Did you lose friends after having a baby?

[Pinktruffle]

I'm sure this subject has been raised here before but I've not seen it.

I'm in my mid 30's but I'm the only one in my (former) close circle of friends who is married and has a child. My close circle of friends met about 15 years ago, we all lived in the same town and did a lot together. A couple of us have moved away and as is natural we have drifted apart a bit but had always met up a few times a year and I had always throughly enjoyed it. Myself and one of the friends have drifted to the point of not speaking anymore but I thought I was still close to the other three. One of them actually messaged me the other day saying that she no longer wished to be friends with me as she felt we were 'just friends for the sake of it' which is fair enough if she feels that way but I would be lying if I said I wasn't shocked as it felt like it came out of the blue. We were in regular contact but hadn't seen much of each other recently, that was mainly down to the pandemic I thought. Obviously I will respect her wishes as I'm not going to force someone to be friends with me when they don't want to be.

I get that people grow apart and our lives have gone in different direction but the only thing that has changed recently is me having my first child (who is 7 months). I'm not available to do the same things that I used to be able to do and my focus/priorities have shifted to my child. Have others found they have lost friends when having kids? Am I assuming it's to do with the baby when actually I'm an arsehole? I feel like I'm going to lose other friends for the same reason...

YABU - You've not lost friends
YANBU - You have lost friends

Yes, my best friend told me off for only being able to talk about my baby, when she was 6 weeks old and I was suffering from ptsd and anxiety. When she was 6 months old and unwell with her first cold, she expected me to travel 3 hours each way with her to go to her party. There were so many small things like this in the first year that we drifted apart.

We didn't have a falling out as such, but now speak only very rarely, it's a shame but it is how it is.

I lost one of my BF of about 25years after I unexpectedly became pregnant at 40 after 4 years infertility (and having cancer!). She'd been single for some time and I think she found it really difficult to see me pregnant at last. I think if she'd said she wanted to distance herself for a bit I would have completely understood. I knew exactly how it felt when yet another person announced their pregnancy!

Instead she fabricated some drama and stopped talking to me for something I didn't do when I was 8 months pg.

I'm still sad about the friendship ending but as time passes I realise at the end she wasn't that lovely person I'd been friends with anymore.

Yes I did. But I decided to forgive and work at the friendships once I had the energy to do it again
Those friendships were worth it , some others I wouldn't have fought for.
I realised I was making people confront their own choices and fertility by getting pregnant and I had my own struggles they couldn't understand. We were not able to speak the same language briefly.

This happened to me, too. People really don't get it.

We lost everyone we used to consider friends. None of them have children. A few got nasty.
I was a little upset but then I had a beautiful baby and I thought Sod them all and I haven’t spoken to them again.
One of the ones who were nasty actually texted Dh a few years later almost apologising for their behaviour and did we want to meet up. After discussing it Dh blocked their number. We never replied.
I think it was a case of we have punished you and you have done your time now you can come back into the group.

I do think it is strange that someone went out of the way to message you they didn’t want to be friends out of the blue.
There was no need for it

I have been on the other side. When my best friend had a baby we drifted mainly to her being so consumed with her newborn, which I get to an extent, but she was no longer interested in me and what I had been up to, her husband, other friends, family etc. Particularly rocky when she only wanted to discuss the baby, turned all conversations back to the baby and would only contact me first to send a picture of baby doing something cute. Throughout this phase never once asked how I was, despite me being poorly. I never said anything but gritted my teeth and bared it as we had been friends for years and luckily we are now out the other side! She’s back to the friend I always had but the above did last for about 10 months, which at the time I thought was going to be forever.

Honestly, if it weren't so outing, I would post the message here. She actually said 'I dont feel good towards, I dont feel bad towards you, i just feel nothing'. I actually felt like I had been dumped! @ivfgottwins I do wonder if there is more at play, she recently spent the weekend away with the friend I don't really speak to any more so I feel like they spent the whole weekend bitching about me.

