A few weeks ago, I read a post on Offbeat Mama entitled “What to expect when you’re the first of your friends to have kids.” About friends’ reactions, the author writes: “Many people will be helpful and understanding, other people just aren’t interested in hanging out with your kids and that’s okay…although it does mean that you’ll probably see less of them.” Numerous commenters lamented losing most of their friends after becoming parents. Others claimed their lives didn’t change much at all when they had babies and they “managed to keep most of [their] friends by not being dicks about being parents.”
We were in the former group. We were total dicks about being parents.
Just kidding. But we did lose a lot of friends.
After three days of labor, when my midwife finally sluiced my first son up onto my chest, I burst into tears. I was so happy to see him and hold him and nuzzle his head fuzz but I was overwhelmed by the unforeseen realization that it was my new 24 hour job to keep him safe in this big, old, angry world. Two days later, the hospital nurses made sure we watched the “Don’t shake your baby” video, tossed me a few extra ice pads, and sent us home. I remember being wheeled out to the car, tiny pink baby snuggled in my arms, thinking, “You’re just going to let us leave? With this needy, fragile, newborn child? ALONE? With a “Good luck!” and a “Don’t shake him!”? What about all the people who are totally incapable of caring for newborns? What if we’re those people?”
That night, we tried four different outfits before we settled on the right sleeping clothes for our baby. Dressing and undressing a newborn is not easy. They don’t like it, especially if you won’t stop. When we decided on a long-sleeved sleep sack, I noticed our baby’s breathing was ragged. He paused a lot between breaths and then gulped for air. Something was wrong. What had we done? I ran to get our baby manual which informed us that uneven, loud, raspy breath is normal in newborns. Oh. This didn’t stop me from listening in the dark for his inhales and exhales, and often putting a hand on his chest to feel it rise and fall for added security all that night long, and any time he slept for the next six or ten months.
I spent most of my time as a new parent struggling to distinguish mother’s intuition from mother’s anxiety disorder. Everywhere I turned lurked a new, previously unconsidered danger. Is there such a thing as a freak wind that whips up suddenly and rips babies out of arms? (Perhaps.) Could my tea tree oil body cream seep into my bloodstream and poison him through my milk? (It’s still unclear.) Even when I left him home with my partner and went out alone, I checked and rechecked my son’s car seat to confirm that I hadn’t forgotten that he was with me, petrified that I would accidentally leave him to die, screaming, in a boiling car.
Friends were excited with us when the baby was an idea, a distant future reality symbolized by an absurd hump on my front, his wants and needs and bodily fluids managed quietly by my trusty uterus. I think we imagined that hazy future reality to include plenty of hanging out at friends’ houses, festival-going, and lazy afternoons at the park, throughout which the baby would giggle and stumble around happily while we caught up on our social lives. My partner and I were grateful to have such awesome friends, each one embodying a unique combination of our favorite qualities. These people were the role models of our dreams. Our kid was going to be so lucky to grow up around them!
But when our son arrived and new parenthood was nothing like the dopey feel-good fantasy we imagined, when he didn’t sleep longer than two to three hour stretches for his entire first year which meant that I was persistently sleep-deprived or as good as drunk that whole time, when that sleep deprivation and anxiety led me to dread taking the baby anywhere unnecessary, when my partner’s dissertation work faltered, when our marriage cracked under the stress of all of this and we were too ashamed to reach out, my partner and I unconsciously shrank inside of our house, vaguely assuming we would emerge one day when things were easier, when we felt more in control and better rested, to find our friendships intact and waiting.
Wanna hang out?
There were a few friends who broke down our door to get to us, long after the initial flurry of newborn visitors dissipated. They were pushy and insistent about bringing over meals, holding the baby, and regaling us with their life news. I was worried at first about how their intrusions would affect our tenuous baby schedule, and I was embarrassed to be unshowered and haggard almost always, but these concerns gave way to 100% intense gratitude. It was such a relief to hear about life outside the baby vacuum, and to be a friend again, however anemic it was compared to my pre-baby version.
I’ll always be grateful to those mighty few that forced our friendships in our son’s first year. But, in a way, they caused me to feel conflicted about everyone else. When someone who used to be one of my best friends accused me of ignoring her and being self-obsessed six months post-baby, I was shocked and angry and heartsick. She hadn’t come over once since the baby was born. She had no idea what I was dealing with. At the same time, I felt guilt and shame. I worried that maybe she was right. Maybe parenthood was only an excuse and I had always been a selfish and inconsiderate person. Maybe that explained why I was such a mess of a mother, and failing as a partner too. My friend and I talked it out over email and seemed to reconcile briefly only for our friendship to explode permanently in an ugly, public Facebook altercation. I imagined that other friends shared her assessment of me, and I began to feel a bitterness toward all of those who’d claimed they’d be there and then were not.
