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.
Thank you! I have held it together for my friends who are parents so many times and then broken down sobbing on the floor afterward. It's really hard to experience how little space is held for friends who do not or cannot have children.
Thanks for articulating this. It feels like there's no space held for this. My pet peeve / emotional trigger is when I share my single/child-free plans which often include travel etc, and parents say "I wish I had your life." It feels so insensitive because truly, often, I wish I had their life! It's like they can't even see from your perspective at all and offer some empathy.
I meant to include that Jody Day of Gateway Women (and if you are childless not by choice, she is someone who should be on your radar!) has termed this the "#FriendshipApocalypse" of childlessness. ;)
Yes!!!!! I was surprised that The Cut article didn’t expand in the deep grief that all of this entails! In addition to what you name (as Adam Phillips calls it “the grief of the life not lived,”), and also the grief of your precious friendships changing in ways that you wouldn’t have chosen! The loss of intimacy of not being relied upon in the same way, friends not having the capacity for care and comfort, grief over not being able to connect/relate in the same way (abandonment/attachment activation for many) etc and all of this happening within the container of the pervasive ocean that is cishetetopatriarchy that says “your value is yoked to that thing you don’t have and may want” (eg “landing a man, having kids.) In short “they won, you lost.”
I completely agree. I typically ride very hard for APD but this article felt unbalanced and like it wasn’t sure what it was. As a piece of diaristic writing, sure, everything she’s saying has value. But, while she attempted to include the perspectives of others, including people with children, it felt very unbalanced. I am childless by choice but there are so very many people who are not for a variety of reasons. Yes, adding a third party (a baby) who is totally dependent on one member of a friendship pair does inherently change the dynamic of that friendship. But there are so many more reasons for that than “my friends don’t want to stay at the bar with me until midnight anymore.”
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.
This is exactly why I choose to be childless! I am fascinated by the lives of my female friends who have kids and how they continued to make that choice in spite of (or perhaps ignorant to) how much harder it made every aspect of their lives. My friends are ambitious Type-A women who strongly value their friendships and I look at the chaos in their lives and think, “Wow, that’s what *really* wanting something must look like,” because they still chose this path regardless of how incredibly difficult, all-consuming and unpredictable it is. And as a childless person who enjoys kids (for the most part), I value my role as a “village person” in the “it takes a village” equation. Unlike my friends with kids, my life is not forced to be quite as insular so I can focus my energy outward and pop in to provide support when and where I see it is needed. In this role, I feel just as valuable to my community as the “breeders” regardless of whether society-at-large sees it that way.
A bit of a different perspective- I lost my young adult child to suicide this year, and being with my peers now, so much of the conversation STILL revolves around kids, now young adult kids. It is sometimes painful to hear about what everyone’s kids are doing - jobs, marriages, etc- when my kid, obviously, isn’t here any more. I can listen for a while but why can’t we talk about something, anything else? Our world is so child focused even when those children are grown.
I understand this feeling. One thing I didn't mention in my comment above is that I was pregnant, 25 years ago, but the baby (a girl) was stillborn at 6 months. I had several friends/relatives/workmates who were pregnant around the same time and I've watched as those kids -- my daughter's peers -- grew up, went through school, graduated and are now starting to get married. i never had to guess what she might be doing or might be interested in or would be studying at school, because I always had the examples of these kids around me.
People seemed to forget about my loss and that my daughter might have been their child's playmate, very quickly. I still get those "ouch!" moments now & then, especially around those milestone events like graduations and weddings. My daughter would have turned 25 this year, and even though she would have been done with school years ago, the first day of school, and seeing all those photos and social media posts come flooding in, can (still) be painful. It's not quite the same situation as what you're going through with your child, but I feel like there are a few similarities...!
Adjacent while obviously much lesser: I am my 20-year-old disabled child's guardian. They may not ever live independently. And my younger kid is struggling even to complete high school due to ADHD, despite considerable brilliance. Many, many people I know have zero conversation other than college: what the kids are doing to prepare, and where they're applying, and where they've been accepted, and all the great activities they're doing and how they will do them to get into college, or do them AT college. And when they ask how old my kids are, college is the inevitable question: "Oh, they must be college age, where are they going/planning to go?" Social media is drenched in pride and ambivalence about empty nesting. I am constantly blindsided and struggling what those answers are for us. I feel some of your emotions about all this.
This is absolutely related. When my son was alive he was disabled in a way - emotionally- md couldn’t do a lot of the typical things - going to college, etc. And it was so hard then, too, with everyone else’s kids hitting those milestones. So what definitely empathize with you 😢
Not only the milestones, but the constant, constant happy talk about the culmination of the kids' incredible hard work and how amazing they are. My children don't get much if any of that.
Our kids worked hard too, and so did we. If only input predicted output.
To relate to the post, it's a bomb that goes off in your life, and leaves radioactive waste behind. In our case, the actual end was a sudden shock, but there was a years long process leading up to that point.
Our friends were very much there for us in the immediate aftermath, especially for the memorial thing we did here, but we isolated ourselves quite a bit, in those first months, to avoid having our grief overwhelm everyone all the time.* Then there was a global pandemic and everyone isolated themselves from everyone else for quite a while. My wife and I deal with the thing quite differently: I like to talk about our son, and the things we did and said and felt together. She's a lot quieter, and has folded herself away from most people.
* I'll tell a short illustrative story. A few weeks after, I felt up to some light socializing, and went, as usual, to walk with the Democratic float in the Homecoming parade. It was the first time pretty much anyone had seen me, so in the staging area lots of people came up to hug me. One local politician who didn't know me that well -- we knew each other's names -- noticed this and asked me about it. I told her and she started crying, and then backed away from me, because she was about to be in a hugely public parade, and couldn't be doing it with a teary face. She was right (and I would vote for her for anything, tbh.)
First, I am so, so sorry. And second - you're absolutely right, and I'm so sorry your current peers aren't sensitive to this. I hope you're able to find other peer groups who are less hyper-focused on their kids' life happenings all of the time.
When I had my first kid I remember feeing so overwhelmed that literally every thought was about my child. It had so completely reworked my consciousness that you could have asked me what 2 + 2 equaled and I would have said “baby”. I felt embarassed that I seemed it have lost all my intelligence.
I’m now 10 years out from that first child, done with baby making, and am just now coming back into myself as an independent personal no longer constantly physically attached to another human via growing, feeding, and holding them.
And so I’m reprioritizing my friendships and it is a JOY to meet my oldest friends where they are and revel in how they’ve grown. That’s not to say I wasn’t part of their lives as they hit new milestones but I can now recenter them and celebrate them on a far richer level. And it’s like knowing my favorite color is blue but then I have a fresh lens and suddenly I can see teal, cobalt, and aquamarine.
I love that I am coming out of the “catastrophe” of early parenthood and celebrating the richness of life in my friendships. I’m still finding my way in this next phase but I revel in the depth of our shared histories and the future we have next.
I’m in the same boat as you and totally agree (kids are 10 and 7). I keep reminding my husband that we are in a new stage of parenting that allows us to do things that we didn’t do, or felt we couldn’t when our kids were younger, like one of us going away for a weekend - solo parenting the babies on the weekend once seemed pretty unimaginable for us both.
I think this is also a mid-life thing - we are mid-career and while not terribly wealthy or even all that satisfied with our work tbh, we are not striving or having to figure things out in the same way - but we need and want to keep growing as people! Time to reconnect with people and also ourselves!
As a childless friend, the only other thing I would add is that we sometimes want to be involved and brought into the family -- invite us if we say we're happy to hang with the kids sometimes!
I have a wonderful friend who would invite me to be a third adult to help host her daughter's birthday parties over the years, and it made me feel so happy and included; I would entertain kids, or help out when someone's feelings got hurt, or volunteered to be covered in stickers, or made the food so that someone else could manage shrieking 8 year old girls. I have other friends with children where I haven't been invited in the same way and, not that everyone has to do that, but I think it does contribute to that feeling of missing the intimacy you may have shared before kids came along.
