A Tale of Two Mamas

Let me start by stating the obvious – it’s hard to make friends as a mom. Can I get a collective “AMEN” to that? For a long time, I didn’t have any real-life mom friends. I had some awesome mama friends that I had “met” on the Internet (hello to all my “scary internet friends” out there) that I had met through various birth month groups on Facebook. I’d even had the opportunity to meet some of these fabulous women in real life. But when it came to friends who live right here in the wonderful Gem City region, and who could share my day-to-day mama life issues, I was coming up empty. 

When my second daughter was still an infant, I became connected with our local chapter of Moms Run This Town and suddenly, lots of likeminded mamas were a part of my network. In particular, I met one special friend through this group, and we’ve become mama besties despite our totally different life circumstances.

I met my sweet friend Alexis at the wine night at Whole Foods one Friday night (random sidebar – this is a great Friday night deal if you’ve never checked it out!). She approached me and asked me if I graduated from Centerville (I did) and we discovered we’d graduated together in 2005. We both recognized each other by name, but we hadn’t ever really known one another during our days at CHS.

After that initial meeting, Alexis and I ran a race together and discovered we were about the same running pace, and a new friendship was immediately born. As we logged countless miles and hours on the pavement together, our friendship began to grow from just running friends into something more. Over the last two years, Alexis has become my go-to person for all things mom-life, and I am so grateful.

The funny thing is, we are total opposites in the mom department.

I’m a full-time-work-outside-the-home mama with a busy career. Alexis is a stay-at-home mama (aka a saint, if you ask me) who stays busy chasing after her two adorable and crazy kiddos and working a few side gigs from home. I know that Alexis would consider herself to be a “crunchy mama,” while I don’t consider myself to even be on the crunchy spectrum (see post by one of my fellow DMB contributors). While we lead very different day-to-day lives, we also have kids of similar ages, so we are dealing with similar issues. We understand each other at that level, and our shared love for running is an added plus.

You see, through this dear friendship, I’ve learned that two mamas can become the best of friends, regardless of their differences as mothers. Too often, we hear stories of mom-shaming, moms judging one another, and mom cliques. Those stories make it seem impossible to befriend another mama whose life circumstances differ from their own. But the fact of the matter is, if you share a common interest (or maybe even if you don’t), a mama with a different life view might become your new best friend.

I know that one did for me.