AIBU to feel like I don’t fit in with ‘straight’ mums?

[ZiggyStardew]

I’m pregnant with my first baby and I’ve been trying to put myself out there by joining local pregnancy groups and booking antenatal classes because I don’t have any friends who are pregnant or parents.

The problem is I keep coming away feeling like I don’t really belong.

I don’t mean this as a criticism of anyone, and I know people are just excited about their babies, but most of them seem to revolve around very traditional ideas about gender and parenthood. Things like “show me your pink nurseries for your little girlies”, “does anyone have blue decorations for a boy baby shower?”, elaborate gender reveals, “boys are so much easier than girls”, or “your daughter will be fighting the boys off one day”.

None of those things are inherently wrong, but they just make me feel like I’m on a completely different wavelength. I’m bisexual and most of my friends are quite alternative, creative or queer, so I’m much more used to people who don’t think in those terms or make those kinds of assumptions. If I quip back with “or maybe my daughter will like girls when she’s older” I often get funny looks.

I’m starting to worry that I’m being judgmental because this seems to be the majority of people I’m meeting, and I don’t want to write people off unfairly. Equally, I also want to find friends I genuinely click with, especially as I’m about to become a parent.

AIBU for feeling a bit out of place? Or am I expecting too much from these groups and should just accept that pregnancy is one thing we have in common, rather than expecting shared values or outlooks? I just worry my baby won’t have any peers if I keep her away from all this.

Baby and toddler groups will drive you mad op. I’m not sure it’s anything to do with sexuality. I felt like I was the only sane one in a crazy cult. And I felt that there might be something wrong with me because I wasn’t baby-obsessed like they all were.

I remember looking round one day and all the babies were in full on head to toe outfits, shoes, socks, hats the lot. Mine were in just permanently in sleepsuits. And the mums singing wind the bloody bobbin up with beatific faces like they were having a religious experience. I could never chat about films or the news. No, always had to be boring baby talk or ‘useless husbands’. Mine wasn’t useless. Ugh. I hated those groups.

But the roles reversed when the teenage years hit. I loved my teens. They were all still pining after the ‘wind the bobbin up’ era when they had full control.

Bear with it op. You’ll work it out eventually.

That's depressing.

The first post nails it: when you become a parent its really disorienting because you suddenly meet all sorts of people you never usually meet.
I too have been amazed by how many people don’t seem to have moved with the times in terms of social roles.
It’s really important for you I think to try and meet like minded parents who aren’t just thrown together because of having a baby bump

Apologies if this point has already been made but statistics suggest that the vast majority of the population is heterosexual. Figures from 2024 suggest that 2.1% do not define themselves as straight.

So is it really a surprise that you encounter people with heteronormative views at an antenatal class? As babies tend to come about due to male and female gametes coming together…😊

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/sexuality

But try not to worry about it right now, everyone is finding their way through pregnancy and you may meet some lovely women, even if their views are a bit more traditional than yours.

There are plenty of other parenting debates to be had in the meantime!

A classic ragey post and run. The OP must live somewhere very unusual for this to be real.

I bloody love wind the bobbin up 🙃

😁

Agree.

I'm straight and I hate the whole "boys will be boys" and "daddy's little princess" pastel pinks and blues crap around babies. It's boring and reductive. I don't think that all straight people think the same, I think you've just found yourself in the company of a certain kind of straight person.

It might depend on the kind of area you're in too. I don't agree with one of the posts that kind of implies that only people in London are educated enough to be liberal, there are plenty of communities and areas that would be plenty welcoming and diverse.

I didn't go to any antenatal classes because I couldn't afford them. At the time I saw NCT as a way for middle class couples to meet other middle class couples to make friends with and I kind of still do. There are other companies who do them, maybe have a look around.

I was a fairly young parent when I had my first and felt like I didn't quite fit in with a lot of the other parents because they were a decade older and in different places in their relationships, housing situations, jobs and so on. I'm friends with more of them now but at the time, it really helped to be matched up with a couple of other mums my age - one was a blind date with a friend of a friend and the other was another young mum I kept bumping into at the supermarket - we started going swimming together with the babies, having tea at each others houses.

You don't have to make friends in every group you go to. Having a child the same age doesn't mean you have anything else in common so it's OK to shop around different groups and activities. You'll find your people as you go along.

Look for an LGBTQ+ or rainbow families group near you.
https://lgbtqfamilies.co.uk/

Even if not advertised, if there is a LGBTQ+ community centre near you, they often host a family/pregnancy group.

I’m another one who is so surprised at the regression. 20 years ago in my northern provincial town and predominantly working class groups this would have been unusual. Sure there were some parents who would talk decorating in blue or pink, along with some casual stereotyping along the lines of boys are easier but not so overwhelming to make others feel uncomfortable. I can only think of a few parents who were heavily into gender stereotypes, the rest of us were very much toys are toys. Heck, no body blinked at my friends son who loved Eliza and dressed up in costume for school as it was fairly obvious he hero worshipped his big sister and followed her preferences.

Are you sure they’re all about genders or do you think you might be sensitive and pick up small things? My NCT group was quite traditional in that all the mums were taking mat leave and dads working, one was a single mum…but no one was that worried about baby gender. At baby groups i’ve met same sex couples/grandparents but we tend to talk about babies to begin with (sleeping/eating etc) and later chat about our lives, but not much about boys vs girls (except the odd comment on boys tend to be developmentally a bit behind, which I have also noticed!)

