Your relationship with childless friends
Having a baby rearranges not only your life but all the relationships in it - and friendships with childless friends are the relationships most likely to wither slowly or rapidly implode.
Flashpoints with childless friends
Childless friends may do any of the following:
- Fail to understand why you can't check your breastfed newborn into a hotel so you can attend a hen weekend in Paris.
- Gaze into the middle distance when you try to express your pressing anxiety as to whether your four-week-old can focus her eyes.
- Be full of really pantstastic parenting advice.
And a few will be delightful and will hold your baby while you bathe your stitches in salt water and cry.
How to protect your friendship with childless friends
Getting your own head in order is likely to help you to preserve your friendships. At least long enough to decide whether you really want them.
- Remember some friendships hibernate and come back to life later. Maybe when your friend has her own baby.
- You have gone on a great journey without your friends. They are just the same old slightly crap mates they have always been. But you are that same crap mate with added unavailability, mood swings and an obsessive interest in a very dull, redfaced, shouty thing. Sometimes they just need you to explain to them how things are different.
As one Mumsnetter, Caligula, explains: "I think with the oblivious childless, you just have to give it to them straight. 'Look, I know you don't understand this, but leaving my children for a whole weekend at this stage, is simply not an option. I can't do it, because they are my children. When you have children, you will understand why I can't, but at the moment you'll just have to take my word for it that it's impossible. Sorry, I'd love to come, but I just can't. Have a lovely time.' And if she keeps on nagging, just say, 'Listen, when you have kids, I'm going to remind you of this. And you will understand then.'"
- Your pre-baby friends are people you loved for a reason. Don't give up on them too easily. Maybe try to see them in different ways while your life is in chaos - a coffee rather than a drunken night out. Or just wait.
- Plan to store up those snippets of parenting advice and recycle them when the childless friends reproduce. And remember to buy them Mumsnet Guides.
- Have some tact about how many weaning stories you tell.
- Quite a lot of people find other people's children dull. And they don't realise that kindness to your child is a form of kindness to you. If they are reasonably polite, that's good enough.
- Be sensitive to the fact that some childless friends may be struggling with their own issues, including infertility.
Getting the best out of childless friends
If you have some friends who entertain your children and cook you meals when you are prostrated by illness, grapple them to you with hoops of steel. If you have friends who are good friends but never warm to your children or want to hang out at your house while you throw a ball for a toddler, spend quality adult time with them. The day will come when you want that.
And sometimes, we just have to accept that certain friendships don't survive the birth of a child or some other life-changing event and that's just the way it is. If you need consoling about this fact, post on the Relationships Talk board.