My Best Friend Is A Mom. I'm Not. Here's How We Navigate Our Friendship

When my friend Lee had her first baby, I asked her a question that cut straight to the heart of the matter: “Would you jump in front of a car for this baby?” She was four days postpartum. She didn’t know the answer yet. That moment—the willingness to ask something real instead of defaulting to small talk about sleep schedules—is the kind of move that keeps friendships alive when life phases diverge. This episode of the Liz Moody Podcast brings together Liz (child-free, living in California) and her friend Lee (a mom of two in New York) to answer listener questions about navigating friendship across the biggest life-phase gap: having kids or not. The conversation is practical, honest, and grounded in the specific mechanics of how to show up, when to pull back, and what to say when things get awkward.

The Reciprocity Problem and How to Fix It

One listener described being the single child-free friend who constantly invests in others’ big life events—baby showers, weddings, meal trains—but feels abandoned when her own milestones arrive. Lee and Liz agree the hurt is real, but they also push back on the assumption that the imbalance is intentional. The deeper issue is that society has a script for celebrating weddings and babies, but no script for celebrating a new job, a published article, or signing a lease on an apartment alone.