I remember getting dramatic flash-backs to uni Fresher’s Week when I walked into my first NCT class. It had been twenty years since my social circumstances depended on a total lottery of random people who made the same life choice as me at the same time. 'Don’t worry about the class content,' someone advised me. 'You join NCT to make mum friends. I promise you, you’ll need someone to text at 3am about the state of your nipples.' But are mum friends merely that? A totally transactional friendship hammered into place by desperate shared circumstances? Or can they be the start of a life-long relationship forged in the most transformative period of your life?
I’d heard many a horror story about the NCT WhatsApp group turning into a reel of performative trad-wife content – with mums competitively sharing organic baby-led weaning recipes or complaining their reformers Pilates class wasn’t challenging enough. Thankfully, I struck it lucky with my group, and found myself in a gang of friendly and honest women.
The group would ping around the clock, sharing post c-section painkiller timetables, laughing about how much we cried when our milk came in, and almost religious recommendations for silver nipple cups. Despite that, however, I still found the first six months of my baby’s life to be incredibly lonely. This surprised me as I’ve dedicated my life to writing about the power of female friendships.
My baby, now famously, didn’t sleep. She’d only nap while fully attached to my nipple, if I was lying in a darkened room, and her overnight sleep was atrocious. I had no life that wasn’t trying to get my baby to sleep, and then chasing as much sleep as I could for myself. My mental health took a huge hit, and yet I closed myself off from all of my friends, new and old, and instead started typing out a novel about how motherhood impacts friendship over my baby’s head in the dark. I didn’t know who to reach out to and how, so turned to writing to process things, rather than my pals.
I was seeing my new ‘mum friends’ most days, rocking our babies while mainlining slabs of cake, but, I did feel there was a definite limit with just how honest I could be in such a fledging friendship. Jokes about poonamis ruining your carpet? Totally fine. Saying something like, 'are you having panic attacks when your baby wakes up or is it just me?' would definitely kill the vibe at the local library Rhyme Time.
There were boundaries around the acceptable levels of vulnerability – and to some degree, this was totally appropriate. My mum friends were also emerging from the mushy embers of their own matrescence, and struggling to even take a shit by themselves, let alone a new friend’s mental health struggles. I got progressively more closed off from every woman I knew and loved. I had never needed my friends more – new and old – and yet I was being totally disingenuous with everyone, on the very rare chance I had a moment to talk to anyone at all.
Eventually, though, something had to give. When our sleep trainer refunded us the money, I tweeted about it, asking for help out of desperation, but the tweet quickly went viral. My old friends started to realise I hadn’t joined the mummy cult, and that I was truly, silently, struggling.
My phone started buzzing with wonderful messages – offering to babysit, sharing sleep tips, or just to say they love me. Two of my oldest friends, in particular, both new mums too, dragged me through the dark times. They were such a lifeline, I even dedicated my novel to them. We made a WhatsApp group called ‘THE SPA’ – and promised ourselves that, one day, our babies would be weaned and we would then spend a whole day in a spa, being nurtured rather than doing all the nurturing.
In time, the impossible started occurring. My baby learned how to sleep. She started solids so I could leave her for longer stints. And, on one dismally rainy day, when she was eighteen-months old, me and my two oldest friends spent the entire day in a luxury spa, crying and hugging each other in an outdoor hot tub while the rain splashed into our eyes. It felt so important to me to be with these two women who had known me before I became a mother. Who knew and loved the various different iterations of ‘Holly’.
Of course we talked about our babies, but, as the rain fell down around us, we also reminisced about our youth. It was the most nurturing and magical day, and I found myself thinking, “This. This is all I needed. Old friends who’ve known me forever.” And I wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t totally right either.
As my freedoms gradually returned, I found myself in a confusing and contradictory place regarding my friendships. I finally started seeing people I hadn’t been able to for literally years and reclaimed old parts of myself. I initially revelled in talking about anything OTHER than my child.
However, I’d also find myself desperate to talk about my daughter but feared it would be boring. It’s taken time, in all of my old friendships to integrate my mum self into them, and know how many pictures of my kid in her new tutu is appropriate to show them. Because, when you’re not in the throes of it, I can admit that child-rearing chat can be quite dull. But I am in the throes of it, and, actually, have found myself coming to love and need my new mum friends as much as I love and need my old ones.
And that’s where I’ve found I’ve naturally landed – in a place where I can recognise we need different friendships for the different parts of us. My child is two now and I’m feeling enormously grateful that I have women I love, who live five minutes down the road, who are significantly invested in how well my daughter is getting on with her new penguin potty. But I’m also enormously grateful for the women who remind myself of who I was before the penguin potty years took over.
My book is all about how women’s friendships can come out of the ‘baby years’ stronger, and with empathy for each other’s relationship to motherhood. We need to hold onto each other, for sure, but we also need to have space to let new friends in.
Holly Bourne is the best-selling author of Am I Normal Yet? Her latest novel So Thrilled For You, released in January, explores female friendships and motherhood.