You can be surrounded by people and still be the only pregnant woman you know. Your friends are between babies, or years away from wanting them, or deep in school runs. Everyone asks how you are feeling, and none of it quite lands, because sympathy is not what is missing. What is missing is company at the same stage: women whose backs started aching the same week yours did.
There are two ways to find it. One is local and weekly, and worth taking if it exists near you. The other is short, further from home, and does something a weekly hour cannot. This is what each one is good at.
Timing, mostly. In England and Wales the average first-time mother is now 29.4, and in London she is 31.1, the only region where first-time mothers are older than mothers across all births (ONS, Births in England and Wales, 2024). When first babies arrive across a ten-year spread instead of a two-year one, the chance that a close friend is pregnant in the same season falls a long way.
Work moves people away from where they grew up, and if you live in a country you were not born in the circle narrows again. None of this means something has gone wrong. The same life that built your career spread your friendships across cities and decades, and it was never going to produce a pregnant friend on schedule.
Start local. The NHS puts antenatal classes on its own list of things that help your mental health in pregnancy, partly because they are a good place to meet other people in a similar situation to you. A pregnancy yoga class does something similar, more quietly, week after week. If there is one near you, go.
The limit is the format rather than the people. An hour a week, most of it taught, and the real conversation starts in the corridor and ends when everyone puts their coats on. Courses also run late in pregnancy, so the group forms at roughly the moment it scatters into newborn life. Some groups click and last for years. Others end politely, and nobody swaps numbers.
Time, and no exit at nine o'clock. At a mom'z Solo Babymoon there are fifteen pregnant women at a similar stage, together for five days at a private luxury estate near Barcelona or near Lisbon. You eat every meal together and take the classes together. By the second evening the conversation has moved past due dates.
Partners do not come. That is deliberate, and it is not a comment on partners. Five days pointed at one thing works better than five days split between two, and what you are preparing for here is your birth and your baby: getting in the zone mentally, emotionally and physically before a new chapter begins. A retreat built for a couple is a good idea. It is a different idea, and it would need a different five days.
Women travel mainly from urban cities like London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich and even New York. About half are expecting their first child and half are already mothers. Close to 1,000 women have come since 2023, from week 14 to week 35, in every month of the year. Childbirth educators are on site for the whole retreat. Midwives are on call 24/7.
Every retreat group keeps a WhatsApp group afterwards, and they stay busy. What you end up with is closer to fifteen friends in your pocket than to a Facebook group with thousands of strangers in it. They were at the same stage of pregnancy as you, they sat through the same five days, and they heard you say the things you do not say out loud at home or at work. Groups formed in 2023 are still in use. Women who met at an estate near Barcelona have met up again in their own cities years later, with their babies, and some are pregnant again at the same time. Nobody books for this part, and it is the part women mention most afterwards.
Rachel, from the US: so rare to find a community that is pregnant the same time as you. Karoline, from Denmark: it was not forced bonding. Sara, from the UK: still in touch, especially immediately after. All three are published reviews on our reviews page.
The pattern across them is the same. Nobody came for the friendships, and the friendships are the first thing they mention.
The days hold as much quiet as company. Meals and classes are shared; the pool, the gardens and your room are yours. A private room is available for exactly this reason, and taking an afternoon off is a normal thing to do.
Yes, and for longer than we expected when we started. Groups formed in 2023 are still in use, through births, second pregnancies and meet-ups in each other's cities. Nobody moderates them into life. They run on their own.
The programme runs in English, and everyday English is enough. Most groups hold four or five nationalities, so you will not be the only non-native speaker in the room.
About half are expecting their first child and half already have children, and they arrive from cities across Europe and sometimes further. What they share is the stage of pregnancy rather than a profession or a personality.
Women join from week 14 to week 35. Most come in the second trimester, when energy is highest. The third trimester works well if you sort the airline letter early.
This article is not a substitute for medical advice.
A class near home gives you people who live near you, and it is worth doing. Five days gives you the same fifteen women at every meal, through every class, with nothing to get back to by nine, and a group chat that is still going when your baby is one.
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