100% this. I’m the childless friend, and I always try to invite my parent friends to things where I can, but the invites I get back from them always tend to be the fewer and further between “I HAVE ESCAPED THE CHILDREN” variety. And I’m here for that, but if you can’t make the things I’m doing because of a baseball tournament or a dance recital or just sheer child related mayhem I am happy to be invited to the mayhem.
Absolutely this. I want to still hang out with my friends with kids when kids are around! I say so clearly and unambiguously. But the parent friends still only hang out with each other, and I am not invited, and not invited to the kids' birthday parties, and I don't really understand how else I can do all of what AHP is talking about in this post about staying involved in the kids' lives if I'm not considered as someone to invite in to get to know them.
I am the perpetually childless woman who always wanted to be a mom. The exclusion that happened after my divorce, when the friends with kids suddenly deemed me like... tragic? For being single and childless... I am at my desk weeping.
It can also happen if you have kids and get divorced. Single moms who are doing it all are also often tragic and toxic. Like infidelity is catching. Whatever the cause, it really really sucks and is lonely, so lonely. I hope you find solace somehow.
When I read that article, I thought, “I really hope AHP writes something about this.”
I’m a woman, and childless, but several of my friends have kids or are having kids, and the article pained me. Your concluding paragraph here, I think, nails it:
“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.“
I think if we think of friendship and community as just people to accompany us on nights out and fancy dinners and girls trips and to listen to us vent about our lives, then yeah, we’re going to be disappointed when our friends have kids, because all of that is taking a backseat. Something completely overwhelming and all consuming has entered their lives and their entire world has shifted. It’s not wrong to mourn or grieve for what used to be—your parent friends probably are too! But we don’t always have to place our own emotions at the center, IMO.
If we want *real* community, then we need to be willing to accomodate and see our friends through those major shifts / crises / catastrophes, both the surprises and the longed for. Of course, parents have a role to play in maintaining friendships too. But I think we need to understand that for a few years, it’s going to be mostly on us to hold them up and help carry them through. That’s what friendship is for.
I love this. Just like in spousal partnerships, sometimes one person has more time, energy, love to give. I am trying to give what I can when I can and ask for what I need when I need it and appreciate my people without scorekeeping.
This year my youngest entered school and they are at a really neat age where they can do so much independently and I have been delighted to find more space in my life for my friendships and for myself. I don’t begrudge the toddler years where they needed so much of me, though. Now I know how fleeting those years were and I’m happy to have been there for the little people who needed a lot.
I am forever grateful for my friends who are welcoming the extra time I can now spend with them with no guilt trip or reminders of when I might have been absent.
The messages from those who have experienced loss in this thread will definitely influence how I interact with others in similar positions in the future. Thank you all for sharing!
I had a lot of feelings about the Davis article, as someone with very painful and extended infertility, and then a very quick transition from that to being an older adoptive mom (I'm now now 40 with an almost three-year-old, and having spent a lot of time in evangelical circles who start their families in the early and mid-twenties, that makes me especially geriatric).
When we're gracious with each other, we can show up for each other. And that's a muscle we can use over and over again - and we'll need to use over and over again, because after adolescence, that conveyor belt of age-related stages really stops and the variables take over. I mean, if you think the kids are rocking your social world, wait until the divorces hit! Or spouses die, or kids have special needs, or kids pass away much too soon - you need to start exercising that grace now because life is hard and if you want to keep your friends, you need to be gentle with them. We're human and very fragile.
The divorce part is so hard, I've found — like it's just a whole lot of pain! But also: it changes the dynamic yet again, particularly if there's shared custody involved. Showing up when a friend has a kid is very important but I feel like showing up amidst and after a divorce is just as much if not more so.
Anne Helen, I find so much of the difficulty is the awful line in the sand by the couple of choosing sides. Are you Team Spouse #1 or Team Spouse #2? Why is this so? Sometimes it's so uncomfortable as the single friend, you walk away completely.
Yes, I’ve tried to make this point less gracefully upthread. Once parents start to die, it reframes ideas of family and care and community again. We all need one another at different times in different ways.
“ that conveyor belt of age-related stages really stops and the variables take over”
I love this, and it is so true (I’m your age so I’ve seen it by now). I wish young people and teens also knew this and it might relieve some of the pressure and expectations they feel entering the adult world too.
I feel like a lot of people could learn a lot from paying attention to their elders (I feel so old right now, lol), but watching my mom manage elder care for her parents, and the choices her parents made vs my dad's parents, all of that left such an impression on me. (Now my mom is managing my dad's disability care since his hemorrhagic stroke, pour one out for her.)
And I remember a somewhat younger family member telling me, "I just want to be a mom" while I was maybe 5-6 years into infertility, and she knew that I was years into infertility - the data is there, I think maybe too often we're too convinced of our own immortality/ infallibility to engage with it.
Your second paragraph is an absolute truth bomb. It echos what AHP wrote about how the kids get older and things can be fun again, but reminds us that having kids is not even close to the only bomb that can change our lives and the lives of those we love.
As someone who chose not to have kids, I feel like the honest answer to making friendships work after kids is that I sacrificed a lot of my needs and expectations in the effort to maintain those friendships early on. I had some resentment about that at first but came around to realizing that parenthood meant my friends with kids were sacrificing their needs and expectations as well, and we were all learning a new world. It's a massive change, but I think I slowly accepted that I could either resist that change and be unhappy or set new expectations and find new ways to be with my friends who are parents. My husband and I have tried to be very involved as auntie and uncle and I agree with Anne and so many others that it has gotten immensely easier as the kids have gotten older and can play by themselves or be left with a sitter for some alone time with friends. There is still grief there - I feel like a huge part of why I struggled with whether or not to have kids was the sadness I felt about not taking the same path as my friends and the distance it would create - but also a lot of joy and love and trust with my friends in having navigated this change together and come out the other side in a way that still honors our friendships. And I've tried to cultivate relationships with friends who don't have kids that can satisfy the needs I have (like for long meandering in-depth conversations!) that my friends with kids just can't meet right now. I always really appreciate these discussions and all the comments - they help me feel so much less alone in navigating these changes.
I really appreciated this as someone whose friends are all just starting to have kids and who feels like I’m about to be left behind. I appreciated The Cut article because if articulated and acknowledged this sacrifices childless people make in their relationships in a way that’s not usually discussed. Sometimes it sucks and you’re allowed to feel like it sucks to not have the same emotional intimacy (at least for a while) with your parent friend. Grace can be extended both ways.
Agreed, what I most appreciated about The Cut article (which, tbh, grated in some ways too) was making explicit the sacrifice experienced by folks without kids — expected but rarely acknowledged (or allowed to be, in polite conversation). Making space for feeling that loss and finding ways to mitigate it seems key.
I saw a lot of comments on the Instagram post for the Alison Davis article from parents that said a variation of: "we don't maintain our friendships because we don't have the time/a support system, it takes a village." I absolutely agree that support systems for parents are incredibly lacking in this country and our government's neglect and a whole host of other cultural and economic factors are at play. But I also am frustrated to see "it takes a village" over and over from parents that seem to interpret the "Village" as "a group of people who will take some of the burden of child rearing from me." I've always thought the proverbial village is meant to encapsulate care from *everyone*; the village/community not only helps with child care and practices emotional generosity, but also helps with elder care, medical issues, and other types of reciprocity that makes life better and benefits their whole community. I think when parents (in this example) look around and perceive that there is no one to help them and they have been "abandoned" by friends, they should think about how they have maintained those bonds with their wider community. I've helped friends with their kids, been very understanding about scheduling issues and last minute changes of plans, traveled to them etc...but these friends have also made it their business to be there for me when they can with non-childcare/child-related problems. Support systems have to be cultivated on all sides, not because "you owe me, time to get mine" but because we owe each other. If you're a person who hasn't cultivated community, it is not magically going to appear once a baby is in the mix.
