to find it increasingly depressing how having children (or not) still can really divide women and end friendships and to wonder how the rest of you deal with this?

[quesadilla]

I always really wanted not to be the kind of person who only had "mummy" friends -- it was one of the reasons I was never sure if I wanted kids until I had dd. When I was pregnant and when DD was very little I went of my way to avoid NCT-ish friendship groups in order not to restrict myself only to the company of other mums of young babies. Not that there's anything wrong with it, I just didn't want to "lose" the old me and become a baby bore, IYSWIM.
Most of my long-term friends now have children and we all suffer from the usual difficulties of keeping in touch with each other that small kids/jobs impose on lives.
Among those who haven't, most are OK with the fact that children form a major part of your life. But I have one friend, childless, who more or less demands that I not refer to my child in front of her unless its a passing or incidental reference (i.e. I have to pick her up after work tonight, type reference). She gets very uptight if the conversation drifts to children for more than a minute or so and complains. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand that other people's children are of limited interest and particularly if you don't have kids yourself, and I don't want to talk about DD's potty training progress when I'm out with the girls. But I also don't realy want to be forced into a situation where the most important person in my life is ruled totally off conversational limits, and any decision to put her needs over friend's needs is treated with anger and scorn. (FYI just as context, childless friend is largely childless by choice, so its not like she's had a heartbreaking history of failure to conceive or anything.)
Childless friend's attitude towards her friend's children has become harder and harder to deal with: there have been a couple of incidents in the past few months where I think her behaviour has been unreasonable. I've tried to be accomodating but have got to the point where I really don't know if I can sustain the friendship any more, we've sort of drifted apart and it makes me feel very sad. At the same time, while I still crave adult and interesting company, I really want a local friendship group where I can actually share parenting ideas/discussions etc. I would really like to think that I can maintain a balance between having friends who really have nothing to do with my family life and being a mum and other friends who are able to share in the experience of being a parent, but it just seems to be bloody hard work.
Do people have to accept that there's a fundamental divide between parents and non-parents which is hard to bridge until kids grow up? Or is it just that I've got the wrong kind of childless friends?

Maebe quite, you've got to the heart of it for me. I am fascinated by lots of subjects and bored stupid by others. I would never in a million years say to someone at the beginning of a friendship "please don't talk about your yoga classes/irritable bowel syndrome/your ongoing attempts to get planning permission to build a conservatory because I'm not interested." Its a question of using your judgement about what people want to talk about and what they don't and being sensitive and reading people. No-one with any social skills is going to spend a whole evening talking about their children and I wouldn't want such a person as a friend. But why is it OK for her to talk for an hour or more about her work and then get shitty with me when I remark, in passing, that I need to think about a primary school? And is this normal? by the sounds of it from what the rest of you are thinking, no its not....

Some people are awful bores about their dcs. They are usually the same ones who are/were bores about their jobs, boyfriends, dhs, what time the gasman did or didn't call...

I enjoyed going out with a friend and never mentioned the dcs - only, as the OP says, when it was necessary, eg oh, can't come, dd has chickenpox etc.

But, in her 40s, friend had child. Oh My Good God. She can bore for England, Team GB, Team Universe on the subject of said child. I have not seen her for a while because my teeth were grinding that for so many years I did the sensitive thing and didn't drone on about the dcs, but she doesn't afford me the same politeness now. Her dc is lovely, but I am really not interested in every single last detail of its life.

In fact dh had the same thing. He never mentioned the dcs to his single friend. Then, finally the friend finds partner and breeds. He then had the cheek to say to dh that dh obviously never really enjoyed fatherhood because he had never mentioned his children. Dh was apoplectic.

This is about your friend being difficult, not people with/out children.

