Alternatively, it’s always possible that nobody likes me!)
But from 2025 to 2026, I’ve made some pretty good strides in mom-friend territory, and I now see friends far more often than once a month. I know I’m not the only one who has struggled with this, so I’m sharing my secrets with you all. Everywhere I look in Mom Discourse World, there are women saying they never see friends, or don’t have any friends, or wish they had more friends. A big part of me is like, do other moms really feel this way? Because the ones I meet sure as hell aren’t acting like it! but I assume they’re out there. And this year, I did a better job at finding (and keeping) them. Here’s how!