Yes! The expectation that the "village" is ABOUT child-rearing is so frustrating. Certainly community should include that, but there has to be more to it. Otherwise it's just drafting all the non-parents as unpaid labor.
There's a columnist in the Guardian who writes on parenting issues -- Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett -- who mentioned The Cut article. She said: "What’s changed, I think, is that more and more women are choosing to be child-free and feeling entitled to child-free time, whereas historically they would be roped into communal childrearing. It’s a reasonable expectation, but we all need to be kind to one another, and new parents are especially vulnerable. Having a baby can be like a bomb going off in your life, and at times like that you need your friends more than ever, even if they’re sick of hearing about it."
This was shared in one of the childless-not-by-choice online communities I frequent, and the reaction was not especially positive. Like, how dare we feel "entitled" to our child-free time, right? And I thought the "roped into communal childrearing" was a pretty telling way to put it...! "A reasonable expectation?" -- I should think so...! Someone said, "feeling entitled to another person's labour and support is the real problem." And as another said, "Surely there has to be some give and take?" I mean, kindness works both ways...
And (as I mentioned further upthread), realizing that the children you always thought you would have are not going to materialize after all -- that parenthood is not going to happen for you, when you wanted and expected it would -- can also very much be like bomb going off in our own lives. We need our parenting friends to support us too -- but too often, the support only seems to go one way. Yes, we can try to make new friends when our parent friends drift away, but that's often easier said than done, especially at midlife.
I will be honest, Davis’ essay didnt resonate with me as much, even though I am childless, because it seems so different than how folks I know do friendships/family. I think our larger American culture is so segmented by generations that we miss out on making and sustaining places for folks at all stafes of life to be and stay connected.
I’m a mom of a three year old and when I read Alison’s piece - which was so similar to how I felt pre-kid - all I could think was “Christ I was such an asshole.” Maybe that’s unfair to the feelings I had but what I saw reading that was a person (me) who could not and did not try to empathize with my friends, who had no curiosity about what my friends were going through. But even more than my friends, I wish I had learned earlier in life to see the humanity of kids at all stages with their accompanying limitations. I thought about kids and their appeal the way one would think of themselves as a dog vs cat person. I considered myself someone who believed in community and a person-forward society but I failed to included this huge portion of the population in the grace and understanding that I so willingly extended to adults.
This is so great (and I'm really looking forward to Rhaina Cohen's book, as I keep beating the drum for communal living with my friends—being the only single person among your friends after an unexpected divorce has made it abundantly clear that I'm not anyone's priority anymore, and it hurts).
I'm not really the "fun auntie" and am not even close with own niece and nephew, and it's been a struggle to keep some friendships alive after kids entered the picture. But for the relationships that have done well, there's been an attitude on both sides of "yeah, this is incredibly hard, but we're going to make this work, come hell or high water." Not sure if that's due to the specific nature of those friendships, but I'm grateful for it.
The feeling of “I'm not anyone's priority” is incredibly difficult (I’m the perpetually single lady). It’s one of the reasons I find the loss of friends so hard. It’s why the fairly common notion (as referenced in the Cut article) that it’s ok for friends with kids to just disappear for awhile *and* expect to seamlessly return to friendships just doesn’t work for me. I’m not anyone’s priority; I need reciprocity, even if that reciprocity undergoes constant renovation.
Joelle, this is such a good point about reciprocity. I think, as others on this thread have pointed out, it’s not always about what you do together (I understand my parent friends can’t do brunch!), but how you’re treated when you do spend time together. Who cares if we all make time for the brunch if we spend it only talking about kids and partners (that I don’t have)? It’s hard to navigate the loss of your friends’ time but it’s the loss of their attention and care that is harder.
Oh gosh yes: RECIPROCITY. I'm not asking for a perfect 50/50 balance, because that's totally unrealistic. But I need *something!*
For instance: A few years back, Friend A got busy with school/her relationship, moved to a city where none of our mutual friends lived, and pretty much went AWOL from the group chat (which was VERY active while we were all locked down during the pandemic). Friend B and I, who are still individually close as well as active in our mutual friend group, had VERY different feelings about encountering Friend A at an upcoming wedding this year. I was like "wow, it's going to be so weird to see her, considering she pretty much ghosted all of us." Friend B was like "oh, I'm looking forward to seeing her! She always responds when I reach out, and [husband] and I have had a few catch-up Zooms with her and her partner." I asked Friend B if it bothered her that she always has to be the one to initiate conversations or make the effort to stay in touch with Friend A, and she said it didn't -- we're all busy, no need to keep score, she just appreciates the friendship in whatever form it takes.
I admire her graciousness, but I don't feel the same way at all. I do resent it when things feel one-sided, I think because of the comment upthread: it shows me I'm not a priority, and that is hurtful.
Yes, exactly! It's exhausting to be the one who must always reach out to everyone else if I want to interact with other humans. I so appreciate the friends who recognize that I'm a whole person who deserves the same grace and consideration as those who are partnered, with or without children, despite all of society telling me that I'm less than and have to perpetually be the one to work around everyone else's lives.
"I need reciprocity, even if that reciprocity undergoes constant renovation."
This is so key. Reciprocity might look very different in different seasons, but there has to still be some sense that I'm *important* to you. For many of my friendships, this roadbump comes up when friends get married most of all, and their new spouse takes on primary priority. I don't need to be your *primary* priority, just need to know that I am a priority *in some way.*
I've more often felt cut out by friends who got married (I'm single), and if our friendship has survived them getting married, then it often survives them having kids as well. I think in both cases it comes back to—at your heart, do you still care about and prioritize me, even if that looks different than it did before?
I felt the Cut article deeply. I'm interested in any advice on how to deal with this new dynamic between sisters - one pregnant and one child-free - and a baby-obsessed grandmom to be. I'm childfree and very excited to be an aunt, but my mom - who has held her tongue about my child free choice - is now UNLEASHED and has ZERO boundaries or self awareness about pregnancy chat now my sister is pregnant with her first.
Our family group chat is bombarded with Mom's 'baby bore' content about prospective sleeping schedules and breastfeeding and 'it's true that you never know love until a baby comes' crazy problematic stuff. Every Facetime with me is about the baby coming. My sister is more understanding and limits nappy decision chats to her mom friends, while making me feel wanted as an beloved aunty, but neither of us know how to deal with how unbothered our own mom is about respecting our different choices in life now because BABY.
Not a lot is written about how a pregnancy can change a relationship between adult sisters and their mom. I've been through the mill of friend experiences when kids arrive but never expected this!
Oh my. YES. You say this so well. In my case, my parents are very involved in childcare for my siblings’ kids, two of whom are very young. And, while nobody takes issue with my choice to be child-free, nobody takes any interest in it either. I have such a hard time having a meaningful relationship with my parents at this point because they are nearly 100% grandkid focused. They essentially have no idea who I am as a person. It feels petulant to say that my parents don’t pay any attention to me, a 43 year old adult. But I would love to have a grown up relationship with them as fellow adults, not as parental figures.
Exactly this. I feel completely insane when I think about it - am I jealous of a literal baby taking my mom's attention? I also have no idea how to share updates about my life in our family group chat (we live on different sides of the country) which we use to communicate and feel involved in each other's lives now it's all baby logistics chat. It's like, sorry Annie, no one cares that you found great produce at the farmer's market or went to a cool outdoor play because Grand-Mom-to-be needs to now bombard the whole family with conversations about formula. It's one thing to go through lulls of friendship dynamics but putting a baby into family dynamics where everyone revolves around my mom's emotional temperature is whoa. I don't know how to be when my childfree life is marked 'frivilous'. Thankfully my sister who is actually pregnant is chill. It's just bought up a lot of mommy drama I'd long buried. Back to therapy for me!
Same. SAME. Getting ignored in the group chat! It brings up so much childhood stuff, it’s wild. And every family gathering is a kid event, so often when I leave at the end, my dad guilts me like “oh I barely got to talk to you.” So much therapy, please.