I have been very very conscious of not making people work around me and the baby, I have been on the receiving end of that in the last. I get my baby is exciting to me but not necessarily others. If I'm meeting friends, I usually want adult company and will leave baby at home with DH unless the friend requests that I bring him. I've been trying to arrange a meet up with the friend who dumped me, now I know why she was being so evasive! I just feel stupid because I thought we were good and we message every week or so, conversations initiated by both of us.

Ironically, the friend who has had the most time for me is the one who does not want kids at all.

@SuddenArborealStop the relationships are important to me and I would fight for them but in this case, when she has gone out of her way to say 'I don't want to be friends with you', I don't feel I can.

Your friend sounds horrid for sending you that message; she’s no loss.

I didn’t lose friends as such, but we had a few friends who never even dropped us a text or email to ask how we or DS were (it was a v tough birth and we’d hinted as such in the email we sent friends to announce his birth), said friends never contacted me again afterwards, so I just let the friendships slide.

Far too much going on in my own life to try and maintain relationships with people who couldn’t even be bothered to send me a text during the hardest months of my life; no need to be unpleasant about it though, just let the relationship go. I’d be polite and friendly now if they ever contacted me, but they never have, so...

@Pinktruffle

Honestly she just sounds vile and cruel and not a friend worth fighting for - her message to you was totally unnecessary - as cowardly as ghosting is that would have been preferable to the message she has sent which was to deliberately hurt you

Even if she is experiencing her own troubles with fertility she shouldn't take it out on you - I've been that friend who has struggled with feelings of jealousy and bitterness towards friends who have seemingly conceived easily but I've always made a conscious effort not to hold it against them. My troubles are my own. That being said on the Infertility boards my approach has generally been the minority one and the consensus (and encouragement) tends to lean towards cutting (fertile) friends off and that could be what has happened Here if your 2 friends have got together recently and now you have received this message?

Yep - a good male friend (married with kids), a single male friend (known for decades) and a single gay male friend. I found it really hurtful. I wasn’t the type of mum who only talked about babies but these three male friends all separately just dropped me.

YABU
Well obviously this has happened to you but I didn't find this to be the case.
I was the last of my friends to have kids. Theres up to a 20 year age gap between my kids and some of my friends children but I've still got a lot of my friends from when I was 18 and in very regular contact with them.

Blimey, sounds like more to this than you having a baby from her side I mean. I did lose friends and looking back I probably didn't help the situation , we were just out of step. I still think they were thoughtless but they would say I was too focused on the children I expect. What your friend has done is a whole other level of nastiness.

@ivfgottwins I have been through fertility struggles of my own. Years of infertility and miscarriage and IVF bought me my LO so if it were infertility I would like to think I understand. The friend is currently single and did say to me a couple of months ago that she was ready to settle down and was struggling to meet someone. I thought I was empathetic and understanding but maybe not?

@Sleepingdogs12 I feel like there must be more too as it is just a mean thing to do, especially as I was completely unaware there was an issue and had been talking to her as normal. I can't help but feel the weekend away with the other friend had something to do with it.

From your updates it doesn't sound like it's because of the baby at all, she sounds quite mean actually and you're better off without her

I actually didn't lose any friends after DC because I very much wanted to keep doing the same things with them, I still went out for dinner and to the pub to watch football and still kept up with their lives

It sounds like you were also trying to keep things normal so I don't think it was the baby

I'm on the opposite side of you, I'm childfree and I've lost friends when they've had children. It's really sad but it gets better with time (cliche I know).

I find it bizarre that she felt rhe need to dump you. I have friendships that have ebbed and flowed but no dramatic exits, and I'm pleased for it.

I'm one of the last child free in my friend groups, and to be honest it can be just as bad the other way. Arranging group catch ups at 8am at a soft play - um, great? (pretty sure no man has suggested that ever) And I'm not some child hating curmudgeon either - I'm on my way to help out my friend with her kids for the weekend whilst her husband is away.

But it's fine really. Friendships don't need to be a fixed quantity in your life.

I drifted from most work/city friends when I had a baby but I wasn’t surprised / bothered as they weren’t really close friends. The one person who mattered stayed in touch, though we rarely meet.