But what do you mean when you say she's 'largely childless by choice'? Just because she hasn't been TTC for 5 years doesn't mean to say she can't be inwardly struggling about her role in society/her friendship circles if she's not a mother and everyone else around her is. Is she single and feels she's running out of time to find someone? Is she with a man who doesn't want kids and she's ambivalent? Could her touchiness be stemming from something personal?

hippermiddleton what I mean by that is that she's always been highly ambivalent about having kids. She hasn't been in a settled relationship for over a decade and is now probably too old to have them and I think has come to terms with the fact that she now won't have kids and since making that decision has been militantly aggressive about how much having kids has ruined everyone else's life and she seems convinced having them would ruin hers. Its possible she's nursing some deeply held and not recognised bitterness about it but if that's the case its buried fairly deep.

It doesn't sound like her bitterness is deeply buried - it sounds like it is bubbling away right at the surface for everyone to see.

No, it's not particularly normal. As lainie says, people who are bores about their children probably were bores about something else beforehand anyway. Most normal people only bring up the DCs a bit on a night out.

If I were you, I'd be half-tempted to ask your friend if there is any reason why you aren't allowed to talk about the children. It might be that she is struggling with not having children herself, in which case this is an entirely different scenario. But if she says it's because she doesn't have any interest in children because she doesn't have children herself, it would be interesting to remind her that you have no experience of skiing/yoga/knitting but you haven't told her not to talk about those topics.

I still vividly remember when I was about 16w pg, at a terrible low point because I had been throwing up constantly for 10 weeks, hadn't seen a friend or done anything interesting because all I was managing in life was to go to work and crawl home to bed - and my friend, after about 60 seconds on the phone, cut me off my admittedly mildly self-pitying and also very hormonal wail and asked if I had anything that was "actually interesting" to talk about I was so hurt I actually went out of my way to ask her about this a few days later. She just said "well, I've never been pregnant, so why would I find that interesting to talk about?"

kerala I don't mean to imply that I think all mothers are dull. I just felt before I had a child and my perspective on this has shifted somewhat now that certain types of friendships based purely around children could be rather dull and stultifying and limiting. Partly because my mum had a lot of these and obviously felt very bored and trapped by a lot of them. But I understand that one can meet a lot of friends through children and then develop relationships which transcend children.

I can understand not wanting your friends to go on and on and on about their children but the OPs friend sounds quite rude and bossy and extreme in her reactions. I would agree its probably just her personality.

talking about your kids, if you have kids, is just the same as talking about any other part of your life. Why is it different to talking about your job, or your partner, or your parents, or your hobbies? No one only talks with their friends about the things they have completely on common. I don't have pets but I'll talk to my friends about their pets. I don't ski, but I'll talk to them about their skiing holidays. That's just what you do in a friendship. You talk about the different things that are important to you.

Maebe that sums up friendship perfectly.

I wonder if others have noticed a recent media trend in pitting mothers against non-mothers (always the women, never men). Growing up, my parents had friends from all walks of life, some had children and some didn't and it was never an issue; now, however, we seem actively encouraged to forge an identity through reproductive choices and "stick with our own". It seems I am bombarded with media articles and blogs about "what I secretly hate about my childless friend"/"what I really want to say to my childed friend" or advice on how to "maintain" these friendships which does little more that continue to emphasise the differences in lifestyles.

For what it is worth, I understand where the OP is coming from on the "mummy friends" thing. I swear my SiL took delight in dumping all her friends when she became pregnant because "now I am with people who truly understand me" and for her, the idea of not talking about one of the children for more than 30 seconds would be unthinkable - why have children if you want to discuss other things/people???

I think there is a middle ground, which most sane people manage to acheive . We need friends from all walks of life - some who have known us for a long time and really understand our personalities, some who ahve gone through shared experiences, some who can cheer us up with a joke...

I don't have children and would probably fit into the "largely by choice" category, although I am very comfortable with my ultimate decision (I'm also a committed auntie, godmother and work with teenagers). Would I get fed up if a friend spoke about nothing other than a blow-by-blow account of what her child did and said over the past month? Of course I would. Would I get fed up if a friend similarly dominated the conversation with what her cat did or a minute-by-minute reconstruction of her latest travels? Absolutely! But all these topics are things that I would expect to hear about and would take an interest (sometimes more genuine that others) because that's what friends do.