I am the parent in my sibling duo and my brother is currently child-free. We actually have 3 group chats - one for parents and each sibling and then one joint one. It helps cut down on the kid chatter (grandparents wanting to know things etc) and makes the larger group chat truly a place where we all share highlights and updates. It may sound complex but similar to how you don't want your parents triangulating normally it's good to split it out in the group chat too!
Ann, they'll have a relationship with you again the minute you become your parents' caregiver. Because it's almost ALWAYS the single daughter and frequently the eldest daughter who gets this assignment.
Elle and Gayle both nailed it. I actually find myself grieving the loss of my parents before they even pass away 😳
My parents are amazingly kind and loving people but the extreme kid-focus creates huge blind spots where any non-kid-oriented relationships are concerned. It’s possibly generational. They are small town midwestern baby boomers and my mom was tradwife by default, before there were any other socially acceptable POVs. Having kids young was just what you did. So these grandparent roles are a natural extension of their parent roles. And they’re so comfortable with kids that they’re not able to really take much genuine interest in other paths, even within their own family.
I wish I had something helpful to say, but so much this. my relationships with my parents are nothing like they used to be and nothing like I thought they'd be. my brother had kiddos and that changed everything in the ways you're both talking about, and then their own aging health issues started, and it very much seems like no one is interested in my life, other than in how I can help them. and I do want to help! but.....lots of therapy time talking about these issues, for sure.
Older adults can get babyfever like whoa. I've seen it so many times. It makes biological sense, in a way, but holy hell was it eye opening to see my parents prioritize visiting the siblings who have children, and demand that the siblings without children be the ones to visit them. There's something about babies that totally addles some peoples' brains. Like, they're not excited about the really difficult parts of childrearing, it's making cute outfits and taking pictures and enjoying the milestones of the first few years. I was able to let go of the bitterness by setting boundaries about what I would participate in and do, and depersonalized it. Babies make people crazy. My parents are much less excited about their moody adolescent grandson who needs a totally different kind of parenting now. Anyway I'm sorry you're going through that, it helped me a lot to reframe it as a form of insanity.
I recently had a baby and my family has created a new WhatsApp chat for baby related updates! We use our old chat for non-baby life news, sharing news articles, etc. and then we have a chat for all things baby. We started it to photo share (I don’t live in the same city as my parents or my brother and my mom requested daily photos), but I have found the division of chatter to be helpful as well.
I’ve had such mixed feelings on this. I straddle the line as a stepparent. (I know plenty of steps just consider themselves parents and they are, for sure! I just feel like I don’t really fit in either camp any more.) Honestly I surprisingly find myself feeling defensive on behalf of parents and I skipped the infant/toddler stage! In my past life as a single/childfree person, I felt like my friends were fairly successful at incorporating me but I think the things that made that possible weren’t necessarily in our control. We lived near each other - this is huge. With some of them, I had a level of closeness already established - so we were comfortable with me just blending into the mess and chaos, no self consciousness to work through. And some of it was down to the temperament of the kid - some kids can be flexible, sleep anywhere, are cool hanging on someone’s lap at a restaurant, etc; and some kids can’t without a huge toll on both kids/parents. These aren’t really things anyone can help. I guess it’s the second one (intimacy) that could maybe be created or sustained with effort. But I realize I’m still describing something other than the child-free time proposed here. For me, being incorporated into home life was actually enough - it made me feel loved and like part of a family - but I’ll say my friends were able to have our normal conversations post-bedtime, too, not just kid talk, so something stayed the same. Maybe that makes the difference.
The experience of adding parenting into my life did pretty much short-circuit me. And I don’t have it on hard mode. But for me it’s the addition of mental labor when I’m already kind of at my breaking point from work. (Caveats: this is maybe pretty specific to me; there is admittedly maybe some baseline neurodivergence/burnout/mental health at play. I also want to point out that being “just” a stepparent does often subtract responsibility and caregiving, but adds LOTS OF COMPLEXITY and grey areas that make each individual decision or communication all the more fraught, all the more deliberate, all the more effortful.) But the point is, for various reasons I’ve experienced overwhelm, even if not directly from parenting. And here’s what I know and imagine is true for many — when you are in a state of overwhelm, whatever the reason — you cannot ask for support because you don’t have the mental space to even stop and notice what would help, much less articulate it. You cannot coordinate plans or even envision how to incorporate a new variable (“I’ll just bring a pizza over!”) because you are getting through the next immediate thing. You need to be able to surface for more than a minute to see what’s missing and pursue it, even if it’s something will impact you positively. Like I said, I am very far from being in the situation of a new parent, but I can totally understand that if you’re in a place where you are struggling to add SHOWERS to your life (a thing with obvious positive impact! A thing that is supposedly “simple!”) you will also struggle with figuring out how to add in higher-order needs. It rubs me the wrong way when it’s described as a matter of effort, priorities, and intention, instead of the sheer mental overload/scarcity that makes activities like “thinking” or “having feelings” a triage situation.
This probably sounds dire and extreme but I think it’s not really so wild or uncommon for capitalism to see people stuck at this crossroads of temperament/health needs and large structural forces. Parenting should not be a thing that creates this mental state but I think for a lot of people, it is, and in our country, I’m not surprised. I don’t want to be defeatist, I think it can and should be possible for parents/nonparents to give each other grace and figure out how to stay connected, but the framing of the problem matters to figure out the solution.
Thank yoooouuu! I've often found it pretty isolating (with the "in between" sort of feeling); having recently made a bit more sense of it all, cannot stop myself from obnoxiously bringing it up ALL the time now :P
Thanks for putting into words what this step-parenting thing can feel like. Yes, it’s not as intense on the caregiving and responsibility, but the complexity, oof. Mine doesn’t live with us, so I don’t give a lot of my time to actively parenting, but I’m still his step-mom when he’s not here; and that affects basically all of our life decisions. I think it’s especially weird when the step-kid is your only kid. I’ve often described myself as being “child-free by choice, except for being bonus mom to this one teenager.”
Don’t even get me started on how he’s got special needs and won’t likely ever become an independent adult, so rather than becoming empty nesters someday, we’re probably looking at eventually having our adult son live with us.
Sorry, I got away from the actual theme of this article, but your comment reflected my mixed experience in a way that I don’t usually see in these conversations and I had to acknowledge it.
I struggled a lot after my second kid was born. That transition was incredibly hard, and I found myself unprepared mentally and physically. It was during that low point in my life that I found out I had not been invited to the wedding of someone I considered a good friend. And I was hurt, but also realized that it made sense. I had been a shit friend because my focus had been on my kids and my struggle and I hadn’t left any space to consider anyone else.
Since then I’ve done a lot of work trying to re-focus on other people, too. Part of that is being clear on my limitations , both with myself and other people. But I’ve also committed to spending time with my friends in ways that are meaningful to them, which often is without kids. And I’ve found it makes me a better, happier person because I get to be myself as a friend for a while, not me as a mom or a spouse.
I'm so impressed by the way you came to the realizations with some self tough love. It couldn't have been easy. Speaking for those of us on the single friend side of the equation, I celebrate you.
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.
Thank you! I have held it together for my friends who are parents so many times and then broken down sobbing on the floor afterward. It's really hard to experience how little space is held for friends who do not or cannot have children.
Thanks for articulating this. It feels like there's no space held for this. My pet peeve / emotional trigger is when I share my single/child-free plans which often include travel etc, and parents say "I wish I had your life." It feels so insensitive because truly, often, I wish I had their life! It's like they can't even see from your perspective at all and offer some empathy.
I think these kinds of comments are dog whistles - they’re really saying that non-parent lives are easier.
