Mandy Moore reflects on changing friendships as she tackles motherhood.
Appears on the January 14 episode of Conversations with Cam podcast, she asked host Cameron Rogers, “Do you feel like you’ve seen friendships kind of take a different course?”
The This is us star, 41, who shares sons August, 4, and Oscar, 3, and daughter Louise, 15 months, with husband Taylor Goldsmith, added: “I have friends who have older children, and I’ve found that the people I’m closest to in my life right now are people who are in the same chapter of their lives as their parents. For example, we have children the same age. I’ve had to grieve in a way, not for the loss of those friendships, but for the way they’ve changed.”
Rogers acknowledged that it is normal for mothers with children of the same age to become friends.
“I have friends who have kids who are the exact same age as me. I have friends who have kids who are older. … The reality is you’re going to have more contact with people who are you.” [kids’] exact age,” the host said.
The Confused star confessed that the change in friendship dynamics after becoming a mother “caught me off guard.”
“I’m surprised by it, I just assumed that all these relationships would last… not that they don’t serve me, but they wouldn’t be the first people I would contact now if I thought, ‘Gus has changed his mind seven times about what he wants to be for Halloween,'” she said.
Moore’s comments come after she was dragged into a mother group drama that started with Ashley Tisdale French’s article in The cut.
Ashley wrote in her essay that she felt left out of the group, which was made up of women who became mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Online sleuths discovered that Tisdale was in a mom group with Moore, Hilary Duff, Meghan Trainor and more.
Moore further confirmed that the group was formed during the pandemic, saying, “So I think the origin story is all about having pandemic babies,” Moore said on the podcast. “Hilary Duff is a very good friend of mine. She and her husband, Matt [Koma]are very close to me and Taylor, my husband. [Duff’s daughter] Mae-Mae was born six weeks after Gus and she is the ultimate mother. She now has four children, but Mae was her third at the time. She was a boss. She was like, “We need music lessons. We need community.” So she started this music class at her house and gathered a group of amazing women, and I brought some along too.”
