Forget nappies and sleep schedules. The worst part of becoming a mum is making new friends

Growing Pains is a new weekly column on nine.com.au exploring the world of parenting – from the wins we publicly celebrate to the messy reality of raising a tiny human. Because despite what it looks like on social media, it’s not all aesthetic playrooms and effortless bliss.

While buying a birthday present for a friend recently, the store assistant helping me asked, “Well, what does she like?”

I had to honestly reply: “Um. I’m not really sure.” Sounds like a bizarre response, but if you’ve ever had mum friends, you probably get it.

By mum friends, I mean the other women I’ve met and become friends with due to the simple fact we have kids the same age. 

It doesn’t matter if we share the same beliefs, interests, backgrounds, whatever – mum friends are all about timing and location. 

There’s no two ways to say it: making mum friends is weird.

First, there’s the whole process of finding someone and approaching them without seeming too full-on and eager. Then once you’ve locked them in, the chat often feels as stilted as one on a first date. 

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Let’s be real, it’s hard to crack through into meaningful conversations when you’re all running off two hours’ sleep and simultaneously trying to deal with nappy changes, feeding and nap demands while socialising. 

It becomes easier to just talk about your kids – swapping horror stories, sharing sympathy, passing on tips you heard from your cousin’s friend who swears her baby sleeps 12 hours straight every night. 

Suddenly, if you’re lucky, you’re meeting up with these new friends every week without actually ever getting to know anything about them, other than their coffee order and how many poo explosions they’ve had to change this week.

Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a big group of friends already who are in the same stage of life as you, entering motherhood at the same time, and you’ve got that established friendship to lean on. 

But I was one of the first of my friend group to have kids, plus I’d moved to a new area just before falling pregnant. 

And with six months of maternity leave stretching ahead of me, I knew I needed to make some connections. 

The mums groups set up by the local health district are obviously a great starting point. 

But in reality, you’re thrown into this group of people where the one thing you all have in common is that you’re blindly groping your way through the early days of motherhood. 

If you’ve been to one, you know that in those first few meet-ups, you’re all too consumed with the act of keeping your tiny humans alive to have any kind of genuine conversation.

As the kids grow and get older, it’s easier to fall back into the same child-centric topics than to awkwardly ask someone you’ve known for a year what they do for work.

Then, in the toddler years, socialising is halted every minute by having to chase after your kid to stop them from eating dirt/throwing sticks/jumping off play equipment/grabbing a random dog/taking other kids’ toys. (Can you tell I have a son?)

Maybe you’re able to break through and make plans to hang out with mum friends after hours, when the kids are in bed and you can go out solo.

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Yes, this step can often open the door to more meaningful friendship. But good luck locking down a night where both of your kids aren’t sick, you’re both available, and able to leave the house.

Thankfully, I’ve been able to make friends with two really great women who live near me and have kids about the same age. It works for now – but as my son gets older, I don’t know how much he’ll want to hang out with two girls all the time.

As it is, he’s already trying to rumble with them like he does with the boys at daycare, and they’re not so keen on it.

My son is still under two, so we’re not yet at the age where he’s out there making his own friends. But I’m already dreading the forced social situations my partner and I are going to be thrown into. 

Alright, perhaps ‘dreading’ is a little dramatic. But is it too much to ask for my son to find friends who have mums that want to kick back with a wine at 2pm while the kids play? Or who shares my love for Taylor Swift and reads the same books as I do and watches the same trashy TV as me?

The thought of boring small talk at kids’ birthday parties and on soccer sidelines, chatting to people with whom I have nothing in common, feels like an all too inevitable reality. 

Everyone says that you make sacrifices for your kids, I guess I just assumed they’d mainly be sleep- and career- related.