I meant to include that Jody Day of Gateway Women (and if you are childless not by choice, she is someone who should be on your radar!) has termed this the "#FriendshipApocalypse" of childlessness. ;)
Yes!!!!! I was surprised that The Cut article didn’t expand in the deep grief that all of this entails! In addition to what you name (as Adam Phillips calls it “the grief of the life not lived,”), and also the grief of your precious friendships changing in ways that you wouldn’t have chosen! The loss of intimacy of not being relied upon in the same way, friends not having the capacity for care and comfort, grief over not being able to connect/relate in the same way (abandonment/attachment activation for many) etc and all of this happening within the container of the pervasive ocean that is cishetetopatriarchy that says “your value is yoked to that thing you don’t have and may want” (eg “landing a man, having kids.) In short “they won, you lost.”
I completely agree. I typically ride very hard for APD but this article felt unbalanced and like it wasn’t sure what it was. As a piece of diaristic writing, sure, everything she’s saying has value. But, while she attempted to include the perspectives of others, including people with children, it felt very unbalanced. I am childless by choice but there are so very many people who are not for a variety of reasons. Yes, adding a third party (a baby) who is totally dependent on one member of a friendship pair does inherently change the dynamic of that friendship. But there are so many more reasons for that than “my friends don’t want to stay at the bar with me until midnight anymore.”
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.
It's absolutely a trap!!!!!
This is exactly why I choose to be childless! I am fascinated by the lives of my female friends who have kids and how they continued to make that choice in spite of (or perhaps ignorant to) how much harder it made every aspect of their lives. My friends are ambitious Type-A women who strongly value their friendships and I look at the chaos in their lives and think, “Wow, that’s what *really* wanting something must look like,” because they still chose this path regardless of how incredibly difficult, all-consuming and unpredictable it is. And as a childless person who enjoys kids (for the most part), I value my role as a “village person” in the “it takes a village” equation. Unlike my friends with kids, my life is not forced to be quite as insular so I can focus my energy outward and pop in to provide support when and where I see it is needed. In this role, I feel just as valuable to my community as the “breeders” regardless of whether society-at-large sees it that way.
THIIISSS!!
This!!!!
A bit of a different perspective- I lost my young adult child to suicide this year, and being with my peers now, so much of the conversation STILL revolves around kids, now young adult kids. It is sometimes painful to hear about what everyone’s kids are doing - jobs, marriages, etc- when my kid, obviously, isn’t here any more. I can listen for a while but why can’t we talk about something, anything else? Our world is so child focused even when those children are grown.
I am so sorry for your loss. :(
I understand this feeling. One thing I didn't mention in my comment above is that I was pregnant, 25 years ago, but the baby (a girl) was stillborn at 6 months. I had several friends/relatives/workmates who were pregnant around the same time and I've watched as those kids -- my daughter's peers -- grew up, went through school, graduated and are now starting to get married. i never had to guess what she might be doing or might be interested in or would be studying at school, because I always had the examples of these kids around me.
People seemed to forget about my loss and that my daughter might have been their child's playmate, very quickly. I still get those "ouch!" moments now & then, especially around those milestone events like graduations and weddings. My daughter would have turned 25 this year, and even though she would have been done with school years ago, the first day of school, and seeing all those photos and social media posts come flooding in, can (still) be painful. It's not quite the same situation as what you're going through with your child, but I feel like there are a few similarities...!
I am so very sorry. It's a terrible thing.
My friend runs an org called stillmama.org
Find connections in the child loss community...they are very kind
Adjacent while obviously much lesser: I am my 20-year-old disabled child's guardian. They may not ever live independently. And my younger kid is struggling even to complete high school due to ADHD, despite considerable brilliance. Many, many people I know have zero conversation other than college: what the kids are doing to prepare, and where they're applying, and where they've been accepted, and all the great activities they're doing and how they will do them to get into college, or do them AT college. And when they ask how old my kids are, college is the inevitable question: "Oh, they must be college age, where are they going/planning to go?" Social media is drenched in pride and ambivalence about empty nesting. I am constantly blindsided and struggling what those answers are for us. I feel some of your emotions about all this.
This is absolutely related. When my son was alive he was disabled in a way - emotionally- md couldn’t do a lot of the typical things - going to college, etc. And it was so hard then, too, with everyone else’s kids hitting those milestones. So what definitely empathize with you 😢
Not only the milestones, but the constant, constant happy talk about the culmination of the kids' incredible hard work and how amazing they are. My children don't get much if any of that.
Our kids worked hard too, and so did we. If only input predicted output.
I'm so sorry for your loss. We're coming to the 4th anniversary of the same sort of loss next week. A club no one wants to join.
To relate to the post, it's a bomb that goes off in your life, and leaves radioactive waste behind. In our case, the actual end was a sudden shock, but there was a years long process leading up to that point.
Our friends were very much there for us in the immediate aftermath, especially for the memorial thing we did here, but we isolated ourselves quite a bit, in those first months, to avoid having our grief overwhelm everyone all the time.* Then there was a global pandemic and everyone isolated themselves from everyone else for quite a while. My wife and I deal with the thing quite differently: I like to talk about our son, and the things we did and said and felt together. She's a lot quieter, and has folded herself away from most people.
* I'll tell a short illustrative story. A few weeks after, I felt up to some light socializing, and went, as usual, to walk with the Democratic float in the Homecoming parade. It was the first time pretty much anyone had seen me, so in the staging area lots of people came up to hug me. One local politician who didn't know me that well -- we knew each other's names -- noticed this and asked me about it. I told her and she started crying, and then backed away from me, because she was about to be in a hugely public parade, and couldn't be doing it with a teary face. She was right (and I would vote for her for anything, tbh.)
First, I am so, so sorry. And second - you're absolutely right, and I'm so sorry your current peers aren't sensitive to this. I hope you're able to find other peer groups who are less hyper-focused on their kids' life happenings all of the time.
Not liking the sadness about your loss, liking the important callout of how parenting "success" is life-defining for so many people.
I am so sorry. How hard this must be for you. Thank you for sharing.
Gosh oh gosh this must be so difficult. I am so so sorry for your loss ❤️🩹
Very sorry for your loss. Thanks for sharing this perspective.
When I had my first kid I remember feeing so overwhelmed that literally every thought was about my child. It had so completely reworked my consciousness that you could have asked me what 2 + 2 equaled and I would have said “baby”. I felt embarassed that I seemed it have lost all my intelligence.
I’m now 10 years out from that first child, done with baby making, and am just now coming back into myself as an independent personal no longer constantly physically attached to another human via growing, feeding, and holding them.
And so I’m reprioritizing my friendships and it is a JOY to meet my oldest friends where they are and revel in how they’ve grown. That’s not to say I wasn’t part of their lives as they hit new milestones but I can now recenter them and celebrate them on a far richer level. And it’s like knowing my favorite color is blue but then I have a fresh lens and suddenly I can see teal, cobalt, and aquamarine.
I love that I am coming out of the “catastrophe” of early parenthood and celebrating the richness of life in my friendships. I’m still finding my way in this next phase but I revel in the depth of our shared histories and the future we have next.
This is giving me hope - thank you!
I’m in the same boat as you and totally agree (kids are 10 and 7). I keep reminding my husband that we are in a new stage of parenting that allows us to do things that we didn’t do, or felt we couldn’t when our kids were younger, like one of us going away for a weekend - solo parenting the babies on the weekend once seemed pretty unimaginable for us both.
I think this is also a mid-life thing - we are mid-career and while not terribly wealthy or even all that satisfied with our work tbh, we are not striving or having to figure things out in the same way - but we need and want to keep growing as people! Time to reconnect with people and also ourselves!
As a childless friend, the only other thing I would add is that we sometimes want to be involved and brought into the family -- invite us if we say we're happy to hang with the kids sometimes!
I have a wonderful friend who would invite me to be a third adult to help host her daughter's birthday parties over the years, and it made me feel so happy and included; I would entertain kids, or help out when someone's feelings got hurt, or volunteered to be covered in stickers, or made the food so that someone else could manage shrieking 8 year old girls. I have other friends with children where I haven't been invited in the same way and, not that everyone has to do that, but I think it does contribute to that feeling of missing the intimacy you may have shared before kids came along.