But that wasn’t fair. While we were holed up with our baby and hanging on for dear life, our friends’ lives were going on. They were busy with their own relationships, their work, and their life events. We missed celebrations and memorial services and break-ups, and generally failed to provide the kind of regular support and attention our friends deserved. It was too much to expect our child-free friends to understand the total life reconfiguration that comes with being new parents, even if a select few did intuitively get it, or pretended to, especially when there are other kinds of new parents out there who don’t seem to change much at all. The Offbeat Mama commenters who gloated about how they take there babies any and everywhere? They have easy babies. Lucky them. I know those exist because our second one turned out that way.
I’m sad that we moved away from Atlanta before we had time enough to attempt salvaging the postpartum wreckage of friendships past. But now that I’ve made it out of the vortex of new parenthood, I have a calmer and clearer perspective on those first years and their casualties. If I had that time to do over again, I would google less and invite people over more. I would get out of the house with my partner and friends when family members were available to babysit. But mostly I would remind myself what Offbeat Mama’s fearless leader, Ariel, mentioned in the aforementioned post’s comments:
It doesn’t have to be a tragedy when people find themselves heading on paths that diverge. Send postcards back and forth — how are things going down that path I didn’t take with you? These communiques can be dispatches from a you who might have been.
Your life and the lives of your friends will shift in unpredictable ways. It’s natural, it’s awesome, and it means everything’s proceeding along exactly as it should. That’s called personal development, and it’s not something to be afraid of — it’s something to expect, embrace, and enjoy.
Release yourself and your friends from the bondage of naive expectations, defunct plans, and the starry-eyed fantasies of yore. None of you knew what to expect pre-baby, maybe least of all your friends. Change is hard and can be painful for everyone. But in this case, for you at least, it is infinitely worth it.
Oh my gosh, this POST! Thank you for writing something so real, so honest, with such a well-rounded perspective. We’re still in the childless group, and it looks like (if everything goes according to plan) we will be neither the first nor the last of our group to have kids. I know I fall into the trap of thinking everything will go on just like always once we have a baby, only there’ll be a baby around. And all my friends with kids laugh at me. I’ve also known parents who have had one child who was born an angel, and another that they couldn’t leave the house with (or shouldn’t have) for a year, so I loved reading about your different experiences with each of your children.
I think any time a big life transition or event happens, you will always be surprised by the friends who stick with you and who won’t. My husband was recently in the hospital, and friends who have absolutely crazy lives made a point of being there for us. On the other side, friends whom I’ve brought food to during childbirths and surgeries, I babysit their kids on a regular basis, and have been the middle of the night emergency phone call on more than one occasion didn’t even call. It always sad when you see who doesn’t stand by you, but your quote at the end is exactly right. For better or for worse, we’re lucky if we have a special few people who stay with us throguhout our lives. Others will come and go, and be no less special for the breif time we’re blessed to count them as a friend.
Thanks for this. I’ll be passing it on to a few friends.
Thanks, Christy! Do you have family living near you who’d be willing to babysit? I think that can hugely impact the new parent experience. We lived 7 hours from our nearest family so we only had them available as sitters if they were visiting. But I know other parents who have the grandparents sitting every week while they go out with friends. I used to judge them (what a burden on the grandparents! and what kind of parents want to leave their kids that much!) but then I realized I was just jealous.
I do, actually, and that’s one of the reasons I don’t want to move! My mom is ten minutes away, and my little sister is already planning to have a room for her niece or nephew in her apartment once she and her fiancee get married. Plus, I’ve got a great community in my church that help each other out a LOT, and I’ve been logging in my share of free babysitting for, like, ten years. So I’m counting on some good will there. Thanks for the encouragement. I love your blog, and always feel like I learn something. I passed this post on to a friend who’s pregnant, and is the first of her friends. She loved it!
Honestly, I don’t think you could have posted this at a better time for me! We just had the first couple from our friend group have a baby and I keep wondering . . . should I invite them to dinner? Should we try to go over? Is it too soon? Has it been too long? It’s so incredibly hard to know how to be supportive but not intrusive . . . anyway, your post gives me courage that actually maybe they do want us to visit!
