The first year after my son was born was one of the loneliest of my life. I went from working full-time and spending lots of time with my husband to being home alone with a newborn almost all day every day.

I knew leaving my job would be a big adjustment and I knew inserting a child into our relationship would be an even greater adjustment still. What I didn’t anticipate was the total wilderness I would enter into after we came home from the hospital and the dust settled on my new life as a mom.

That year was lonely for a lot of reasons, many of which I’ve talked about here before and don’t feel the need to revisit today. What I do want to talk about is finding your way through that loneliness, whether you’re a stay at home mom or anyone else struggling to find meaningful relationships and community.

Reach Out To Those Around You

Something I realized after my son was born was that I had actually lacked community and relationships for a long time but hadn’t let it bother me since I was busy working and had plenty of time with my husband to fill whatever need for community I did feel. I hadn’t been investing in people and relationships before motherhood and just kind of assumed those relationships would fall into place on their own after I joined “the mommy club.”

But that’s not how life works, really. People don’t generally just show up at your door ready to meet your needs because you’ve decided they now serve you. Relationships take time and investment and sacrifice on both sides. I had to recognize I was alone because I had chosen to be alone by investing in only my small bubble of work and marriage. I hadn’t reached out to others and so they did not, or had stopped, reaching out to me as well.

So step one for me was reaching out to the people who had been a part of my life for years but who I had neglected to invest in. It wasn’t easy getting out of the house with a newborn but I tried to spend time when I could with other moms from my church and with my sisters-in-law who were also busy raising families. This was a baby step but it was a start on restoring neglected friendships and community with the people who were already a part of my life.

Tell God What You Need

I remember lying in bed crying, telling God I was lonely and alone and I couldn’t do this by myself. I told God I needed friendship, I needed community, I needed women in my life who I could talk to, laugh with, cry with, and be my crazy stupid self with. I really didn’t know how God would answer that prayer. I knew he could, but I doubted if he would. I had lived in the same place with the same basic group of people for years so I wondered if anything could really change or if this was it—this was the life I had built and was stuck with.

But God did change things, in ways I never imagined, and started bringing the very women I had prayed for right to the small area I had been living in for years. My brother moved up from Louisiana and with him my fun, crazy, hilarious, thoughtful, sister-in-law. We have so much fun together, too much fun, and she has been a drink of cold water in a drought of loneliness.

Then our pastor retired and the new pastor’s family moved to the area. Our pastor’s wife is my age with a young family and again, like my sister-in-law, she’s fun, crazy, hilarious, and such a sweet challenge and encouragement to me.

Friends who had moved away moved back to the area, people I had never thought to talk to started conversations, people I had struggled to be close to in the past started opening up and moving forward in friendship…on and on it goes.

In February, I sat at a women’s retreat with a group of girls from my church and as I looked down the row at each of them, it hit me, “God, this is exactly what I prayed for.” The answer to that lonely, tearful heart cry for friendship and community was sitting here on either side of me.

God doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we want or especially when we want. But still I believe God wants to hear from us and wants to know our hearts and desires. God is a father, after all, and like any good father desires to give to his children and to see them delighted, so God desires to delight us as well. Tell God what you want, what you need, and see what he will do—let him delight and surprise you with the ways he can work and move on your behalf.

Invest In Long Distance Relationships

Because I grew up in Missouri, went to school in South Carolina, and moved to Massachusetts, I have friends and family all over the country.  It sucks that I can’t meet my friend Ashley for a walk through the woods or at a taco truck to eat some of the ridiculously good Mexican food she has available in south Texas —but we’ve learned instead to stay in touch through text {and by texts, I mean mini books written with our thumbs}, sending snail mail, or by reading and listening to the same books. I talk to Ashley more and feel closer to her than some of the people I see almost every day. Why? Because we try—we make an effort to stay in touch and know what’s happening in each other’s lives even though this big, beautiful country keeps us apart.

Not every friend will be one you can meet for coffee but with all the technology available to us, this is no reason why you can’t still maintain thriving long-distance relationships as well.

Get Up and Go

Life can be lonely and there will likely be times of aloneness and a seeming wilderness in the way of meaningful relationships and community. But if I have learned anything over the last year, it’s to do everything in my power to not accept loneliness as just the way life is but rather to seek friendship and community where I can. We were made to need each other and life is so much sweeter with friends to laugh with and at :]

How thankful I am that God heard and responded to my loneliness and filled my life with friendship and community; he can do the same for you—ask and see.