How to Kid-Proof Your Friendship
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Yesterday’s A Book That’s Changed You (800 comments and counting) has reminded me just how *many* different ways a book can change you. There’s so much good stuff in there — go find your book soul mate. And last Friday was a meta-thread of ideas for FUTURE THREADS (!) — go vote with your little fav heart for the ones you’d most like to discuss in the future.
Earlier this week, I was reading an advance copy of Rhaina Cohen’s The Other Significant Other: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. You open the cover, and there’s a bunch of publicity information, her photo, and a bio, which has the same beats as most author bios — where she’s worked, what she’s written, where she lives and with whom. “She lives in Washington D.C.,” the bio concludes, “with her husband, friends, and her friends’ children.”
I read that bio after a week of hearing people talk about Allison P. Davis’s purposefully provocative cover story in New York Magazine entitled “Why Can’t Our Friendship Survive Your Baby?” Davis is one of my favorite writers for New York Magazine — she’s wrote the moment-defining essay on the vibe shift of Spring 2022, the definitive profile of Meghan Markle, and this stunner on the “Permit Karen.” Which is all to say: I respect her a lot as a writer and a person in the world. And reading this piece, I recognize every single scenario she describes about how the arrival of children has shifted her friendships.
Coming to visit for a weekend and you just hang out at playgrounds? Been there. Conversations exclusively about kids’ and kids’ needs to the point that you can slowly feel yourself receding into the wallpaper? Absolutely, constantly. Adult gatherings that become kid gatherings simply through the presence of one child; the inability to hold a prolonged or in-depth conversation in proximity to kids; the weird feeling when everyone leaves to go to put their kids to bed and it’s 8 pm and you thought the night was just starting — all of it, SO RELATABLE.
I’d also add to the mix: no longer having a place to stay at your friend’s house because the guest room becomes a playroom, getting left out of the Mom text thread, and just generally feeling deprioritized. All very real — and what I appreciate about Davis’s piece is that it makes those sensations visible and speakable, instead of something that people without kids are supposed to just “get over” if they want to stay friends with their friends.
Kids absolutely bomb out your friendships. If you think “everything can stay the same” you’re 1) lying to yourself and 2) going to deal with some real hurt and disappointment, regardless of whether you’re the person with or without the kid(s). So we should stop thinking about whether or not it’s true and start thinking about how all members of the friendship are responsible for building upon the wreckage.
I’ve already written extensively about how people with kids can show up for their friends who don’t have them — and how friends without kids can show up for their friends with kids in return. That piece is the product of SO MANY conversations (with newsletter readers, with friends) and I know this sort of concrete advice and scripts has been helpful.
Stick with me here, but I think it might be useful for all us who feel wronged or left behind in this scenario to do a bit of reframing. The arrival of children in someone’s life is a sort of catastrophe. In most cases, a very welcome and desired catastrophe, but a catastrophe nonetheless. If you’ve given birth, it’s a catastrophe on the body; if you haven’t, a baby still wreaks havoc on your physical well-being. All of the rhythms are forcefully changed. I feel like the shift is most akin to leaving your childhood home for work or college: you have to learn a whole new way of negotiating the world, of making things work, of managing your time. And then, depending on your situation, you or your partner or both have to go back to work — but there’s still this time-consuming (beloved!) baby there to make pretty much everything harder.
And even though parents rarely speak about it, there’s also some ambivalence, some sadness, and some mourning for the past life — because it’s very possible to love a child with everything in you and also feel alienated from yourself, or your body, or your partner. It can be a real mindfuck, made even harder if you feel like you’re doing it alone. That’s why parents glom to fellow parents: for that precious feeling of getting it.
But here’s where it’s essential to remember that the friend without kids is also experiencing a more subtle form of catastrophe, not unlike watching your friend ditch you for a new best friend. Think about it: suddenly, all the Instagrams that used to feature you now exclusively feature their kid; all the interstitial time they used to spend hanging out with you doing nothing is now spent hanging out with the baby doing nothing. You used to be their errand friend, now the baby is their errand friend. I know it’s not as simple as that but also: it can feel that simple.
If you want a friendship to get through this catastrophe — which only gets worse before it gets better — then everyone in the friendship has to pause their rightful sadness or resentfulness and spend some time imagining how the other person is feeling. Not just “oh they’re tired all the time,” but “oh they’ve gone from feeling totally in control of their lives to totally out of control” — and not just “they feel left out” but “an essential part of how they make sense of their lives feels like it’s evaporated.” You have to really think about it — and then act the way you would if your friend was going through any other form of catastrophe. You show up for them.
When my friends started getting pregnant, I knew things would change. I have a very distinct memory of being at a remote cabin with five of them, one of them pregnant, and going on a hike where the only topic of conversation was birthing plans. But the friend I usually stayed with in Seattle, she wasn’t pregnant yet. It felt like clinging to something, that last friend. When she called to tell me she was, I told her how happy I was for her — was was true!— but I also held that happiness alongside the sinking realization that our friendship would never be the same.
And it hasn’t been. None of them have. Those early years — particularly the time right after most of my friends had their second kid, when they were dealing with the shitshow of a verbal and very mobile toddler and an infant — were the hardest. I have really wonderful memories from those times. But they were also filled with lowering expectations, and lowering them again.