What does make it difficult however is when one person is outnumbered in a group and no matter how much everyone things they are moderating their conversation to include everyone, there really are a lot of references to their children and little comments like "well, you wouldn't understand; you're not a mother" or seemingly positive comments like "ooh, your life is so different from ours" which, as they stack up over an evening can start to sting. Obviously the same can happen in the opposite situation when a mother is out with a group of childfree friends but I'm focussing on the situation presented in the OP.

Perhaps the OP's friend does actually need a friend. Maybe talking about her work is a way of trying to get the OP to ask the right questions so that she can confide that she is unhappy or has concerns about the future. Maybe she is genuinely scared of losing her friends so her demands to not hear about any children is her way of trying to turn back the clock and recreate the way your friendship/nights out used to be. I'll admit I got very scared and maybe a little crazy at the thought of losing friends (yes, this did come from the aforementioned media articles) Or maybe she is just being selfish, which is a trait not confined to the childfree or parents.

As others have said, she obviously thinks you are close enough to set embargos without it causing a problem so do the same back to her. Tell her you will be happy not to speak about your child if she agrees to hold back on conversation on one topic also.

"I don't mean to imply that I think all mothers are dull. I just felt before I had a child and my perspective on this has shifted somewhat now that certain types of friendships based purely around children could be rather dull and stultifying and limiting."

I think you've missed out if you've deliberately eschewed 'mummy friends'. Mothers are people just like any other - they can be dull, interesting, intelligent, irritating, alternative, mainstream ... ad infinitum. They aren't limited to talking about their children! My NCT group spent the first six weeks after birth obsessively talking about our babies - because they were our first babies and we were all feeling our way along together.

After that it mellowed into more of a normal friendship, talking about work, politics, feminism, cooking, sex ... blah blah. I don't get this stuff about the 'old me' either. I think these divisions are in your head.

Benedict understood - I think what I am partly saying is that before having kids I shared my friend's prejudice about mothers and I am now coming to realise how silly and limiting it is.
Novembrish beautifully put. It has crossed my mind that my friend is sensitive about this which is why I have gone out of my way to accommodate her but she is so relentlessly negative about motherhood it is difficult.

Your friend probably thinks (with some justification) that you are a giant hypocrite who was against talking about children until she had her own child to gas on about.

The title of your thread is bizarre given that you personally seem to think that whether a woman has children defines her in terms of whether she is interesting to you.

You used to think mothers were beneath you, now you are trying to recruit mother friends.

I think your friend is probably feeling a bit ambivalent about children. She hasn't had the ideal circumstances in which to have them, and even if she is largely happy with that there is a large section of the media dedicated to telling people (women) that they have failed if they don't have a husband and children. So I can understand why people get a bit defensive even if they aren't bothered about not having same.

But I still think she's being rude. Part of the point of having friends is so you get different perspectives on life. For me one of the best things about having friends is getting to vicariously experience being a doctor/teacher/grandmother/man without actually doing it. I think if you insist your friends only talk about things that directly apply to you then you are both rude and dull.

I agree with whoever said that the media is obsessed with 'mummy wars'. But that is because 'the media' has many pages of print to fill every day, and sometimes they just use any old lazy crap which doesn't really exist in actual life.

I would bet anything she secretly longs for kids but for whatever reason it hasn't happened.

AThingInYourLife
What is your problem? I've now said three times, including capitals for the benefit of people who didn't understand it the first two times that I NEVER talk about my child with her and talk about her minimally with anyone else, what part of that is it you have trouble understanding?

Agree with goody on this.
She probably does want them but never had the opportunity.
I have both sets of friends.
One who can't have kids and it's something she accepted long ago.
She's always loved my DD though and we do talk about her.

