How to prioritise friendships and why it matters so much

As motherhood reshapes our world, friendships help us stay grounded. Dr Miriam McCaleb on how to tend to your 'friendship garden'.

When a baby is born a mother is, too. 

Motherhood doesn’t just give us a new role, and a new title. Motherhood is a tilting of our personal stratosphere. All our relationships must be renegotiated – that’s not just my brother anymore, that’s someone’s uncle! These renegotiations include our very important relationship with time.

For all too many new mums, making sense of this new timescape looks frighteningly like women drowning... at least a wee bit, if only sometimes. I learned a new word recently ('motherwhelm') and I knew exactly what it meant, straight away. I bet you do, too.

This new relationship with time means we might struggle to see our friends as much, although we likely grow some new friendships. If you are a new mother, there is nothing as good as another baby mama. There’s many a mateship that started because of timing. Walks and coffees and infant naptimes that vaguely align? How good. Precious.

We get to know some families through kindergarten, kapahaka, or karate. There’s your antenatal buds and your Plunket pals. The school mum who’s super cool. Or – let’s be honest – the OK mum of the kid your child adores. Your friend-in-law, or something. There are similar friendships with the partners of your husband’s friends. You get what you get and you do your best.

Motherhood offers wonderful opportunities to get to know new people – parents of your kids’ contemporaries are often logistically or geographically easier to connect with than ‘your own’ friends, who can live anywhere in the world, these days.

Sometimes, we strike gold. It is a genuine pleasure to feel that friendship spark where you find lots in common with the other mum who drove for the school trip, or the wife of your husband’s work friend. But sometimes we just go along to get along. I think we have all wound up in awkward friendship with someone just because they are not actively awful. Crikey, I hope it doesn’t make me awful to say that! But in a life where we may be picking up new relationships along the path, it can be useful to check in with the 'energy in, energy out' ratio. Michelle Obama talks about people being radiators, or drains, and about being purposeful in whose company we spend our time.

If we are not careful, we can find ourselves spending too much time on these relationships-of-convenience, meaning we have less time and energy to consciously in the relationships that sustain us most. Writer and creative Zoë Brock (*my lifelong friend since our parents were hippies together) recently shared really useful analogy about a Friendship Garden, which I have thought a lot about since...

FRIENDSHIP GARDEN

In a healthy friendship garden, there are new seedlings being germinated along life’s pathway. Some will bloom, some won’t. Some will survive, others will die out. Some are only intended to flower for a short while. And some turn into weeds – we have to dig them out, even if it’s uncomfortable.

It’s the natural cycle of life. Imagine the specimen trees in the heart of the garden – maybe a stand of mighty kahikatea, whose roots and limbs intertwine, part of a lucky seedling’s friend and family grouping. Whānau. (*this is true! These trees actively connect above and below ground to make them all stronger against wind. Love that.)

The biggest trees in the middle of the garden are probably the oldest relationships, the friends you might not have seen for ages but you can pick right back up like you’d just been gone for a minute. Those people knew you with dorky braces and that overconfident haircut.

They have deep roots, but still require nurture – watering, fertilising. We must be careful not to take these precious relationships for granted, or we run the risk of needing shade or shelter during hard times, and finding a depleted forest instead of thriving garden. 

That said, all friendships ebb and flow. They come and go. They evolve.

We need different things from one another at different times of our lives. Someone might have been a wonderful friend to you when you were eight, but once things moved beyond hopscotch and Uno, you were kind of done with each other. Other people you knew when you were eight are still in your life. Either way is fine. If we are lucky, our childhood friendships are sources of joy and shared experiences, buddies to walk alongside as our understanding of the world and ourselves goes from simple toward complex.

Speaking of complex, the relationships we found during teenagehood can be important in a new way. I suspect it’s a bit like how the music we loved throughout our adolescence and into young adulthood will always be the music we love the most. There have been studies – there is a measurable shift in the strength of brain activity when we listen to certain songs, and that life stage shows up as the most emotive. It’s supposed to be something about the cocktail of hormones and new experiences that carve especially deep grooves in our brains. I wonder if there is something like that with the friendships forged in our teenage years, which can be fairly awesome. I’d give anything to hang out for days on end like we used to. Watching movies, dancing, snacking. SO much snacking.

Then people get into couples and our relationship with time changes, and now we are back to the notion of how we must renegotiate our relationships with time once we become parents. It can be hard to make room to nurture everything in the garden, all at once. If the shadiest, loveliest tree (ie, your bestie) is inaccessible to you because of geography or other reasons, it can be tempting to just walk in the easy shade of the nearest trees.

The odd thing about our nearby neighbour trees is how groups of mothers can all too easily ooze into the whole ‘competitive mothering’ thing. These are trees that must be vigorously pruned, or felled! The humble-bragging, subtle-digging smartypants has been around a long time, but their shadow stretches longer, these days, exacerbated by lives lived online. A generous way to approach the competitive mothering thing is to consider that it could be someone’s heavy-fisted attempt at seeking reassurance. Clearly they’re lacking in some aspect of their lives.

