The antenatal group that helped me find community as a new mother

I will never forget walking into Elgin, a pub with worn wooden tables, soft lighting and the faint scent of chips and Sunday roast hanging in the air. Outside, London’s sky pressed against rain-streaked windows, but inside, thirteen other random expectant mothers and their partners were settling into mismatched chairs. It was the first evening of our antenatal group course, Happy Parents, Happy Baby, a four-week immersion into everything from hypnobirthing to contractions to decoding the mystery of swaddling. My husband and I walked in with no expectations, just a head full of unknowns: How painful would delivery be? How exactly does breastfeeding work? Should I get an epidural?

When I moved to London from New York City a year and a half earlier, I found myself swiping through Bumble BFF, making small talk in gym classes and smiling too brightly at my husband’s friends’ wives, hoping proximity might turn into friendship. I quickly learned that making friends as an adult is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle—rare and fleeting and always just out of reach.

Then I fell pregnant and the loneliness felt like a weight I carried alongside my growing belly.

Everyone talks about how it takes a village to raise a child, but my village was three thousand miles away. My mother’s advice came with love but often too late, arriving in a different time zone when I had already weathered the storm that prompted my call. My friends back home, many of them mothers themselves, were always a text away, yet our worlds had fallen out of sync. Their 9pm was my 2am. Their toddlers were sleeping just as my insomnia began. I wondered endlessly who I would lean on when the baby was here.

From the moment I sat down in that pub, there was a shared understanding. We were all strangers—some native Londoners, others expats like me from America, France and Spain—but together we were a United Nations of anxiety, bonded by the tiny humans doing somersaults in our wombs. No question felt too silly and no topic off-limits. I only made it to the first two classes before my son decided to arrive six weeks early. My husband and I were completely unprepared, both physically and emotionally. Yet what surprised me most wasn’t the chaos of premature motherhood but the kindness of near-strangers. My phone lit up with messages from the women I met a fortnight ago, offering to drop off food or set up my nursery or wash the tiny onesies still in my shopping bags. It was an avalanche of empathy from people who barely knew me and my first glimpse of a budding village I feared I would never have.