My son and his friends have graduated. What remains is our special mom group

The graduation picture was supposed to german mark the terminate of our boys’ childhoods. 

Turns come out it was also grading the beginning of our own next chapter as moms.      

It was 2023. One of the moms had put together a video to showcase our kids’ journey through their elementary and high school years. 

Parents and teens jumbled together in a living room to witness the frames that showed our boys’ friendships — from awkward childhood smiles and missing teeth to teens wearing jerseys too big for their always-changing bodies and finally to the confident young men who now sat amongst us. 

Suddenly, the boys were taller than we are. Handsome young men in suits, arms slung over each other’s shoulders, casually celebrating their joint success. Nine young men, stitched together by classrooms, endless basketball practices, bus rides and inside jokes.  

They were the kind of boys every parent hopes for: bright, kind, loyal.  

I watched the slides for the boys. 

But somewhere between the grainy photos that had us reminiscing, I started noticing something I hadn’t paid much attention to before. 

In the background of almost every frame, slightly out of focus, were faces similar to those of our boys. Their ever-present mothers. Laughing, holding coffee cups, waiting in parking lots, on bleachers and in kitchens. Purses slung over shoulders, leaning against minivans. Hovering just out of frame.

It hit me then: while these nine boys were figuring out this stage of life together, so were their mothers.

We didn’t plan on becoming friends. At the time, our relationships felt secondary. Practical even. We were assembled by circumstance — team rosters, carpools, school zones. Connected because our sons were connected. 

Who could drive? Who had snacks? Who could keep an eye on whose kid during practice? We exchanged phone numbers for logistics, not intimacy. 

As we sat beside each other game after game, season after season, we slowly became cheerleaders for each other’s kids, both in games and in life.  

When high school arrived, with it came the complicated terrain of adolescence. There were academic pressures, relationship dramas, moments that skirted with the law and anxiety. 

Some of the boys talked openly to their parents. Others didn’t. Regardless, crucial information travelled quietly sideways — silent texts and measured conversations between mothers, rooted in trust and shared concern. Not to interfere, but to support. To watch out for one another’s kids the way you do when you understand that we’re all in this together.

We weren’t gossiping. We were co-ordinating care.

I was struggling as a new mother. Finding my mom group made me realize I wasn't alone

We took pieces from each others’ parenting styles. We learned when to intervene and when to stay out of the way. We learned how to hold each other up while pretending, for our sons’ sakes, that we had it all handled.

And then our boys left. Suddenly the homes that had once overflowed with noise and laughter went quiet. Bedrooms stayed clean. Fridges stayed full. The job of daily mothering loosened its grip. 

The boys are in their 20s now. University. Work. Different cities. Different lives. But they are still close. They travel together. They still find their way back to one another, reconnecting at Christmas and holidays as if no time at all has passed. Watching their continuity feels like a quiet triumph. Not that we did everything right — but that something worked. Something connected.

Here’s the thing no one really tells you about empty nesting — you don’t just lose the constant presence of your kids. You lose the social architecture that came with raising them, too.  

Unless you don’t.

Our mom group didn’t drift apart. Instead, we leaned in.

Because the years have a way of wearing grooves into people.  

In the quiet, those relationships that had once lived on sidelines and in parking lots  stepped forward.

Because we’re still here. Nine women who now talk about different things. Menopause. Medical emergencies, aging parents. Marriages stretching and contracting under time’s pressure. Adult children making choices we can’t fix. We help each other grieve and reinvent ourselves.    

Some of us have husbands. We have other friendships. But these women — the ones who went through raising boys with you — are what we have come to lean on.

Now when we get together, it looks different. Dinners at Earl’s linger because no one needs to rush home for bedtime rituals. Wine tours replace tournaments. Pickleball games and long hikes take the place of early-morning drop-offs. We also travel together. We babysit each other’s dogs instead of each other’s kids.

The graduation video reminded me that it is we nine women, frame after frame, who have been quietly holding things together. And we will likely continue to do this in our next chapter, too.  

We didn’t set out to form a village. But somewhere along the way, while raising these boys in the foreground, we moms quietly became the main character story in the background. 

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Freelance contributor

Sonja Arsenault is a community parole officer in British Columbia — a job she has done for the past 15 years.

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