100% this. I’m the childless friend, and I always try to invite my parent friends to things where I can, but the invites I get back from them always tend to be the fewer and further between “I HAVE ESCAPED THE CHILDREN” variety. And I’m here for that, but if you can’t make the things I’m doing because of a baseball tournament or a dance recital or just sheer child related mayhem I am happy to be invited to the mayhem.
Absolutely this. I want to still hang out with my friends with kids when kids are around! I say so clearly and unambiguously. But the parent friends still only hang out with each other, and I am not invited, and not invited to the kids' birthday parties, and I don't really understand how else I can do all of what AHP is talking about in this post about staying involved in the kids' lives if I'm not considered as someone to invite in to get to know them.
this right here!
That’s lovely.
I am the perpetually childless woman who always wanted to be a mom. The exclusion that happened after my divorce, when the friends with kids suddenly deemed me like... tragic? For being single and childless... I am at my desk weeping.
It can also happen if you have kids and get divorced. Single moms who are doing it all are also often tragic and toxic. Like infidelity is catching. Whatever the cause, it really really sucks and is lonely, so lonely. I hope you find solace somehow.
I am sorry your friends have abandoned you. They’re missing out.
When I read that article, I thought, “I really hope AHP writes something about this.”
I’m a woman, and childless, but several of my friends have kids or are having kids, and the article pained me. Your concluding paragraph here, I think, nails it:
“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.“
I think if we think of friendship and community as just people to accompany us on nights out and fancy dinners and girls trips and to listen to us vent about our lives, then yeah, we’re going to be disappointed when our friends have kids, because all of that is taking a backseat. Something completely overwhelming and all consuming has entered their lives and their entire world has shifted. It’s not wrong to mourn or grieve for what used to be—your parent friends probably are too! But we don’t always have to place our own emotions at the center, IMO.
If we want *real* community, then we need to be willing to accomodate and see our friends through those major shifts / crises / catastrophes, both the surprises and the longed for. Of course, parents have a role to play in maintaining friendships too. But I think we need to understand that for a few years, it’s going to be mostly on us to hold them up and help carry them through. That’s what friendship is for.
I love this. Just like in spousal partnerships, sometimes one person has more time, energy, love to give. I am trying to give what I can when I can and ask for what I need when I need it and appreciate my people without scorekeeping.
This year my youngest entered school and they are at a really neat age where they can do so much independently and I have been delighted to find more space in my life for my friendships and for myself. I don’t begrudge the toddler years where they needed so much of me, though. Now I know how fleeting those years were and I’m happy to have been there for the little people who needed a lot.
I am forever grateful for my friends who are welcoming the extra time I can now spend with them with no guilt trip or reminders of when I might have been absent.
The messages from those who have experienced loss in this thread will definitely influence how I interact with others in similar positions in the future. Thank you all for sharing!
I had a lot of feelings about the Davis article, as someone with very painful and extended infertility, and then a very quick transition from that to being an older adoptive mom (I'm now now 40 with an almost three-year-old, and having spent a lot of time in evangelical circles who start their families in the early and mid-twenties, that makes me especially geriatric).
When we're gracious with each other, we can show up for each other. And that's a muscle we can use over and over again - and we'll need to use over and over again, because after adolescence, that conveyor belt of age-related stages really stops and the variables take over. I mean, if you think the kids are rocking your social world, wait until the divorces hit! Or spouses die, or kids have special needs, or kids pass away much too soon - you need to start exercising that grace now because life is hard and if you want to keep your friends, you need to be gentle with them. We're human and very fragile.
Oh the divorces...yes. I have been completely unprepared for this particular difficulty.
The divorce part is so hard, I've found — like it's just a whole lot of pain! But also: it changes the dynamic yet again, particularly if there's shared custody involved. Showing up when a friend has a kid is very important but I feel like showing up amidst and after a divorce is just as much if not more so.
Anne Helen, I find so much of the difficulty is the awful line in the sand by the couple of choosing sides. Are you Team Spouse #1 or Team Spouse #2? Why is this so? Sometimes it's so uncomfortable as the single friend, you walk away completely.
Yes, I’ve tried to make this point less gracefully upthread. Once parents start to die, it reframes ideas of family and care and community again. We all need one another at different times in different ways.
“ that conveyor belt of age-related stages really stops and the variables take over”
I love this, and it is so true (I’m your age so I’ve seen it by now). I wish young people and teens also knew this and it might relieve some of the pressure and expectations they feel entering the adult world too.
I feel like a lot of people could learn a lot from paying attention to their elders (I feel so old right now, lol), but watching my mom manage elder care for her parents, and the choices her parents made vs my dad's parents, all of that left such an impression on me. (Now my mom is managing my dad's disability care since his hemorrhagic stroke, pour one out for her.)
And I remember a somewhat younger family member telling me, "I just want to be a mom" while I was maybe 5-6 years into infertility, and she knew that I was years into infertility - the data is there, I think maybe too often we're too convinced of our own immortality/ infallibility to engage with it.
Your second paragraph is an absolute truth bomb. It echos what AHP wrote about how the kids get older and things can be fun again, but reminds us that having kids is not even close to the only bomb that can change our lives and the lives of those we love.
This is so beautifully put.
As someone who chose not to have kids, I feel like the honest answer to making friendships work after kids is that I sacrificed a lot of my needs and expectations in the effort to maintain those friendships early on. I had some resentment about that at first but came around to realizing that parenthood meant my friends with kids were sacrificing their needs and expectations as well, and we were all learning a new world. It's a massive change, but I think I slowly accepted that I could either resist that change and be unhappy or set new expectations and find new ways to be with my friends who are parents. My husband and I have tried to be very involved as auntie and uncle and I agree with Anne and so many others that it has gotten immensely easier as the kids have gotten older and can play by themselves or be left with a sitter for some alone time with friends. There is still grief there - I feel like a huge part of why I struggled with whether or not to have kids was the sadness I felt about not taking the same path as my friends and the distance it would create - but also a lot of joy and love and trust with my friends in having navigated this change together and come out the other side in a way that still honors our friendships. And I've tried to cultivate relationships with friends who don't have kids that can satisfy the needs I have (like for long meandering in-depth conversations!) that my friends with kids just can't meet right now. I always really appreciate these discussions and all the comments - they help me feel so much less alone in navigating these changes.
I really appreciated this as someone whose friends are all just starting to have kids and who feels like I’m about to be left behind. I appreciated The Cut article because if articulated and acknowledged this sacrifices childless people make in their relationships in a way that’s not usually discussed. Sometimes it sucks and you’re allowed to feel like it sucks to not have the same emotional intimacy (at least for a while) with your parent friend. Grace can be extended both ways.
Agreed, what I most appreciated about The Cut article (which, tbh, grated in some ways too) was making explicit the sacrifice experienced by folks without kids — expected but rarely acknowledged (or allowed to be, in polite conversation). Making space for feeling that loss and finding ways to mitigate it seems key.
I saw a lot of comments on the Instagram post for the Alison Davis article from parents that said a variation of: "we don't maintain our friendships because we don't have the time/a support system, it takes a village." I absolutely agree that support systems for parents are incredibly lacking in this country and our government's neglect and a whole host of other cultural and economic factors are at play. But I also am frustrated to see "it takes a village" over and over from parents that seem to interpret the "Village" as "a group of people who will take some of the burden of child rearing from me." I've always thought the proverbial village is meant to encapsulate care from *everyone*; the village/community not only helps with child care and practices emotional generosity, but also helps with elder care, medical issues, and other types of reciprocity that makes life better and benefits their whole community. I think when parents (in this example) look around and perceive that there is no one to help them and they have been "abandoned" by friends, they should think about how they have maintained those bonds with their wider community. I've helped friends with their kids, been very understanding about scheduling issues and last minute changes of plans, traveled to them etc...but these friends have also made it their business to be there for me when they can with non-childcare/child-related problems. Support systems have to be cultivated on all sides, not because "you owe me, time to get mine" but because we owe each other. If you're a person who hasn't cultivated community, it is not magically going to appear once a baby is in the mix.
