Mommy issues: It’s exhausting to be the ‘mom friend’

Mom Friends plan birthday surprises, check if you’ve eaten, and hold the group together. It’s a full-time, unpaid gig. How about we return the favour?

Every friend group has one. That buddy who’s holding the gang together with invisible labour. This is the friend who will take your calls at whatever time of the day, even when you only ring when you’re annoyed and stuck in traffic. This is also the friend who hears someone say “Let’s meet ya”, picks the date, time and place that works for everyone, makes the reservation, does the Splitwise payment and lets the other person believe that the meet-up was their idea. It’s the same person who remembers everyone’s birthdays and reminds everyone else (and lets them add their names to what is never a group gift). And they’re the ones who share advice, look over your final draft before you hit Send, and send you Zomato surprises on a blah day… all while other friends are only sharing Reels, lol.

Yeah. That’s not a friend. That’s a mom. And, as we said, every group has one. It’s often women, but needn’t always be. Male protectiveness and an eagerness to please can create much the same role.

Tucker from Off Campus was the mom friend of the hockey group, ensuring that they were well-fed.

The internet’s term, Mom Friend, sounds affectionate and admirable. But as with most actual moms, the label contains multitudes. Rashmi Rajpurohit, 28, didn’t realise she had become one until her friends told her that she had mom energy. She would check if everyone had eaten, text ‘Hey, you good?’ the second someone was missing from class, and instinctively slip into what she calls ‘protector mode’ around her friends. Before going on a snow trip, she woke up early to pack burgers for everyone ‘in case anyone got hungry later’. “Nobody asked. I just knew I would feel better knowing they were taken care of,” she says. “I didn’t consciously decide to be the Mom Friend.”

No one does. But looking back, most people find that the signs were always there. For Rajpurohit, they deepened when she moved to the US in 2025 to pursue her master’s degree. “There’s a different kind of responsibility that comes with being far from home. You become each other’s family in a way,” she says. It came at a cost. “You get so used to putting yourself second that it slowly becomes your default setting. You stop asking ‘what do I need?’ because you are too busy answering that question for everyone else.” A mom statement if there ever was one.

In Voicemails For Isabelle, Wes’s friend Breeda acted as his emotional anchor.

Most Mom Friends don’t pick up on it for years. Madhumitha Subramanian, a 26-year-old entrepreneur from Bengaluru, knew she was the dependable one. “It’s because my friends come to me. It’s always, ‘I’ll ask Madhu; she will know what to do.’” So, she simply did what needed to be done: Planned the group meets, made sure everyone had eaten, kept drunk friends hydrated, made sure everyone got home safely. “I always come home feeling happy,” she says. “But also like an event manager who finished the task.”

It’s an unpaid job, and often an unappreciated one. And yet, Mom Friends find it hard to let go of their roles, fearing that it may fray the friendship, convinced that the glue they bring is their best asset. Dubai-based life- and relationship coach Chetna Chakravarthy says it’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that isn’t helpful in friendships. “Friends don’t choose one person and push them to assume the role; it’s usually that one of them steps up, because nurturing allows for a warm kind of control.” It suits everyone else to go along, and eventually becomes hard for the Mom Friend to ask for help, reveal a vulnerability, or set a boundary. “It becomes your identity; you become the person that everyone goes to.”

Schmidt from New Girl was fiercely protective of his friends.

Some take to it more readily than others. Many Mom Friends are the eldest daughters in their families or have been doing a lot of caretaking since childhood, Chakravarthy says. The solution isn’t to stop caring. It’s for Mom Friends to develop friendships in which care flows both ways. “Healthier, more reciprocal friendships occur when there are other people around the Mom Friend who are just as strong,” she says. Perhaps the solution is not to wait for the Mom Friend in your circle to figure this out, but to step up, take on some of Mom’s chores, and let her just be your friend for a change.

From HT Brunch, August 8, 2026

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