Parents not upsetting people who can’t have kids

[PlumPudd]

Read this article in the Guardian with interest, about the need for people with kids to be very conscious of the pain people without kids around them might be feeling, and how friendships can break up when one person is able to have kids and the other can’t.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/new-parent-friend-children-baby-grief?CMP=fb_cif#comment-158514602

As someone with one kid and a second on the way, and some old friends / a sibling around me who don’t have kids (some who want them but haven’t found a partner, one who is struggling to conceive), I do try to be careful not to constantly talk about mine or say things like “gosh you went to the theatre then had a lie in the next day, I’m so jealous.” Even though I am very jealous. Also try to not always suggest meet ups with them at the park with baby in tow (though most meet ups do have to be like this as it’s just when I have more time to meet and gives partner valuable alone time to cook, read, be a person rather than a parent.

However, it is also legitimately hard not to sometimes talk about your kids or bring your baby along to a meet up, because when they are young, they consume your life in a way that is sometimes good and sometimes bad : exhausting!! I’d love to be able to chat to friends about the books I’m reading, the day trips I’ve been on, the exhibitions I’m going to visit, what’s going on in politics at the moment but since having a baby the time I have to do any of those things has literally shrunk by about 85%. You also do start spending a bit more time with other parents because they also care about objectively boring stuff like sleep schedules and catchment areas, and they also don’t mind hanging out in awful kid friendly cafes and soft plays.

Curious to hear views about what parents and those who want to be parents can do to accommodate each other’s lives without causing hurt.

Is it possible that she just had other stuff going on in her life at the time she stopped answering messages, like work busyness or personal drama, and the timing was coincidental? I’m not totally clear from your post whether the cutting out was temporary or permanent on her part, but if permanent could it partly be that she got the impression you’d distanced yourself, if you just never contacted her again after she said that things were fine between you?

Realistically. there's not much you can do, is there? If you have kids they are a part of your life, and if that is, understandably, too painful for that person to bear there is not much that the parent can do about that.

I have other things going on in my life that makes ordinary things in other people's incredibly painful for me. I rather see it as for me to manage those feelings. But ultimately, if something going on in someone's life is too painful for you to manage, then you have to decide whether to let that friendship go ( which is painful for the ejected person).

I do get your point too. Sometimes I try and tell myself that my triggers aren’t anyone else’s problem. I do expect my friends to be mindful of my situation though, which mostly they are and will communicate with them if I feel uneasy.

I don’t really expect strangers to be mindful or know what I’m going through, although the “you’ve just got married, when are the kids coming?” 3 weeks after my miscarriage from strangers is just unneeded imo

To be fair we do also live in a society that tells women that once they’ve had a kid they should then be able to hold down a job full time, keep a clean house, feed a family, and raise well behaved, socially conscious, academically high achieving children with minimal reliance on TV or childcare - all that and smile at the same time. And if you don’t manage to do all that you’re told you’re either a feckless state dependent single mother who is probably raising future criminals, or an unmaternal cold hearted career woman who is probably raising future sociopaths.

Also in the UK 54,000 mothers every year report being forced to leave their jobs because of how they are treated during their pregnancy, maternity leave or after they return to work and over three quarters of women with kids reported experiencing some form of pregnancy or maternity discrimination at work every year.

I completely agree that we live in a society that fetishises motherhood and implies it’s the “greatest achievement a woman can achieve” that women who don’t want children or can’t have them are somehow unwomen. And that this is awful and wrong.

But once you’ve achieved that great achievement, society doesn’t reward you, usually it pulls the carpet right from under your feet, shoves a hundred new responsibilities onto your plate, doesn’t adequately fund your healthcare and demotes you in favour of a guy called Chris with four years less experience than you.

Not saying wanting a kid and not having one isn’t worse than wanting a kid and having one - it is worse. Just that the lovely vision of motherhood as ultimate female goal society holds up, is a vision that screws everyone over, whether you’ve not met the goal and are taunted by it, or have met it and discovered it was largely an illusion.

It was permanent. The timing could well have been coincidental, but based on a few things she’d said in the past, and something she’s said since to a mutual friend who asked her if she’d seen me lately, it felt like it was probably linked.

The reason I found her texting to say everything was fine and why was I asking if she was okay, odd, was because we’d gone from texting a few times a week and meeting up every few weeks, to me still texting and suggesting meet ups and her not replying ever. I had good reason to ask if she was okay, as it was very out of character/ out of friendship context behaviour and was worried something had happened to her or she was going through something. So for her to act as if everything was fine and why was I asking if it wasn’t, seemed a bit disingenuous. I didn’t back off completely after that, sent something for her birthday, a few Facebook likes etc but I stopped asking to meet up or if everything was okay as it had been a good eight months by then.

If it was the news about the pregnancy that led to her cutting contact I hope it helped her, but I still miss her and felt our prior friendship justified a text just to say, I’m sorry I can’t handle being around people with kids, I wish you well or something like that. I don’t know, it’s hard to ever fully understand someone else’s reality or what they can or can’t do.

🤣🤣🤣

I went NC with a friend I had been very close to. My DH and I had been TTC for years, we were on the waiting list for IVF and having tests to try to find the reason for the infertility.

My friend had her second baby, couldn't understand why I didn't want to meet the baby right at that time (surprise visit) and then gave me a calendar customised with photos of her baby and toddler.

That is fucking dreadful, I’m really sorry.

I had a friend go through a phase of writing my birthday and Christmas cards in baby/child speak from her daughter. We’re not friends anymore, oddly…

Wow. How utterly thoughtless. I'm sorry, that is awful.

Me "not being nice" to my friend re her baby/the calendar caused issues for years. I'm still friends with her sister and it was brought up fairly recently.

I was very very blunt and just told her how much it hurt me and how I couldn't imagine how she possibly thought I'd want a new born baby calendar.

She finally got the point and it hasn't been mentioned again.

But I still feel hurt and angry all these years later.

@Poppchipps that's truly awful. Honestly, I would have found the calendar cringe worthy.... unless you are a doting grandparent, godparent or aunt.

It's weird. I had something similar from a friend. A big weird elaborate picture announcement for their second over text accompanied by a "just wanted you to know so you are not upset". Do people lose their minds over pregnancy?

massively over complicating quite a simple thing.

Just be a normal person who appreciates that people have more than one element to their lives. Kids / family is just ONE side of us. I am far more than a parent and when I see friends we talk about lots of things regardless of whether we have children or not.

if I’m talking about my house / home then of course kids come up but if I’m talking about work, hobbies, art, politics, travel, food, music or lots of other things then kids are rarely mentioned.

I am a mum but I’m loads of other things and I ensure that the time I spent with my child free friends isn’t just me wanging on about what my kids have been up to.

Do people lose their minds over pregnancy?

Yes. Both ways.
The expectant parents can become completely consumed by it and people struggling with their own fertility or circumstances can get upset by it. Then there's the middle ground who just don't really care and get a bit sick of having a pregnancy/baby/child thrust on them.

I have an acquaintance who from the minute she peed on the stick was rubbing her belly, sighing, waddling and talked about nothing but her pregnancy. Swore she could feel kicks at 6 weeks and made people 'feel' it by putting their hands on her upper stomach and didn't believe anyone telling her it wasn't possible to feel it yet and the fetus was nowhere near where she was touching and it was probably farts. Since having the baby she lost any form of identity outside of the baby, will not talk about anything else or do anything without the baby... I can completely see why anyone would want to distance from that kind of person.

I've also known people completely cut off anyone with kids because it was just too painful for them. To me, this response is understandable (if extreme).