Yes! The expectation that the "village" is ABOUT child-rearing is so frustrating. Certainly community should include that, but there has to be more to it. Otherwise it's just drafting all the non-parents as unpaid labor.
YES.
There's a columnist in the Guardian who writes on parenting issues -- Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett -- who mentioned The Cut article. She said: "What’s changed, I think, is that more and more women are choosing to be child-free and feeling entitled to child-free time, whereas historically they would be roped into communal childrearing. It’s a reasonable expectation, but we all need to be kind to one another, and new parents are especially vulnerable. Having a baby can be like a bomb going off in your life, and at times like that you need your friends more than ever, even if they’re sick of hearing about it."
This was shared in one of the childless-not-by-choice online communities I frequent, and the reaction was not especially positive. Like, how dare we feel "entitled" to our child-free time, right? And I thought the "roped into communal childrearing" was a pretty telling way to put it...! "A reasonable expectation?" -- I should think so...! Someone said, "feeling entitled to another person's labour and support is the real problem." And as another said, "Surely there has to be some give and take?" I mean, kindness works both ways...
And (as I mentioned further upthread), realizing that the children you always thought you would have are not going to materialize after all -- that parenthood is not going to happen for you, when you wanted and expected it would -- can also very much be like bomb going off in our own lives. We need our parenting friends to support us too -- but too often, the support only seems to go one way. Yes, we can try to make new friends when our parent friends drift away, but that's often easier said than done, especially at midlife.
I will be honest, Davis’ essay didnt resonate with me as much, even though I am childless, because it seems so different than how folks I know do friendships/family. I think our larger American culture is so segmented by generations that we miss out on making and sustaining places for folks at all stafes of life to be and stay connected.
I’m a mom of a three year old and when I read Alison’s piece - which was so similar to how I felt pre-kid - all I could think was “Christ I was such an asshole.” Maybe that’s unfair to the feelings I had but what I saw reading that was a person (me) who could not and did not try to empathize with my friends, who had no curiosity about what my friends were going through. But even more than my friends, I wish I had learned earlier in life to see the humanity of kids at all stages with their accompanying limitations. I thought about kids and their appeal the way one would think of themselves as a dog vs cat person. I considered myself someone who believed in community and a person-forward society but I failed to included this huge portion of the population in the grace and understanding that I so willingly extended to adults.
This is so great (and I'm really looking forward to Rhaina Cohen's book, as I keep beating the drum for communal living with my friends—being the only single person among your friends after an unexpected divorce has made it abundantly clear that I'm not anyone's priority anymore, and it hurts).
I'm not really the "fun auntie" and am not even close with own niece and nephew, and it's been a struggle to keep some friendships alive after kids entered the picture. But for the relationships that have done well, there's been an attitude on both sides of "yeah, this is incredibly hard, but we're going to make this work, come hell or high water." Not sure if that's due to the specific nature of those friendships, but I'm grateful for it.
The feeling of “I'm not anyone's priority” is incredibly difficult (I’m the perpetually single lady). It’s one of the reasons I find the loss of friends so hard. It’s why the fairly common notion (as referenced in the Cut article) that it’s ok for friends with kids to just disappear for awhile *and* expect to seamlessly return to friendships just doesn’t work for me. I’m not anyone’s priority; I need reciprocity, even if that reciprocity undergoes constant renovation.
I wholeheartedly agree, Joelle — the reciprocity (which can take so, so many forms) has to be at the heart
Joelle, this is such a good point about reciprocity. I think, as others on this thread have pointed out, it’s not always about what you do together (I understand my parent friends can’t do brunch!), but how you’re treated when you do spend time together. Who cares if we all make time for the brunch if we spend it only talking about kids and partners (that I don’t have)? It’s hard to navigate the loss of your friends’ time but it’s the loss of their attention and care that is harder.
YES.
Oh gosh yes: RECIPROCITY. I'm not asking for a perfect 50/50 balance, because that's totally unrealistic. But I need *something!*
For instance: A few years back, Friend A got busy with school/her relationship, moved to a city where none of our mutual friends lived, and pretty much went AWOL from the group chat (which was VERY active while we were all locked down during the pandemic). Friend B and I, who are still individually close as well as active in our mutual friend group, had VERY different feelings about encountering Friend A at an upcoming wedding this year. I was like "wow, it's going to be so weird to see her, considering she pretty much ghosted all of us." Friend B was like "oh, I'm looking forward to seeing her! She always responds when I reach out, and [husband] and I have had a few catch-up Zooms with her and her partner." I asked Friend B if it bothered her that she always has to be the one to initiate conversations or make the effort to stay in touch with Friend A, and she said it didn't -- we're all busy, no need to keep score, she just appreciates the friendship in whatever form it takes.
I admire her graciousness, but I don't feel the same way at all. I do resent it when things feel one-sided, I think because of the comment upthread: it shows me I'm not a priority, and that is hurtful.
Yes, exactly! It's exhausting to be the one who must always reach out to everyone else if I want to interact with other humans. I so appreciate the friends who recognize that I'm a whole person who deserves the same grace and consideration as those who are partnered, with or without children, despite all of society telling me that I'm less than and have to perpetually be the one to work around everyone else's lives.
As another perpetually single lady, this is EXACTLY what I'm afraid of as my best friend is currently pregnant.
Some days I feel like "I'm not anyone's priority" should be a tshirt I can wear.
"I need reciprocity, even if that reciprocity undergoes constant renovation."
This is so key. Reciprocity might look very different in different seasons, but there has to still be some sense that I'm *important* to you. For many of my friendships, this roadbump comes up when friends get married most of all, and their new spouse takes on primary priority. I don't need to be your *primary* priority, just need to know that I am a priority *in some way.*
I've more often felt cut out by friends who got married (I'm single), and if our friendship has survived them getting married, then it often survives them having kids as well. I think in both cases it comes back to—at your heart, do you still care about and prioritize me, even if that looks different than it did before?
I felt the Cut article deeply. I'm interested in any advice on how to deal with this new dynamic between sisters - one pregnant and one child-free - and a baby-obsessed grandmom to be. I'm childfree and very excited to be an aunt, but my mom - who has held her tongue about my child free choice - is now UNLEASHED and has ZERO boundaries or self awareness about pregnancy chat now my sister is pregnant with her first.
Our family group chat is bombarded with Mom's 'baby bore' content about prospective sleeping schedules and breastfeeding and 'it's true that you never know love until a baby comes' crazy problematic stuff. Every Facetime with me is about the baby coming. My sister is more understanding and limits nappy decision chats to her mom friends, while making me feel wanted as an beloved aunty, but neither of us know how to deal with how unbothered our own mom is about respecting our different choices in life now because BABY.
Not a lot is written about how a pregnancy can change a relationship between adult sisters and their mom. I've been through the mill of friend experiences when kids arrive but never expected this!
Oh my. YES. You say this so well. In my case, my parents are very involved in childcare for my siblings’ kids, two of whom are very young. And, while nobody takes issue with my choice to be child-free, nobody takes any interest in it either. I have such a hard time having a meaningful relationship with my parents at this point because they are nearly 100% grandkid focused. They essentially have no idea who I am as a person. It feels petulant to say that my parents don’t pay any attention to me, a 43 year old adult. But I would love to have a grown up relationship with them as fellow adults, not as parental figures.
Exactly this. I feel completely insane when I think about it - am I jealous of a literal baby taking my mom's attention? I also have no idea how to share updates about my life in our family group chat (we live on different sides of the country) which we use to communicate and feel involved in each other's lives now it's all baby logistics chat. It's like, sorry Annie, no one cares that you found great produce at the farmer's market or went to a cool outdoor play because Grand-Mom-to-be needs to now bombard the whole family with conversations about formula. It's one thing to go through lulls of friendship dynamics but putting a baby into family dynamics where everyone revolves around my mom's emotional temperature is whoa. I don't know how to be when my childfree life is marked 'frivilous'. Thankfully my sister who is actually pregnant is chill. It's just bought up a lot of mommy drama I'd long buried. Back to therapy for me!
