I feel fortunate that I have some lovely old friends with dc, and mostly over the years we have all grown up together with the children playing when they were younger and it has been great, but just lately it has become quite strained.
DDs (13 & nearly 16) do not want to see my old friends' children anymore. They tell me they have nothing in common and don't enjoy it. I dds are old enough to decide who they see, so I have since tried to organise just adult evenings and days out with my friends, and this is where the difficulty lies.
My friends for a multiple reasons really are insisting on doing things with dc still.
Some have dc that don't have many/any friends and so really want to see my girls, others see my eldest dd as a good influence and want their dc to hang out with her to keep them away from what has become a troubling period. One other set have a dd that is really quite unkind to my youngest dd. So we obv avoid them. Others have younger ones and can not organise babysitting because of lockdown! I It has become really fraught now we are out of lockdown, and friends want to catch up.
Do I:
- Insist on adults only get togethers and if I don't see them, that is fine
- Take tc and make it short and sweet
- Distance from it all for a while, see more straight forward friends
- A solution I haven't thought of!
Am I being unreasonable or selfish?
This is causing some tension between us, because I don't want to say outright and hurt anyone's feelings that my dc are no longer interested - and probably never were really, so I have been saying dc are busy with sports, revision etc but then they ask for the next free date!!
How do others manage this transition?
The whole group gathering just doesn't work anymore..