The absolute necessity of the new-mum friend

My friend Cathy and I recently took an afternoon off and got a couples massage. We lay side by side in a small candlelit room entirely at ease. It was the third time we had met in person.

In February 2017, our mutual friend, Steph, introduced us over email. Steph’s first child had just been born. Cathy and I were both due in June. Steph said she’d found it helpful to have another pregnant friend when she was pregnant, and since we both lived in New York — me in Brooklyn, Cathy on the Upper East Side — she thought we should connect. As our due dates grew closer, Cathy and I transitioned from the occasional polite email exchange to rapid-fire text messages at all hours. In the first 11 months of our children’s lives, we never once saw each other. Especially early on, Brooklyn and the Upper East Side might as well have been London and Tokyo. But we texted every day, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 times.

We got each other through post-birth recovery, nursing woes, the search for child care, high chair selection, the transition to solid foods, road trips and sleep. So many texts about sleep. We sent each other gifts in the mail. We texted pictures and videos. When my son was 8 months old, I found out I was unexpectedly pregnant again. Cathy was one of the first people I told, and the only one who responded with, “I had a feeling.”

One afternoon when I was two or three months pregnant, eating lunch alone, I sat beside a group of women who all had very young babies. I soon deduced that they’d met online and were getting together in person for the first time. They confirmed my worst fears. They all seemed flustered. They didn’t get each other’s jokes. “I’m Kate, and my baby is Rose,” one of them said on arrival. The others called her Rose for the next hour. She looked pained but didn’t correct them. “She’s Kate,” I wanted to yell. “The baby is Rose.”

I thought I’d be fine without this sort of forced companionship. I had plenty of friends who’d had children already. Yet those same friends swore that meeting other brand new mothers was essential, and that these strangers would soon be some of the most important people in my life.

I learned that they were right upon skipping the formalities and going straight to discussions of milk supply with Cathy, and two other women as well. I’ve also spent the last year texting dozens of times each day with Olessa and Siobhan, whose sons were born within weeks of my own. We three are lucky enough to live near each other.

During maternity leave, we’d try to meet up once a week. We breast-fed together in a cafe. I am usually a modest person, but I almost immediately abandoned the idea of covering up with a blanket while nursing my son. Not to make a statement, but because I am highly uncoordinated.

I’m now more than halfway through my second pregnancy, and although I’m much better prepared this time, I’ve been feeling wistful that my original new mum friends won’t be along for the ride. You need people who are in the trenches with you because you forget so fast what babies are like. Already, I cannot recall what a child does at four months vs five months vs six. Recently, I got an email from a woman who is due two weeks after me. We’ve long been fond of one another, but we’ve never hung out one-on-one or even exchanged phone numbers.

“Will you be my text-neurotic-things-to-every-day friend?” she wrote. It’s her first baby.

I responded right away: “Of course.”