Same. SAME. Getting ignored in the group chat! It brings up so much childhood stuff, it’s wild. And every family gathering is a kid event, so often when I leave at the end, my dad guilts me like “oh I barely got to talk to you.” So much therapy, please.
I am the parent in my sibling duo and my brother is currently child-free. We actually have 3 group chats - one for parents and each sibling and then one joint one. It helps cut down on the kid chatter (grandparents wanting to know things etc) and makes the larger group chat truly a place where we all share highlights and updates. It may sound complex but similar to how you don't want your parents triangulating normally it's good to split it out in the group chat too!
Ann, they'll have a relationship with you again the minute you become your parents' caregiver. Because it's almost ALWAYS the single daughter and frequently the eldest daughter who gets this assignment.
And what kind of relationship will that be, at that point, if they didn’t take the time to have one with her before needing the care? ☹️
Elle and Gayle both nailed it. I actually find myself grieving the loss of my parents before they even pass away 😳
My parents are amazingly kind and loving people but the extreme kid-focus creates huge blind spots where any non-kid-oriented relationships are concerned. It’s possibly generational. They are small town midwestern baby boomers and my mom was tradwife by default, before there were any other socially acceptable POVs. Having kids young was just what you did. So these grandparent roles are a natural extension of their parent roles. And they’re so comfortable with kids that they’re not able to really take much genuine interest in other paths, even within their own family.
I wish I had something helpful to say, but so much this. my relationships with my parents are nothing like they used to be and nothing like I thought they'd be. my brother had kiddos and that changed everything in the ways you're both talking about, and then their own aging health issues started, and it very much seems like no one is interested in my life, other than in how I can help them. and I do want to help! but.....lots of therapy time talking about these issues, for sure.
Older adults can get babyfever like whoa. I've seen it so many times. It makes biological sense, in a way, but holy hell was it eye opening to see my parents prioritize visiting the siblings who have children, and demand that the siblings without children be the ones to visit them. There's something about babies that totally addles some peoples' brains. Like, they're not excited about the really difficult parts of childrearing, it's making cute outfits and taking pictures and enjoying the milestones of the first few years. I was able to let go of the bitterness by setting boundaries about what I would participate in and do, and depersonalized it. Babies make people crazy. My parents are much less excited about their moody adolescent grandson who needs a totally different kind of parenting now. Anyway I'm sorry you're going through that, it helped me a lot to reframe it as a form of insanity.
I recently had a baby and my family has created a new WhatsApp chat for baby related updates! We use our old chat for non-baby life news, sharing news articles, etc. and then we have a chat for all things baby. We started it to photo share (I don’t live in the same city as my parents or my brother and my mom requested daily photos), but I have found the division of chatter to be helpful as well.
I’ve had such mixed feelings on this. I straddle the line as a stepparent. (I know plenty of steps just consider themselves parents and they are, for sure! I just feel like I don’t really fit in either camp any more.) Honestly I surprisingly find myself feeling defensive on behalf of parents and I skipped the infant/toddler stage! In my past life as a single/childfree person, I felt like my friends were fairly successful at incorporating me but I think the things that made that possible weren’t necessarily in our control. We lived near each other - this is huge. With some of them, I had a level of closeness already established - so we were comfortable with me just blending into the mess and chaos, no self consciousness to work through. And some of it was down to the temperament of the kid - some kids can be flexible, sleep anywhere, are cool hanging on someone’s lap at a restaurant, etc; and some kids can’t without a huge toll on both kids/parents. These aren’t really things anyone can help. I guess it’s the second one (intimacy) that could maybe be created or sustained with effort. But I realize I’m still describing something other than the child-free time proposed here. For me, being incorporated into home life was actually enough - it made me feel loved and like part of a family - but I’ll say my friends were able to have our normal conversations post-bedtime, too, not just kid talk, so something stayed the same. Maybe that makes the difference.
The experience of adding parenting into my life did pretty much short-circuit me. And I don’t have it on hard mode. But for me it’s the addition of mental labor when I’m already kind of at my breaking point from work. (Caveats: this is maybe pretty specific to me; there is admittedly maybe some baseline neurodivergence/burnout/mental health at play. I also want to point out that being “just” a stepparent does often subtract responsibility and caregiving, but adds LOTS OF COMPLEXITY and grey areas that make each individual decision or communication all the more fraught, all the more deliberate, all the more effortful.) But the point is, for various reasons I’ve experienced overwhelm, even if not directly from parenting. And here’s what I know and imagine is true for many — when you are in a state of overwhelm, whatever the reason — you cannot ask for support because you don’t have the mental space to even stop and notice what would help, much less articulate it. You cannot coordinate plans or even envision how to incorporate a new variable (“I’ll just bring a pizza over!”) because you are getting through the next immediate thing. You need to be able to surface for more than a minute to see what’s missing and pursue it, even if it’s something will impact you positively. Like I said, I am very far from being in the situation of a new parent, but I can totally understand that if you’re in a place where you are struggling to add SHOWERS to your life (a thing with obvious positive impact! A thing that is supposedly “simple!”) you will also struggle with figuring out how to add in higher-order needs. It rubs me the wrong way when it’s described as a matter of effort, priorities, and intention, instead of the sheer mental overload/scarcity that makes activities like “thinking” or “having feelings” a triage situation.
This probably sounds dire and extreme but I think it’s not really so wild or uncommon for capitalism to see people stuck at this crossroads of temperament/health needs and large structural forces. Parenting should not be a thing that creates this mental state but I think for a lot of people, it is, and in our country, I’m not surprised. I don’t want to be defeatist, I think it can and should be possible for parents/nonparents to give each other grace and figure out how to stay connected, but the framing of the problem matters to figure out the solution.
Just a quick shoutout for stepparents! This is an under-discussed, complex, and potentially amazing parenting relationship. <3
Thank yoooouuu! I've often found it pretty isolating (with the "in between" sort of feeling); having recently made a bit more sense of it all, cannot stop myself from obnoxiously bringing it up ALL the time now :P
“Getting through the next immediate thing” - yes!
Thanks for putting into words what this step-parenting thing can feel like. Yes, it’s not as intense on the caregiving and responsibility, but the complexity, oof. Mine doesn’t live with us, so I don’t give a lot of my time to actively parenting, but I’m still his step-mom when he’s not here; and that affects basically all of our life decisions. I think it’s especially weird when the step-kid is your only kid. I’ve often described myself as being “child-free by choice, except for being bonus mom to this one teenager.”
Don’t even get me started on how he’s got special needs and won’t likely ever become an independent adult, so rather than becoming empty nesters someday, we’re probably looking at eventually having our adult son live with us.
Sorry, I got away from the actual theme of this article, but your comment reflected my mixed experience in a way that I don’t usually see in these conversations and I had to acknowledge it.
I struggled a lot after my second kid was born. That transition was incredibly hard, and I found myself unprepared mentally and physically. It was during that low point in my life that I found out I had not been invited to the wedding of someone I considered a good friend. And I was hurt, but also realized that it made sense. I had been a shit friend because my focus had been on my kids and my struggle and I hadn’t left any space to consider anyone else.
Since then I’ve done a lot of work trying to re-focus on other people, too. Part of that is being clear on my limitations , both with myself and other people. But I’ve also committed to spending time with my friends in ways that are meaningful to them, which often is without kids. And I’ve found it makes me a better, happier person because I get to be myself as a friend for a while, not me as a mom or a spouse.
Anyway, all that to say that I love this.
I'm so impressed by the way you came to the realizations with some self tough love. It couldn't have been easy. Speaking for those of us on the single friend side of the equation, I celebrate you.