To make mom friends, I rediscovered my religion
Photo by Melanie Kanzler on Unsplash
Having a hard time connecting with other moms? My advice: Head to your favorite house of worship.
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A woman, in her life, will make several types of friends. Childhood friends, camp friends, college friends, work friends, and, for those who opt in during the reproductive years, mom friends. The lattermost of these always seemed like an endpoint to me—the hardest level in a game I’ve spent three decades playing. A rite of passage that marks the final frontier of girlhood.
Finding your people in motherhood is difficult. Until your child is in school, you are left floating through fix-ups with friends of friends and families you meet at the playground. Daycare can feel transient, and making solid friends at the small in-home program my daughter attends took more than a year.
You may, like me, have pre-existing close friends who have kids around the same time as you, but they may not live in your neighborhood, let alone your state, and therefore are categorized in their primary, or original, friendship bucket.
Mom friends are unique, made and dependent upon another relationship—that of your child and their child, and what they have in common—and time-dependent, too. Can you meet up on a whim? Would they like to grab that post-drop-off coffee? (This, I’m convinced, is not really something that exists in real life, only in the 90s and on television.) Is it ever really that easy?
Perhaps you have had better luck than me, but the only way I’ve managed to make mom friends is by relying on the oldest trick from, well, the oldest book: religion.
Returning to my religious roots
Nearly every Saturday morning, my husband and I take our daughter to our synagogue at 10 a.m for “Tot Shabbat,” as it’s commonly called. It is just two blocks from our apartment, in a century-old building with magnificent stained glass windows and a ceiling that may be caving in. I take my daughter to a multipurpose room with basketball court floors while the main Sabbath prayer service goes on in the sanctuary. The kids, ages five and below, play together on a blue carpet, with blocks and Magnatiles and cars.
The moms and dads drink our coffees and schmooze. After a while, we do Circle Time, where a wonderful twentysomething teacher leads the kids in songs about gratitude and spiritual tradition. Pom-poms are involved. We are usually there until noon. Oh, and none of us have our phones. And that is how I finally made mom friends.
I realize this makes me an outlier. In a 2023 column for the New York Times, Jessica Grose described the decrease in church attendance as perhaps the “largest and fastest religious shift in America.” The following year, Grose wrote again about young women in particular fleeing organized religion in droves, largely in response to traditional ideologies around bodily autonomy and gender roles. A 2025 study showed that more than one in four Americans consider themselves unaffiliated with organized religion. I can tell you that many people bristle when I share that we observe the weekly Jewish Sabbath, assuming it’s restrictive and overly conservative or anachronistic. Culturally, amongst moms my age who live in urban centers, it just doesn’t seem to be en vogue.
When organized religion is embraced, it’s often by Gen Z, who are curious about its benefits—community, ritual, connection, belief—in an otherwise isolating time. The Wall Street Journal recently claimed that New York City’s newest hotspot is Sunday Mass. Last year, the New York Times wrote about the resurgence of the cross necklace amongst White House staffers and pop stars alike. Elle covered the cross-as-jewelry-trend even earlier, in 2024. As far as modern takes on traditional Judaism go, a hospitality concept called Shtick, founded by producer Jacqueline Lobel, creates editorial Friday night dinners and other parties that celebrate “the quintessential Jewish foods and customs found here in New York City.” In 2025, one such event included a Shabbat dinner for the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
So perhaps there is something to be said about what turning inside yourself, or to your family and its denominational history, can offer. Perhaps there is something to be said about the foundation that a shared belief or tradition can provide. A place of worship, if you find the right one, is also a place that naturally builds local community. (A mommy and me class there can, for what it’s worth, also cost less than a trip to the children’s museum.)
Finally finding mom friends
When I started bringing my daughter to our synagogue, it was more of a survival strategy than anything else. She was just six months old, a poor napper and always happier when we were out of the house. She could barely sit up, let alone play with other kids. The other mothers seemed seasoned and poised like veterans, worlds ahead of who I was and what I knew about raising a child. I mostly kept to myself and tried to listen in to everyone else’s conversations. Some moms were nice, asking me my name and gawking at my baby. I kept on showing up.
After my daughter turned one, there was a great shift. A new wave of babies joined the group, all learning to walk and eat chicken and extend their attention spans. This would be her “class,” a group of girls all born within the same six-month period who had finally dropped their morning nap (“What morning nap?” my daughter, if she could talk then, would have said) and were ready to build towers and clap during Circle Time.
Together, my daughter and I hit our groove. Soon we started to get invited for Shabbat lunch at her new friends’ homes, and we invited them to ours. As the mothers stuff the children into their coats and wipe kugel off their faces, we agree to meet again in Central Park later in the day. And because it is Shabbat, and none of us use our phones for 25 hours, we simply fly by the seat of our pants and commit to our plans and show up. When we get to the park we talk to each other, because no one is working or texting or scrolling. It’s very bucolic, and yet it feels like an alternate reality every single Saturday, orbiting the rest of my social life.
So this is the scene of my “mom friends.” We all live in the same neighborhood, but do different things for work. Many of us didn’t know each other before mommy and me, and we all have lives and friends of our own, outside of our motherhood. Our WhatsApp chat errs on the side of purely logistical, confirming our weekly meetup or a sporadic special event—a Purim puppet show, a Hanukkah celebration.
I think this is what religion, as divisive as it can be, is meant to bring to our lives. A place to go with your kid every Saturday morning, the will to keep showing up, people who expect you to be there. And if you’re lucky, kugel.
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