Free Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood: The Good, the Bad, and the Scary by Jill Smokler

Don’t have anything in common with them anymore and have no idea how to start making new ones.
    • I like my online friends more than my real-life ones.
    • I talk to my mom more often than I talk to anyone else . . . when did she replace my girlfriends and how the hell did that happen?
    • My best friend does everything perfectly, but she can’t control her children. I’m secretly thrilled about this.
    • I stopped speaking to my best friend because she had the life that I wanted. I miss her every day.
    • My five-year-old has deeper friendships than I do.
    • I wish I could be happy for my best friend’s amazing children, happy marriage, and perfect life, but I’m too busy seething with jealousy.
    • My husband says I am his best friend . . . I love him, but friendship-wise, he doesn’t even make my top-ten list.
    • I consider my kids to be my closest friends these days. I’m pathetic.
    T he moment you’ve birthed/adopted/fostered/surrogated/whatevered a child, you instantly become a card-carrying member ofthe biggest club on Earth: the Mommy Club. Congratulations! There is no hazing and no pledging and membership is instantaneous and guaranteed. The Mommy Club is overflowing with mothers of all shapes, sizes, and colors, with only one necessary bond: a child.
    Sadly, one cannot be a member of both the Mommy Club and the Non-Mommy Club at once. The new mom, having just made the transition, will inevitably try to simultaneously keep both memberships—attempting to play the role of a carefree and unburdened girl to her childless friends and the loving and doting mom to her new mommy friends. Her childless friends won’t buy it, though, hearing the cries from a baby in the background of a phone call or smelling the stench of spit-up, buried underneath her perfume during a night out. The new mother’s cover will be blown, and her former membership immediately revoked, along with the ability to pee in peace or actually flip through an entire magazine in a single sitting.
    The Non-Mommy Club is objectively a much more fun club to be in, with conversations never once containing the words “diaper blowout” or “questionable rash.” Long dinners of seared tuna and sushi are consumed along with bottles of wine and pretty pink martinis. Impromptu slumber parties and all-night gab fests are not uncommon and shopping or mani/pedis over lunch are considered a strenuous activity. It’s the kind of club you want to be in, rather than the one you need to be in.
    The New Mommy Club, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as fun or easy. Though induction is a given, the club doesn’t necessarily guarantee companionship, acceptance, or solidarity. There is no orientation to meet fellow members and no quarterly get-together. Every member has one important thing—perhaps the most important thing—in common, but that’s where the similarities end. Havingbeen knocked up at the same time isn’t enough to sustain a decent relationship, as any lonely new mother will eventually learn.
    Once I was booted from the Non-Mommy Club, I set out to meet some people in my new club. It wouldn’t be hard, I thought. There were millions of women just dying to talk sleep patterns and solid foods with me, along with Hollywood gossip and the best shades of lip gloss. I thought it would be easy and natural to find those people, but I was sorely mistaken—making friends as an adult is hard . The last time I’d really sought out new friends, I was working at a job with other young people looking to forge relationships, too. It was just . . . effortless. As making friends should be. Before that, I made friends in college, surrounded by other eager and enthusiastic students searching to find their people, too. This time, though, was different. The other mothers I met seemed to be content with their relationships and I just didn’t see any vacancy signs hanging in their windows.
    Entering the Mommy Club felt like what I imagined it would have