FRIENDSHIPS PERFORMED ONLINE (BEWARE)

I tell ya. Social media has a lot to answer for. I know the good bits of it are good, but even the people who helped set up the whole infrastructure question whether the scales tilt in favour of 'worth it' The bad bits are so very bad.

Mums have always been vulnerable to “am I doing enough for my baby? Am I a good enough mother?” anxiety. These days, we have a limitless stream of people to compare ourselves to. Private lives are no longer private – at least on our phones.

The forward-facing, performative aspect of so much of today’s lived existences create a a whole new pressure for all of us. It’s a lot, trying to make sense of the seemingly contradictory images being flung in our direction. On any given day, Instagram and pals would tell you, a 'good' mother is a career woman, managing to look well put together. A ‘good’ mother does messy play activities with her children, laughing happily as their painted hands wave about. Or maybe a ‘good’ mother is a shiny tradwife, churning her own butter and still managing to get her children excited about gardening. Meanwhile, it is highly likely that the beautifully curated online story we are comparing ourselves to is hiding something.

I had a long conversation with my friend who recently started at a new school with her three kids. She has made a network of mostly polite, fairly surface friendships. She sees the shallow nature of things as a byproduct of putting lives lived in parallel on social media: it might make us feel like we have shared something already, removing the need to talk about it. She sees it as people saying “Not gonna ask what you have been doing. I’m not gonna ask. I’m quite aware, so I don’t ask. It’s the elimination of conversation.”

But the sharing – I don’t know, let’s say we know someone spent the weekend facilitating a child’s sporting activity. The post might involve facts, there could be a picture of a sweetly uniformed someone, but it might leave out the tantrum, the parent’s complicated feelings about supporting a child during the difficult moments, or just the joy of having found an awesome carpark right near the venue. Any of these unshared tangents that may emerge in-person could have allowed for a free-form, meandering conversation, allowing both parties to follow the story on to other stories, leading to greater shared understanding or at least a bit of an unexpected laugh.

In her experience, “those people who are struggling the most are often the ones performing ‘happy families’ the loudest”. By only showing the gap-toothed grin and never unpacking the messy bits, friends only share a version of what they are doing. This can get us into a habit of what she described as “that’s how you portray your life”. In her experience of mums online, “the perception of happiness is more important than happiness itself”. YIKES. Friends, that’s no way to live. That’s no lesson to be teaching!

LONELY MUMS

If that’s true, then it’s no wonder people are finding it hard to ask for help, which makes the stories and research about loneliness all the more compelling. In one study of 500 new mums and their social media habits, researchers found that mothers’ loneliness went down if they limited their smartphone use to less than two hours per day. After that, it went back up again. Alas, most new mothers’ smartphone use is well above that ‘sweet spot’, suggesting that their phone habits are making them feel more lonely. And this isn’t really our fault, given that we have an inbuilt drive to connect with others. Researchers describe an evolutionary mismatch – just as we evolved a preference for calorie-dense foods which was a great idea in the caves but less useful in our modern world, our need for intimacy makes perfect evolutionary sense but is unhelpfully hijacked by our super-distracting social media. 

PRIORITISING FRIENDSHIP

Where, one of the mums I interviewed wanted to know, are the mums just hanging out? Where are the mums who are just gonna chill, or those who had a lousy day? This brainstorm went further, wondering about the absence of sites or influencers who celebrate and uplift their friendships. “Where is the list of ‘questions to ask your girlfriends’?” “Why so many lists of activities to do with kids, or for sexy times with husbands, and so few lists of ways to connect with your female friends?”

As mums we are encouraged to put our kids first. As little girls we were sold romantic stories a-plenty. The Disneyfication of childhood means most of us absorbed heteronormative messaging of impossibly small waists and oversized eyes, where the cherished prize was a lifelong romance. Happily ever after.

But where are the love stories of friendship?

Is it any wonder we might need reminding how valuable our friendships are, and how time spent appreciating them is almost as precious as time spent hanging out and snort-laughing. These are the people who will have our backs and last the distance. They’ll bring the lasagnas, mind your children, and tell the truth.

In the juggle for your time, as you prioritise your spouse, your kids, your family of origin and yourself, as you value work time and crave leisure time, don’t overlook your friendships. Ensure the Friendship Garden is watered and fertilised. And weed it regularly to make sure the most prized plants have room to grow.

MIRIAM'S TOP TIPS

🗹  Nurture the treasured specimens in your garden. Make time: put speakerphone on while you’re chopping the veg. If you live within an hour of each other, don’t let another day go by without getting something on the calendar.

🗹  Know when it’s time to weed the garden, if negative shade trees are crowding out the others.

🗹  Trust your gut, march to the beat of your family’s drum. Don’t compare your family with those performing their lives online.

🗹  Do more direct messaging, texting and phone calling, and less scrolling. Use your phone to set up in-person hangs, and then put it down.

🗹  Risk being bravely vulnerable with your friends. Getting real is wonderful, and breeds closeness. Tell them you appreciate them. In person, not just online.

Dr Miriam McCaleb is a writer, researcher, and mother of two great girls, based in beautiful North Canterbury. She is thankful for every single one of her friends – the old, the new, and the as-yet unmet. baby.geek.nz.