Another childless friend hasn't had the opportunity either but also loves my DD and we discuss her.
Both of these friends would have loved to have kids.
Your friend is 'odd' IMO!
I would say to her next time - 'Can you please stop banging on about your job, it's getting a bit tiresome now'
See how she reacts to that.

You need better friends that want to take an interest in you and your whole life - not just bits they dictate about!

hellsbells yes. Its really about empathy, or lack of it. A really good friend is someone who will tolerate incursions into territory that doesn't interest them from time to time and who will accept that people's lives have many dimensions, rather than someone who imposes a one-sided moratorium on subjects they consider off-limits but isn't prepared to accept the same limits on what the other person considers boring or unworthy of discussion. But I think you're right, its about the friend, rather than her child-free status.

Since having children, I've lost or stopped friendships because:

with one person I talked too much about my child, I don't know why

with a couple of people they couldn't stop talking about their children (particularly the feeding of their children)

with one very good friend, and I am sad about this every day, because she became so utterly focused on her son that she actively seemed to dislike all other children and parenting styles: she turned into smug uber mummy and was vile and boring to be around and completely humourless to boot

I couldn't, what with being a parent and all, commit to a child-free social life

etc
What I'm saying is that it's the people, the relationship with me and with themselves, their perception of what it is to be a parent or to be childless. It's not a trend.

There are loads of great people still, perhaps friendships just fall by the wayside naturally for a multitude of reasons?

Your friend is definitely being unreasonable. You don't impose a moratorium on any subject a friend wants to discuss (and you're obviously not going on endlessly about DD anyway) unless it is directly offensive / hurtful. I have a friend who works for the BBC and talks about nothing else when I see her. Yes, I change the subject and my eyes glaze over a bit, but she's a dear friend and I would never tell her to can it. I don't have DCs and love hearing about / playing with my best friend's DD, but get a bit irked when all my SIL talks about is where the DCs were conceived . It's about being a decent individual and showing a friend some respect. Which is what you're already doing, and she should do the same.

Your capitalised protestations are beside the point.

You are trying to make a general point about how crap women "still" are that they allow motherhood to define their relationships.

But really all you have is a rant about very specific circumstances where the person who feels most strongly about either having, or not having, children is you.

You looked down on mothers for being boring.

Then you decided to have a baby but tried to uphold your (adolescent) self-image of yourself as madly interesting and not a boring old mother by deliberately avoiding making friends with other mothers.

Now you belatedly realise there might be something to be gained from having friends with children.

And you have the utter lack of self-awareness to start a thread moaning about how shit it is that women allow motherhood to spoil friendships?

Wake up! You are the problem here.

And here's a hint about your friend:

She has not chosen to be child free. It has been imposed on her by the lack of a relationship with a willing father.

You were as ambivalent as she is once, and you chose to have a kid.

Is it so hard to imagine that she might find that tough?

I guess so if you struggle to realise that women who have children can be interesting, clever, funny and good company.

Minshu is bang on. Ban her from talking about her work or her sick parents or her new boyfriend or whatever. Except I can just imagine the relationship is one of those where if you met up and you didn't really want to drink, she'd insist that you go to a nightclub just because. So she would whine and whinge and tell you to sod off. Why do people put up with friends like these? I've never understood it.

TheSeniorWrangler, were you really senior wrangler? If so, consider me impressed.

I am not really Cardinal Richelieu, in case you were wondering.

The issue is with your friend.
I have 2 very good childless friends. One's in her 40's, no relationship so is unlikely to have any even though she wants them and the other is a good catholic girl in her late 30's who's waiting for her boyfriend to propose before she has any children :)
I try not to talk about kids to them as I'm not sure how sensitive an issue it is but they both always ask me about the kids, how they are, if I've got any new pics on my phone.
Its because they are lovely people who are genuine friends and so are interested in my life.