I also found I didn’t feel like immediate besties
woth my NCT group. We only really had babies in common, but over the years we’ve become close!

I was in your position, op- I lived in suburbia but travelled to a baby/toddler group in a more bohemian area- I was a bit sniffy as to how "straight" the other mums were.
I alienated myself from these lovely families and I regret all the opportunities I passed up because of my inverse snobbery.
It took me a long time but eventually I grew up and now I massively gravitate to the more (what you would call) middle of the road parents- I am so over the cool, quirky parents: their kids are fucked up and the parents are often incredibly blinkered, childish and dull- yes, dull!
I still look a bit artsy- I like dressing a certain way and my tastes haven't dramatically changed, but beneath all that I'm as middle England as they come and proud of it.
Please don't mistake sexuality for personality and give the normies a chance- because they'll give you one- they are actually the decent people.

@LaPerruque Where are you? This doesn't describe my experience in London at all (my NCT group had a lesbian couple and two people who'd conceived during a short, casual fling but decided to raise the baby together while not being in a relationship), but we moved for work, disastrously, when DS was only a few months old to a village in the midlands where exactly what you describe was the norm. In my experience it came down to lack of education and insularity.

I think this is one of the most egregious bits of snobbery and judgement I've read on MN in ages. Oh and all the lesbians are in London apparently FFS!

You should sack these ignorant gender conforming normies get your queer alternative creative more enlightened friends to build you a birthing yurt and crowdfund a pair of lesbian sound bath practitioners and a two-spirit non binary doula in the back garden, then find a gay mens chorus to sing out the contents of a parenting manual over gentle harp music until go-time.
This should negate having to spend any more time with the trads.

I didn't make any friends at pregnancy group - mainly because I was 18 and unexpectedly pregnant and they were generally in their late 20s/early 30s and very much 'what does your husband do?' types. Nothing inherently wrong with that, just didn't have anything in common with them really! I did make some good friends later at mother and baby groups though. My advice is don't force it and hopefully you'll find a friend or two in time, once baby is here. Don't worry about your child missing out - babies don't need to socialise, they need to bond with their primary caregivers. Once they're 2 or 3, they benefit from interaction with peers which is fine because they start nursery. Even then, it's more parallel play than playing together at that age!

You sound really judgmental to be honest. There will be people you like and don’t like all the way through baby groups, pre school, school and beyond. I’m not sure what your sexuality has to do with anything though.

What a thoughtful post.
You’ve done the most heteronormative imaginable, OP. Having support and friends is more important at this stage of life. Prioritise that.

@LaPerruque No, I wasn’t triggered by your post about pink hair bands, each to their own. Who cares?

You just come across as painfully insecure and like you’ve digested a manual on how to appear sophisticated and cool, which involves denigrating other people’s choices.

If we had met in London, I would have seen straight through you I think, and avoided you. In your quest to be cool, you partake in othering, which is why you felt the need to mention the same sex couple and the other couple who were co parenting. Your husband’s relatives probably unsettle you because they are content and happy.

I didn’t hear anyone saying stuff like ‘show me your pink nurseries for your little girlies’ or anything else that stereotypical, and that was 25 year’s ago. Where do you live?

When the only thing you have in common in a group is that you're all pregnant or a new mum, people sometimes struggle to find conversation topics. Most of the people you meet at this lifestage will be "friends for a season" with only a few, if any, turning into long term friendships

I would just see it for what it is - women embarking on motherhood seeking advice, company and solidarity. It doesn't matter if you don't share the same outlook on some things, you will probably drift apart once the babies are born and people make their own way.

I didn't go to any groups when I was pregnant. I did one ante-natal class that was NHS run with my husband and that was it. I made friends at the groups after I had my baby. And actually, the one that I really made friends at was a walking group - where mums would meet up and go for a walk around a local park with their babies, and then have a coffee afterwards. Was great because you could migrate around the group talking to different people, or just stick to one person or whatever you fancied really (and chatting is easier when it isn't the sole focus). If someone wasn't your person, you could pause to sort your baby out and let them go on ahead...! And the babies tended to be happier because they were asleep.

So basically, I wouldn't worry about making friends at the moment. Or, if you're keen, you need to find a group of people who you have more in common with - you'll be amazed at how many different types of groups there are for women who are pregnant/have a baby - find one that does an activity you enjoy anyway and then you'll have that activity in common as well...

(I can't think of anything worse than a group of people talking about gender reveal parties, and I'd probably find a different group.... I remember my Mum once telling me how she only once went to a baby group, they were all told to bring a magazine - she went with a copy of Private Eye, to discover everyone else had bought 'Mother and Baby' or 'Parenting' or whatever and she just thought 'nope, these aren't my people' and didn't go back.)

The world has become more gendered

She's literally too alternative and cool to respond to all the straight people on this thread

Honestly I am the most Tom boy femi nazi there is and it was a shocker to me when I had kids 😂

And my boy is super shy, quite chill and a bit of a scaredy cat. And my girl is absolutely psycho with energy levels and an Adrenalin junkie. So not entirely on trend.

But you only have to go to a preschool party to see it quite clearly. Boys running around playing Batman robbers and the girls sitting peacefully in the corner colouring and talking/arguing. It is quite something.