Click for simple, affordable ways to make the most of what's left of summer. Having a hard time connecting with other moms? My advice: Head to your favorite house of worship.
A woman, in her life, will make several types of friends. Childhood friends, camp friends, college friends, work friends, and, for those who opt in during the reproductive years, mom friends. The lattermost of these always seemed like an endpoint to me—the hardest level in a game I’ve spent three decades playing.
A rite of passage that marks the final frontier of girlhood. Finding your people in motherhood is difficult. Until your child is in school, you are left floating through fix-ups with friends of friends and families you meet at the playground.
Daycare can feel transient, and making solid friends at the small in-home program my daughter attends took more than a year. You may, like me, have pre-existing close friends who have kids around the same time as you, but they may not live in your neighborhood, let alone your state, and therefore are categorized in their primary, or original, friendship bucket. Mom friends are unique, made and dependent upon another relationship—that of your child and their child, and what _they_ have in common—and time-dependent, too.
Can you meet up on a whim? Would they like to grab that post-drop-off coffee? (This, I’m convinced, is not really something that exists in real life, only in the 90s and on television.) Is it ever really that easy? Perhaps you have had better luck than me, but the only way I’ve managed to make mom friends is by relying on the oldest trick from, well, the oldest book: religion.
Nearly every Saturday morning, my husband and I take our daughter to our synagogue at 10 a.m for “Tot Shabbat,” as it’s commonly called. It is just two blocks from our apartment, in a century-old building with magnificent stained glass windows and a ceiling that may be caving in. I take my daughter to a multipurpose room with basketball court floors while the main Sabbath prayer service goes on in the sanctuary.
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