I know they were a different kind of hard for my parent friends, too. Both things can be true, and understanding as much is essential to making this sort of friendship work. But no friendship ever stays the same forever. Your friendship would change for some reason, even if it weren’t kids. And the great thing, the thing I tell everyone a few years younger than me and that I wish I had heard more from older friends — is that kids get older.
If, like me, you enjoy kids — that means that you get to have a lot more weird and hilarious conversations with them, and get to figure out how to be an important person in the life of this child of someone who’s important to you. In the vast majority of cases, it also means that your friend will get more sleep, their schedule will be more flexible, it’ll be easier to get a sitter and/or eventually for the kids to stay home by themselves. The kids, in essence, cease to take up as much mental and physical real estate in the friendship.
Speaking as someone without kids: it’s essential and joyful to integrate your friends’ kids into your friendship. I’m back to being an errand friend — it’s just that kids are also my errand friends. We still wake up on Saturday mornings and lounge around in our PJs for too long talking shit, only now we’re doing it while watching Hotel Transylvania 2. I garden with my friends’ kids. I eat candy with them. I sing as loudly as I can to WE WILL ROCK YOU and ski with them and make store bought cake mixes with them. All of that rules.
But speaking to friends with kids: it’s essential and joyful for you to make time with your friends away from your kids. A short trip, great, but a walk with just the two of you, or an errand trip, or a night out without a bedtime, so long as it’s away from the space where kids always come first — all of those work too. Babysitters are expensive but so is losing your friendship entirely. (Also, there are lots of ways to swap kid watching duties with other friends, to trade off with your partner, to schedule sleepovers, etc). I know it’s a lot easier to try and figure out how to have your friend come over after your kid’s asleep but it is not the same and don’t pretend it is. Your kids are precious. They are worth all the money and time you spend. But so are your friendships — and just like your kids, they cannot survive untended.
It’s comforting to have friends who think and live the exact same way you do, who have the same priorities and worries and rhythms. But life is better when you’re friends with people whose lives aren’t exactly like yours. That includes being friends with people who are older and younger than you, who do different things for work, who experience the world differently, and who’ve made different decisions about what family looks like for them. I am a more nuanced writer, a more thoughtful friend, and a better person because of these friendships. And I hope my friends can say the same for me — for many reasons, but also because I do the very arduous work of curating TikTok for them.
The fact that we got through this first hard part — it’s going to prepare us to get through so many hard parts to come. It makes community feel real, not just aspirational. It makes me feel like I do, indeed, live in the Pacific Northwest with my partner, my dogs, my friends, and my friends’ children. ●
You can pre-order The Other Significant Others here — and look out for an interview with Rhiana coming soon.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear about your struggles and successes (and what you’d do differently if you could do it again, and what you think you did well) when it came to the addition of kids to the friend equation.
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Subscribing gives you access to the weekly discussion threads, which are so weirdly addictive, moving, and soothing. It’s also how you’ll get the Weekly Subscriber-Only Things I’ve Read and Loved Round-Up, including the Just Trust Me. Plus it’s a very simple way to show that you value the work that goes into creating this newsletter every week.
As always, if you are a contingent worker or un- or under-employed, just email and I’ll give you a free subscription, no questions asked. (I process these in chunks, so if you’ve emailed recently I promise it’ll come through soon). If you’d like to underwrite one of those subscriptions, you can donate one here.
If you’re reading this in your inbox, you can find a shareable version online here. You can follow me on Instagram here — and you can always reach me at annehelenpetersen@gmail.com.
That article in The Cut/NY Mag was really good! But the one aspect of this story it didn't really touch on (except briefly at the very beginning) is that, for many of us, our childlessness was not a choice. Many of us WANTED the lives we see our friends living. We EXPECTED, from the time we were kids ourselves, that we would be mothers with kids of our own someday. For some of us, for various reasons (infertility, pregnancy loss, failed adoptions, medical issues, just not finding the right guy before our fertility ran out...), that "someday" never happens. And it's a hard, hard thing to watch from the sidelines as all your friends head off into the sunset with barely a glance back at you. And even when they do try to be inclusive, there are times when it's just too painful to be around them and the very real reminders of the life we wanted and didn't get to lead. Some parent friends are sensitive and empathetic enough to understand this, but some, sadly, are not.
I read a comment on this piece that said that nonparents don't understand that having a baby can be like a bomb going off in your life, and that parents need their friends around them, even if they're sick of hearing about it. Well, parents don't always understand that for those of us who wanted to be parents too, NOT getting to have the children we wanted can also be like a bomb going off. When you finally reach the point of realizing that this is not going to happen for you, it shatters all your assumptions and plans and forces you to rethink your entire life, look for meaning and purpose in other ways. That can be a lot too. And we need our friends around us then too.
I'll add that I'm also at an age where many of my friends are now becoming grandparents, and in some respects it's an echo of those years with their own children, when (once again) children become the focal point of their lives and all they can talk about.
I think a lot about how American parents (moms) are expected to shoulder every responsibility, meet incredibly high standards of parenting "correctly," and navigate all the difficulties of arranging child care, school stuff, medical care, etc with so little support...and then they're deemed boring and devoid of personality for not having much else to talk about. It's such a trap! And I'm totally guilty of being the child-free friend who has no idea how to join in or relate to kid-focused conversations & hangs, but whoof, I can see how it's not just the inherent life-exploding nature of having a child, it's the massive undertaking that is raising one in this country.