A House Full of Boys

I grew up with a sister and female cousins, onto boarding school and college where being surrounded by other girls was the norm. Through jobs and moves and relationships and breakups and plenty of single life over 15+ years in New York, existing and new female friendships bolstered me. Brilliant, beautiful ladies who I traveled with, partied with, cried with, laughed with.

Then I met my husband and we got a dog; my first baby boy. We went on to have two human boys in two years. And then it was Covid and I was in a house full of boys 800 miles away from all of my ladies. I was a new mom in a new city and lonely for the first time in decades. Texts and zooms were my lifeline, but not all those women were in the same "season;" the loneliness persisted.

And then something happened. I was introduced by a family friend to her family friend, another mom. "I think you'll get along, her daughter is about the same age as your son" was all it took. And as women do, that new friend introduced me to a few others with similar aged kids that she thought I would also get along with. Playground play dates where our kids couldn't talk yet, but we certainly could.

Someone suggested happy hour, dinner, a quick weekend away. Moments for me to remember what I was like outside of my house full of boys. A new crop of remarkable women entered my orbit and I started to feel familiar again.

My life was new and I was new, but I believe making these connections brought back a part of me I was sure got lost along the way. We commiserate over motherhood, of course; that's the easy part, the great equalizer. But oh, do we travel, we party, we cry, and do we ever laugh.