YEARS ago, I watched that episode of Sex and the City where Miranda, as a dazed and confused new mother, singularly fails to make friends with the other mothers in her building. When she finally bonds with one of them, the woman asks her why she doesn't seem to know anything about babies or motherhood. "Don't any of your girlfriends have kids?" she asks. And when Miranda replies they haven't, the woman shakes her head and says: "Then you're screwed."
Even back then, when babies were not on my to-do list, I vowed that wouldn't happen to me. I'm not particularly sociable and I realised I could easily find myself with a squawking brat, but without a support network. So right then I decided that if I
ever had a child, I would be Mrs Friendly to everybody and if that meant baking cakes, going to coffee mornings and plucking up the courage to talk to complete strangers just because they were holding a baby, then so be it.
So far, I haven't baked any cakes, but I've drunk one heck of a lot of coffee and talked to many assorted baby-wielding strangers, so I officially fit the pattern recently discovered by a survey for the Children's Mutual, which specialises exclusively in savings for children.
According to the survey, a mother makes an average of eight new friends purely through having a child. This doesn't surprise me. In fact, I thought it might be more, but then the Mirandas of this world drag the average down. Being distressingly similar to Miranda in many ways, what surprises me most is that I've actually managed to achieve the average number of friends, although it's been bloody hard work sometimes.
The problem with making friends through having children is that it has nothing to do with the normal ways we make friends – like having a similar sense of humour, sharing the same tastes and passions, or drinking too much. In this case, the entire relationship is built on the fact both the participants have experienced the same bodily function.
If two men became best mates simply because they'd both gone bald, most people wouldn't reckon it was a great basis for camaraderie. But when it comes to babies, you automatically become a member of the sisterhood simply because, once upon a time, you ejected a screaming, watermelon-sized creature from your body.
I've always thought that becoming a parent is like joining the Sealed Knot re-enactment society: it's a battle, it's dirty and messy and sometimes you have to wear dodgy clothes. The people who don't want to join in think you're mad for doing it, but the ones who are into it are right there with you, shoulder to shoulder, even though you might have nothing more in common with each other than the desperate need to make it through in one piece.
Desperation is the key word in many parental friendships. Rather than be lonely, we force ourselves to hang out with people we would otherwise probably never meet. This can be great, with new friendships cutting right across cultures, class and even language.
But it can also be soul-destroying, such as when you find yourself regularly in the company of mothers-and-kids-from-hell without a means of escape.
I got pounced on by one woman who lived across the street and so I couldn't avoid her. We only met because we had children of the same age and, while she seemed nice at first, slowly and surely, weirdness crept in.
Her elder son was a trainee pyromaniac; the younger one was so obsessed with scissors, I could never relax because I kept expecting him to re-enact the shower scene from Psycho. Thank God, they moved away – though not before the mother started trying to convert me into a Jehovah's Witness.
Babies and children are a ready-made introduction to another parent, but they aren't enough to sustain long-term friendships. There's more to bonding than both of you having NHS 24 on speed-dial.
Simply by reproducing, I've managed to meet some fantastic people and make some good friends – thank goodness, because I have no family nearby and I need the support. But interestingly, some of these friends don't have very young children any more. They're older women – one is a grandmother – whom I met through having a child, and although the subject of children inevitably comes up and I pick their brains shamelessly, we can talk about pretty much anything.
I'm grateful for all my baby-buddies, but there is one other child-related statistic I'd be keen to know: once you have a baby, how many friends do you lose?
The full article contains 801 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