I then made new mum friends that I met at local playgroups! Super people I really fell in love with and saw nearly every day! Our babies learned to eat and walk together!

A year later they all finished maternity leave, returned to work full time, and ditched me as part of a closed chapter of their lives. Now that hurt.

I haven't lost any friends since having children, though I do see less of all of them than I did before having children. I try and see them without my children present as much as possible - I cringe at the descriptions upthread of expecting people without children to go to softplay! - but that inevitably limits how much time I have available. I think we're as close as ever when we do see each other, though.

I was ditched by my antenatal group friends for being the only one to go back to work full-time - they made nasty passive aggressive comments about it for a bit and then just stopped including me. That wasn't great.

I don’t have a ‘circle’ of friends, as I move around a lot and have lots of separate friendships and groups, and I had my son late, at almost 40, so my friends with children have children aged anywhere between newborn and 35. I did lose three friends when I had DS, but it turned out that older people I assumed were happily childfree (as I had been) had had fertility struggles long before I knew them, or had missed out on parenthood for sad reasons, and found it difficult to deal with shifting me in their heads from ‘childfree’ to ‘parent’. One, who had been a genuinely close friend, simply never contacted me again and stopped taking my calls, after a perfectly cordial coffee when I told her I was pregnant.

I do also have close childfree friends.

I had dc mid thirties, sort of average in my friends. I moved in my twenties lot and had good friends but spread out, not one group. I'm mid forties now and most of my friends have kids. I must admit I'm not as close to two, who are single and childless, because we just don't have so much in common any more. They are heavily into their careers and money. Although I really enjoy my career I'm not ambitious to work my way up. My dc are a big part of my life especially as dd is autistic and takes up a lot of my energy, but of course I try not to talk about my dc as it gets boring. I feel we don't understand each other the way we used to. But it's not lack of effort - there's a lot of affection there and we see each other but it's changed.

I lost friends.

But I realised it was fitness who didnt really care for me, but who I was obviously only good for going to the pub or being available to listen to their problems

I gradually stopped seeing a few friends who married or had a partner and then children as all they bleated on about was the babies and boring stories of nappy changes and diet etc....there is nothing more boring than other peoples baby stories...awful...the same as wedding photos...!!

Yes we drifted. I rekindled with the longterm friendships when they had DC.

Yes. We are an "older" couple who have two young children so still in the midst of the early childhood stages, I only work part time and we have childcare bills so no spare money to fritter away.

Never really had many friends to begin with but my "best friend" is in a same sex relationship with no interest in having children and they both love to travel and drink. She really couldn't understand why I couldn't continue to do the things we did pre-children (hello, breastfeeding!) Over the past 5 years, our friendship has dwindled away, to the point when she doesn't even send the kids/my partner birthday cards anymore. I often think I should feel more sad about it, but to be honest, I don't.

One of them actually messaged me the other day saying that she no longer wished to be friends with me as she felt we were 'just friends for the sake of it'
This is one of the oddest things I've read on here for a while now.
I mean, who does that ?
If a friendship drifts, then let it drift. Nobody normal contacts someone to 'end a friendship' unless there has been a dramatic falling out / one feels the other has done something terrible.
What an odd person.

However I totally agree with @ludothedog's post about different types of friendship.

I would also say that when you have big life changes, friendships often go 'on the back burner' for a while whilst you are at different stages. As someone in my mid 50s, I can tell you that I am at a lovely stage of my life where I have more time, and yes, more money than I had 10, 15, 20 years ago, and over the last 5 or 6 years, have picked up quite a few friendships that had been on the back burner. People that I knew from pre-dc, or when my dc were little, are now, like me, back in a stage of life where our dc aren't reliant on us being there and might actually pick us up from the pub and have time to reconnect with those older friends, and the money to be able to go out for a meal without having to think about the family budget, or get tickets to something we couldn't prioritise before, or have time to spend the day doing something just for pleasure. It's lovely. I don't see that you need to "drop" friends or "break up with" friends just because life gets in the way for 10 or 15 years.