When my twins were four days old, my husband and I ordered fancy takeout for his birthday. With the newborns in their bassinets in front of us in the living room, we opened containers of steak and sushi to celebrate not just a 35th birthday, but making it through the first night in our home as a family of four.
A few bites in, I remembered to take my blood pressure, which I was monitoring per my doctor’s recommendations. It was high, and when my husband called the hospital to report the numbers—“Can we finish our dinner first?”—they said we needed to head there immediately.
On the ride over, I sat in the front, furiously texting someone I barely knew. My mom and husband were both in the car, yet the person I needed to share this experience with was Katie, a friend of a friend whose daughter was six weeks older than my twins. Katie was hospitalized with preeclampsia following her daughter’s birth, and because that seemed to be what I was experiencing, I wanted to hear from her what to expect.
She told me what her numbers had been before hospitalization, what the intake and treatment looked like, and how she and her husband managed to take care of a newborn while Katie was admitted.
That frightening shared experience, at nearly the same moment in new motherhood, created an immediate intimacy I couldn’t have found even with the people who knew me best.
The Village I Found By Accident
Before becoming a mom, I could not have understood the importance of proximity—both to where you live and to the age of your children—in building a community of mom friends. On that car ride, texting with an acquaintance, I saw for the first time how quickly and deeply bonds can form when you’re sharing such a specific experience of motherhood.
Katie is now one of my closest friends in San Francisco. After those initial texts, she continued to check in on me throughout my recovery. Eventually, the “how are you doing?” texts turned into invitations—to walk, to book club, to playdates. We get together almost weekly either with girlfriends (I soon also became close with her friend, Alyx, whose daughter is six days older than my twins) or as families.
At four days postpartum, facing a health scare and running on little sleep, I was at my most vulnerable. That openness, and Katie’s role in it, propelled us into a friendship that has always been light on small talk. We skipped the usual early stages of getting to know each other. What was unusual wasn’t that I met Katie, but that the circumstances gave us a reason to trust each other so quickly.
And yet, that kind of connection is hard to manufacture. As a twin mom, there was simply no way I was taking two infants to a mommy-and-me class (and serious kudos to those who do!). My childbirth education classes had all been over Zoom, so aside from this friendship that began in a crisis, I didn’t have any connection with other new moms in San Francisco until my twins started preschool and I saw the same moms, day after day, whose kids were the same age as mine and in the same place.
Fortunately, my mom and mother-in-law were staying with us for much of those early months, but I often reflect on what I would have done had they not been. I think about it because this is a reality I hear over and over again from new moms in San Francisco and across the United States.
It made me wonder what it might look like if we didn’t leave these connections to chance.
Making mom friends before a baby arrives won’t prevent every lonely moment of new motherhood. But meeting parents nearby who are due around the same time means there may already be someone to text when a question, a scare, or a long afternoon comes along. It moves at least some of the work of finding community to a time when parents may have more room to do it.
Can You Make Mom Friends Before the Baby Arrives?
When the twins were three weeks old, their cousin was born, just outside of London. My sister-in-law, Elle, had a very different postpartum social experience from me because of a program she completed before her son was born. The prenatal program, run by the National Childbirth Trust and colloquially referred to as “NCT,” groups expectant parents based on due date and location. Each group is capped at 18 total participants and has five expert-led sessions covering labor, birth, feeding, and life with a newborn.
Elle’s son is now (like my twins) three-and-a-half years old. To this day, she sees her NCT friends and their children at least monthly, if not weekly. The NCT reports that 95 percent of its antenatal group participants stay in touch with their group after baby is born. My mother-in-law counts among her close friends a woman who was in her NCT group when she was pregnant with my husband, 38 years ago.
We don’t have a prenatal program in the US as popular and ubiquitous as the NCT is in the UK. My hypothesis is that our lack of focus on preparing socially for a baby, especially before the baby arrives, contributes to the maternal loneliness so many American mothers experience.
In a 2025 survey of 2,250 mothers around the world, Peanut found that 70 percent felt they were doing motherhood alone, while 77 percent said guilt or shame kept them from asking for help. And yet, this time period is just when we are asking moms to make new friends and build their “village.”
New moms certainly do meet friends at mommy-and-me classes. But we’ve largely designed those opportunities for connection to happen at a moment when mothers have the least capacity to pursue it: they’re depleted, often without established childcare, and caring for a newborn whose temperament and schedule can change by the hour. In the U.S., there’s also no nationally mandated paid parental leave. New mothers take an average of 10 weeks of leave, including unpaid time. Ten weeks into new parenthood, I was still very much in survival mode. If I knew I was going back to work soon, I would have had a hard time prioritizing socializing, no matter how much I understood its benefits.
Of course, having the time and attention to build community also requires bigger forms of support: paid leave, accessible and attentive postpartum mental and physical health care, and affordable childcare. Without that scaffolding, “the village” will remain out of reach for many mothers—especially those without the financial resources or built-in support to create one themselves.
In the meantime, we can still take smaller steps toward lower-pressure, easier-to-access forms of connection that meet mothers where they are, rather than asking them to do all the work of building the village themselves.
Building the Village Around New Moms
My closest mom friends fall into two categories: people I was introduced to through a mutual friend, or people I met through preschool. In both instances, I had support crossing the initial threshold—I wasn’t starting at zero. There are small ways we can do that for other new moms, too: Introduce friends who are expecting a baby around the same time (better yet, host the coffee hang!). Share the Instagram post or flier in the library about a moms’ group in your area with an acquaintance or coworker who’s expecting.
While in the U.S., many expectant parents work right up until baby is born, we need organizations and systems that set people up for success before the bleary-eyed newborn days. It’s why I co-founded Green Street Social, which runs a paid prenatal community program in San Francisco—an option whose cost and geography put it out of reach for many families. More accessible programs, including sponsored or subsidized spots, could give more parents the chance to meet before their babies arrive.
The Village Shouldn’t Depend on Luck
I often think about that car ride to the hospital, texting Katie. I barely knew her, but because our babies were just weeks apart, she understood exactly what I was going through. That text became a friendship, and that friendship became foundational to my village. The connection came when I needed it, but I wonder how different those first few months might have felt if I’d had it before my babies were born.
Maybe that’s what we should be aiming for: not asking new mothers to build a village when they’re at their most depleted, but giving them more opportunities to find their people before they need them.
