to feel miffed at friend with new baby

[DonnaHayward]

I have namechanged (even though I'm not a prolific poster) because I know AIBU, and I'm ashamed to be feeling this way. I'm hoping MN can talk a bit of sense into me. Apologies for long post.

My BF and I have known each other since school, been close for 15 years, she's one of my favourite people in the world. We've supported each other through a lot of things. She had her first baby, a little boy, in Sept. I am afraid I've started to feel resentful about how our relationship has changed since her DS was born .

In the first few months, I was totally sympathetic to how much her life had changed, and tried to be both supportive and unobtrusive. Went to visit when invited, trying to make sure she knew I was always available with practical help without being demanding of her time etc., and completely happy to fit everything around her and her new DS. My problem is, I still feel like this is expected 9 months on, and I'm starting to get a bit fed up.

Her DS has routine which means she can't do anything after 6pm, including having people other than her and her DH in the house (as it is their family bonding time). I think this it lovely that they prioritise this, but must admit that it rules out almost all social activity, and is getting on my nerves now DS is 9 months old and not a tiny baby. My only opportunity to see them is weekend afternoons (I work FT), and with weekends being busy for both of us this means I've only seen her half a dozen times since DS arrived, always in or around their home.

I totally know, in this stage of her life, DS and DH come first, but I think what's upset me enough to post here is birthday plans. We are both 30 this year, and idly chatted lots in our 20s about having a big joint event. Obviously that couldn't happen in the way we'd fantasised when younger. She was unable to come to my birthday meal last month, as she can't be apart from DS in the evenings. Hers is in August, and plan is for a group of friends to get together in the park so 'we can all spend time with DS'.

Childish bit now - I want to say 'I'm not that fussed about time with DS, I want to hang out with you!'. I've been through a fair bit in the last 9 months (made redundant, splitting up with LTP), and I've really missed her - both as support and as someone to have fun with.

So... I know I'm being unreasonable, but as I don't have children, hoping you can show me some things from a parent's perspective, and help me to stop resenting a 9 month old baby

[MrsMook]

YANBU for feeling this way.

In the last 3 yrs of being pregnant, having two babies, some of my friendships have changed- some (and generally more local) have been able to adapt, some feel like the pause button has been presssed, particularly with school friends who haven't had children yet. No particular reason, but we've had less things like BBQs to be able to invite them to. (Awful weather also a factor!) We've had less invitations and I assume they assume that I/we won't be interested.

She may be covering up and scraping by with a very difficult baby. She may have just ended up cutting herself off in a baby-bubble which is a bit unreasonable.

I still maintained a slimmed down social life when DS1 was a baby. He was EBFed and a bottle refuser, but I could go out in the evening for a couple of hours between feeds. I remember a mummy night out when our DCs were about 6-8mths, and it was obvious who was FF and BFed. The FFers were having a few drinks, the BFers were clock watching, on soft drinks and were gone by 10pm- we still enjoyed a brief escape. My DCs do often accompany me/us- we have babysitting issues beyond BFing days, but we do maintain social contact with our friends.

Some people do just disappear into a bubble for no particular reason. My ILs did this. They'd longed for children for a long time, and when they finally got lucky, they immersed themselves into the world of babies/ children. Their choice. There wasn't any reason for them to reject our offers of baby sitting (we did hear about phases where they had issues either directly or through family, so I doubt it was that). I've just always felt aware that that's not for me as I want to have maintained life byond my family unit for the days when they grow in independence. DH is also a parent and he can/should have time with our DCs. I would also go loopy to not do things independently- at 5mths I joined a circuits class, because it was a time slot where I could get out for an hour between feeds, and was my one chance in the week.

Maybe you could gently enquire as to the source of her isolation? If she has a difficult baby, she may appreciate some understanding, or she may have fallen into a habit without noticing.

[Ragwort]

A very common theme on mumsnet (and I've been here for over 12 years ) is how difficult some mothers find it to make friends, I wonder if this could be one of the reasons - ie: some mothers closet themselves up for a few years and then when they emerge and want to make friends ............. it is not so easy, some friends will have drifted away.

