‘I DON’T KNOW HOW I’D GET THROUGH THE DAY WITHOUT MY SCHOOL-MUM GANG’

Rosa Silverman on making friends in your 30s.

Once you have children, you can still do everything you used to, it’s just that it’s ruined. I once saw someone post a sentiment to that effect on Twitter and couldn’t help but grimace in recognition. You could argue it holds true as much for friendship as for anything else.

I was the first of my London friends to have a baby, getting pregnant at 30.

Since everyone else was still enjoying the various pleasures of bars and parties and night buses, I was determined not to drop out of circulation. The small matter of a small child needn’t be a problem, I reckoned. And so, four weeks post-partum, we drove off to a cottage in Suffolk for a fun weekender with a group of childless friends. A few months later, I wheeled my son in his pram to a bar in Brixton for an evening of drinks. In the months to come I would put him to sleep in the hosts’ bedrooms at house parties. And it kind of worked. Until my friends started having children too.

Suburbs and beyond

It was then that the flight to the suburbs and beyond began in earnest. Although we’d coped with two children under three in a two-bed flat in Zone 2, we couldn’t hold out forever. Our friends were moving away, some to the edges of London and others out of the city altogether. We did the same five years ago, moving to a distant suburb, far from most people we knew, but close to a good school and plentiful green space. A clichéd move perhaps, but one for which we were ready.

Suddenly, seeing friends required inordinate amounts of planning, diary coordination, arranging babysitters and lengthy Tube or car rides. Inevitably, in practice it meant it didn’t happen anywhere near as often as before.

When my son started school, it all changed again. I’d heard of ‘school gate mums’, this mythical group of women who formed the basis of the 30- and 40-something’s social circle. And I dared to hope I might find such a circle myself, a group of local women who I would get on with and who had children the same age as mine. Happily, it happened, in part because I was so determined it should. With zealous commitment, I threw myself into arranging playdates with the other mothers from my son’s class. I’d already learnt, during two maternity leaves, the strength of the bonds you can form with fellow mothers, even if you’d never have been friends in other settings. But in this case I found women who I genuinely would have been friends with in any other context. They continue to form my local social circle today – geographically close and welded together by our shared experience of watching our firstborns progress through primary school.

My old friends and I still make the effort to see one another whenever we can, and remain close on Whatsapp. But I don’t know how I’d get through the day without my school-mum gang.

‘I threw myself into arranging playdates’