Why this woman and her best friend moved in together to ‘co-mother’ their children

When mom Ashley Simpo and her best friend, Tia Strother, both found themselves single and struggling to find affordable homes in New York City to accommodate their families, they decided to move in together. Strother has 3-year-old and 13-year-old sons while Simpo is the mom of one 5-year-old son.

The pair has known each other for a decade and seen each other through a lot. Facing single motherhood in the wake of a divorce for Strother and a break-up with her live-in boyfriend for Simpo, they decided to merge their households and raise their three children together as co-parents. Simpo wrote about the experience in an essay for the Huffington Post.

“Finding an apartment in New York City is hard enough, but finding one that accommodates kids is like searching for a very expensive needle in a very expensive haystack,” Simpo wrote of the problem that motivated the friends to seek their unconventional solution.

Simpo and her child moved into Strother’s three-bedroom apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. They share all housing expenses, down to groceries and Netflix. But their partnership goes beyond logistics and finances. They also help each other balance work and motherhood and negotiate the struggles that come with continuing to also co-parent with their former partners, and they provide emotional support for each other as parents.