Nurturing Friendships During Motherhood
Being a mom has a way of becoming all-consuming, whether you’re stumbling from one newborn feeding to the next or doing the after-school pickup dash. With so many demands on our time, it’s easy to let the plans for that moms’ night out slide to the bottom of the to-do list. Time with good friends who support, encourage and challenge you can be a source of great power and inspiration for moms. Here are five ways to keep those friendships alive during the demanding years of motherhood.
1. Schedule a regular date. A weekly or monthly chance to get together, either with or without your kids, is one of the best ways to ensure you make the time to see your friends. Friendships need time to grow and be maintained, and a regular date will help prevent several weeks or months slipping by when you just get too busy to call.
2. Understand that friends without children may not understand your life post-kids. But don’t let that stop you from getting together with them. Big life changes can be difficult to weather in any kind of relationship, but they’ll make your friendship stronger in the long run.
3. Seek out a community of other parents who have similar values. A staunch believer in sleep training may have a hard time being friends with a breastfeeding, co-sleeping mama. Having a few good friends who take the same general approach to parenting can be a great source of support and encouragement. This is not to say that you should only be friends with one type of person, just that having a few like-minded folks to call on can be a wonderful thing.
4. Talk to other parents at the playground, school doors or dance class waiting room. If your kids are friends, it’s worth having an idea of who their parents are and what they are like. And you just might meet someone awesome who lives just around the corner from you.
5. Remember that friendships are about give and take. If you want to build and maintain them, it takes a bit of time and effort to call, chat, make plans and actively listen to what’s going on in your friend’s life. Shared experiences are the stuff of memories and fuel for a great friendship.
A great friend will listen when you need to talk, tell you in the nicest way possible when you really need to just go get your hair cut already, and can be another positive adult role model in your child’s life. Human beings are social creatures, and moms are certainly no exception. Nurturing your friendships can be a part of nurturing yourself.
Michelle Carchrae is a freelance writer and homeschooling mom to two girls. With a serious love for Vancouver and an equally serious need to get out of the house with two young kids, Michelle searches out the best kid and parent friendly places to go. Michelle also writes about parenting at her blog, The Parent Vortex.
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Michelle Carchrae is often asking those important life questions: "who moved the scissors?", "how would you do that differently next time?" and "are you finished with the glitter glue?" Homeschooling two girls, ages 6 and 3, is her full time job. The rest of the time Michelle can be found blogging at The Parent Vortex, hiking in the forest or knitting and reading simultaneously. She recently published her first ebook, The Parenting Primer: A guide to positive parenting in the first six years, and moved to Bowen Island.
I agree about having supportive girlfriends that listen to you, support you and take turns planning the schedule of events! It’s no fun being the “giver” all of the time and having a friend who has to be the leader of the group!
Great tips! I’m going to share them with the moms on my FB page 🙂