Well, every new parent is different but I think a good idea would be to email or call and say everything you just said here. You could even say you just read this post and it made you more sensitive to what they’re going through. Sometimes, new parents don’t even know WHAT they’re going through until someone points it out. Even if they resist visits or help at first, keep asking and checking in. They will be grateful and your friendship will likely survive.
I’m catching up on Offbeat Mama and saw this (fabulous) post linked. I think this advice is perfect – I can’t even express how much it would have meant if our friends had done this.
What a wonderful and appropriate blog for me to read in the last few days before our little one arrives! I think we’ll have good support when baby arrives, but that’s so hard to predict. I am sure that we’ll end up neglecting some important relationships in the haze of new parenthood, and I hope that our nearest and dearest relationships survive the transition.
In all my ruminating on the subject in recent days, I’ve developed a theory that – even though our radical queer communities are so awesome and fantastic and superior in so many ways – supporting parents isn’t something at which we always excel. I suppose that’s largely because not as many people have children either by choice or because that option hasn’t been readily available. And, with less parents, less people understand what it’s like to be a new parent. So many of our spaces are not child friendly, and we don’t have community rituals around what to do with new babies. Everything I learned about being a pushy, persistent friend after the birth of a new baby is something I learned from family or straight friends (and maybe etiquette classes). It never occurred to me that new parents should be anything other than absorbed in their new babies and new families.
As more of us become parents and talk about the experience, maybe our queer communities will become better at supporting parents. Or maybe we’ll just build a bigger offshoot community of queer parents to provide what we need. I wish you were still in Atlanta, but I appreciate you sharing your experiences with me and everyone else. And, I apologize in advance if we forget to call or write or if I call constantly asking panicked questions
Jamie, I love this: “Everything I learned about being a pushy, persistent friend after the birth of a new baby is something I learned from family or straight friends (and maybe etiquette classes). It never occurred to me that new parents should be anything other than absorbed in their new babies and new families. ”
You were pushy and persistent and INCREDIBLE. Seriously, I cannot thank you enough for your dedicated friendship over the last few years and I WISH I could still be in Atlanta (to attempt) to return the love. I’m not even sure I could manage to bring you delicious dinners complete with wine and dessert as often as you did, superfriend, but I would give it my all.
As the youngest of three kids who didn’t have friends with kids and hadn’t been around babies much at all in my life, I didn’t know anything about what to expect of new parenthood or where our friends fit into it. Maybe if I’d seen other friends go before me, I could have avoided some of my own mistakes. I don’t think it’s just the queer community that has trouble with this. Many if not most of the Offbeat Mama commenters lamenting friend loss were in hetero relationships. I do think as the average maternal age rises, many of us spend way more of our lives not being around babies, so when they finally show up in our 30s or close to them, it’s a shock for everyone.
Anyway, please call and text and write with any and all panicked questions. Chances are I’ve had the same ones at some point, googled them to death, and now have a whole corner of my brain full of information that so desires to be useful to someone.
I found your blog through apracticalwedding.com because of a soon-to-be family member’s wedding – and I just have to say that you’re super inspirational and I so appreciated you speaking truth into the topic that is counseling! I really appreciated that and can’t wait to read more
Thanks, Anna!
Loosing friends is so painful. When I look back on my life transitions – getting married, having a child, getting divorced, becoming a single mom, finding a partner, getting married again – I can see all the beautiful people who came in and out of my life. I am grateful for each and every one of them. They all changed me in intimate ways. I wish I could hang on to all of them, but I know that new bonds await me in my next phase of life. A few of them refuse to let go despite my ups and downs, and I feel so lucky to know them! We are ever-evolving beings and that means our environments and loves must also grow and change. Thank you for sharing your journey.
Thanks, Jenni! I love your zenlike approach. What you say is so true but sometimes it’s hard to get my heart rate and stomach knots to hear it.
This. Is. Amazing. The writing, the post all of it. I don’t have anything more to offer, or anything more articulate than that to say.
ah! so good. i lost my best friend in the months after our son was born, and meg just sent me this post. well said. thank you!
Thank you for this. I just had a dear friend (who is dealing with some serious personal issues, so I’m giving her some grace) basically ream me out for…well, I wish I knew. But it hurt and still stings and feels like the end of our friendship. I’m a stay at home mom and that is life she has always wanted and it’s the one I didn’t expect to have. What she doesn’t understand is that I’m home with a very demanding, teething baby and dealing with PPD, and while I’m so grateful for this sweet little guy, life is hard and I’m just now emerging from the cocoon of craziness. Sigh. Hopefully fences will mend, but right now the hurt is too deep.