Passage One Growing up, I earned my best marks for playing well with others. For my husband, I lived in three different countries in five years, and while abroad, 1 easily sparked friendships by starting book clubs and hosting girls’ nights. When it came to making friends, I had never failed until the birth of my first child. My husband and I relocated from Moscow to Alexandria in 2006. I gave birth to our daughter, Eloise, that December. Soon after her arrival, I sought friendships in places where I thought I could meet cool new moms. In mommy-and-me yoga class, Eloise and I lunched with the yoga ladies and their babies with regularity, and true to form, I hosted my first yoga-moms playgroup. Months passed, and Eloise and I became a fixture on the playgroup circuit. The moms and I talked and shared nursing nightmares and milestone moments. One year after moving to Alexandria, I measured my social success by the large number of guests at our backyard picnic. But as I walked the crowd, I realized that my eyes had glazed over and my mind had wandered away from many of the conversations. My new so-called friends surrounded me, but with little to say to these ladies outside of playgroup. I realized I had only created the appearance of friendships. As a new mom in my carly 30s, I longed for the friendship bonds I had enjoyed in my 20s. Times of change and stress had always sent mc running into the arms of family and my best girlfriends from high school and college, a small group of women I have laughed and cried with for more than 15 years. According to research and my own experiences, women seek comfort in other females during times of stress. Like many new moms, work and family demands had separated me from my closest girlfriends. I thought that having a baby would increase my circle of close friends, but despite a supportive husband, hundreds of Facebook friends and a full mommy-and-me schedule, I felt like a high schooler alone at the lunch table. I struggled for months to turn my new acquaintances into real friends. And add to my baby-talk tiredness a weird episode, in which one playgroup mom breast-fed another’s baby, and an uncomfortable request from another, who asked me to hide financial and immigration papers from her cheating husband, and I started to rethink these friendship. Eventually, I divorced the yoga-moms playgroup because I realized that it takes more than a baby in common to develop a true friendship. I decided to spend quality time with Eloise and people we really enjoyed like my neighbor who is 20 years older than I and has kids in college--rather than force false relationships to fill up my mommy-and-me schedule. The author left the yoga-moms because ______.

A. she needed to spend quality time with her daughter
B. she wanted to be with people she really liked
C. her mommy-and-me schedule was too crowded
D. her friendship needed to be built on more solid basis