When Mary got pregnant with her second child in lockdown, she was keen to connect with other mums in the same situation. “We moved from London to Pocklington in Yorkshire in 2020 and went straight into lockdown,” she says. “It made the culture shock even worse because I couldn’t easily get out to meet people.” In 2021, with most mother and baby groups still closed, she joined Peanut, an app for mothers to make friends.
After a few false starts, she connected with Naomi, a patient advocacy director who had also moved to Yorkshire from London with her partner and little boy. Naomi had become pregnant with her second child not long after the move, and joined the app hoping to meet like-minded people. “We exchanged a few messages and clicked immediately,” she says. “We realised we had lived just streets away from each other in London and our children were born days apart.”
