If I had one wish in these times, it would be as follows: I beam myself to Hamburg at my friend's wooden kitchen table, with whom I always feel so welcome and in good hands.

She has invited three other women, we have a glass of wine in front of us, laugh, interrupt each other, but also listen carefully to each other, at some point look for leftover chocolate and have rough feelings when we hug each other late at night Voices from lots of chatter.

Eva sleeper

Editor in the "Life" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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I feel a deep connection to my girlfriends, they are an important constant in my life and it would be difficult for me to lose one of them.

That's how it is for many women.

Our author Stefanie von Wietersheim also wrote about the importance of friendships two weeks ago under the title "Men have no idea about this".

She talked about a meeting with eight friends around 50 in Berlin, about the conversations that took place, and raved about the bond between herself and the others.

Although this is so familiar to me, as I read the text, I became more and more incredulous. Because in the declaration of love to her friends, "being a mom", as the author herself calls it, played the most important role. She wrote that all the women who came together in Berlin for a break lead their lives with commitment, with ups and downs, sometimes less self-determined than desired. "But most of all, they fight and love for their children - and that binds us together with an invisible bond of steel whose structure and strength men have absolutely no idea." Birth and motherhood is something that activates survival mechanisms. Sometimes being a mother is a matter of life and death. Or the fear of life and death. Day and night,in our dreams and nightmares. And that's why the mother's bond of friendship definitely has something exclusive, separating, radical about it. Even after the baby years.”

Do my girlfriends feel less connected to me?

For me, who, after all, am a woman but childless, these lines really convey an exclusive message.

Do my friends who are mothers feel more connected to each other than to me?

Can I empathize less with my girlfriends because I don't have the birth and mothering experience, I don't know what unconditional love feels like?

Do I have different relationships with the two women in my circle of friends who are also childless than with the mothers?

(Resolution in advance: No, they are only more available.)

Now, clearly not the best person to question the statements made about what is special about mother friendships, I wrote four friends in their mid-thirties and late forties, each blessed with two sons between the ages of four and twelve, an E -Mail and asked: Do the friendships you have with mothers differ from those with childless women?

If so, to what extent?

Before I continue with the answers, a quick interjection to all fathers: I find the sweeping generalization with which you are denied, in the plea for mommy friendships, your willingness to look after your own children in a comparable way to mothers.

In my environment, the fathers do not shine through their absence.