I am not sure what the OP can do about this particular friend, I had one or two friends like this, after 15 years one of them is back in my life after going through a very PFB phase .

For those of you who say 'I cannot leave my baby' - sorry if this sounds harsh but don't you ever think about what would happen if you had to go to hospital or dropped dead? I was very conscious that I would not allow my DS to become totally dependent on me.

[WoTmania]

'For those of you who say 'I cannot leave my baby' - sorry if this sounds harsh but don't you ever think about what would happen if you had to go to hospital or dropped dead? I was very conscious that I would not allow my DS to become totally dependent on me'.

We would have dealt with that if it came up - I don't suppose a couple of nights out woudl ahve prepared any of my babies for me to be gone overnight/completely in any case. It's a bt like the people who tell you that you should introduce a bottle ASAP 'just in case'.

My lot always slept on me or DH downstairs so never had the 'disappearing back' problem.

[Fairydogmother]

I think you sound like a lovely friend. You've been caring and considerate the whole way through and its only natural that you are struggling to understand how shes feeling.

But things probably would be much easier for you both if there was better communication! My BF had a baby 3 months ago and we dont see each other all that often but we do keep in touch several times a week and have a go at grabbing a coffee the odd time. I understand that she has an all encompassing child and she understands that the odd txt to ask how my ill father is makes me feel like she still cares.

Family time is great but I'd be slightly concerned that it has to be SO regimented.

[wannaBe]

While I do totally sympathise with the people whose babies are clingy/demanding and who feel they cannot leave them for a second, surely the only way a baby will ever be able to be left is if you do at some point force the issue? As hard as that is. One of the reasons why so many children e.g. have sleep issues is because parents do what at the time makes for an easy life, and before you know it you have a three year old who will only sleep while being driven down the m25 in the car because that?s what you did at the time to make it happen.

I?m being flippent there obviously but reality is that other than in cases of severe sn or profound medical needs it is rarely a question of ?can?t,? but more a question of not wanting to force the issue yet because dealingwith it isn?t the easy solution ? saying you ?can?t? leave the baby is the easy answer. And that?s fine ? parents have to deal with their babies in the way they see fit, but equally other parents will form opinions on that, and those opinions aren?t necessarily wrong just because their babies weren?t as demanding/difficult or they had other strategies to deal with it.

Having a baby is life-changing, but if you make the choice to allow that baby to take over your life to the exclusion of everything else, then the risk you run is that when that baby grows up a bit you?ve isolated yourself from those you pushed away during those first few years. And you can?t blame people for being put out about that, if babies were that difficult even a year on women would never manage to go back to work For instance. Or perhaps we should be pushing for women to stay at home in order to cater for the needs of babies because they simply cannot be left with anyone else ? ever? No didn?t think so.

I would worry about the emotional state of someone who had never left a nine month old baby for longer than to have a shower tbh.

[wannaBe]

oh and if that's what breastfeeding does then is it any wonder so many women choose not to do it.

[vvviola]

Ragwort - DH and I actually had the "what if you had to go to hospital" argument conversation on one of the many failed attempt to get DD to drink expressed milk from a bottle. We just had to figure we'd deal with it at the time. And as a previous poster said, I'm not sure a couple of nights out would have helped in that situation anyway.

OP - do you think you could resign yourself to a more daytime based friendship for a while? Or even a text/email one. Like I said, I emigrated so I'm very far away from all my friends (with the exception of a few v lovely ones I met through MN ~wave~) so I'm in a slightly different situation, but I do appreciate people checking in every now and then, it means a lot when you are in a fog.

Oh, and yes to the alcohol issue too. Hangovers and babies are not a good mix... and I lost my tolerance for alcohol after I had DD1, which made for an interesting hen party (for which, incidentally, I left DD1 at 8 months overnight with then DP, having left her the night before with my DM so DP & I could celebrate my birthday... it's only DD2 that keeps me close to home. Little troublemaker )

[noblegiraffe]

Wannabe, my DS who couldn't have been left at 8 months now sleeps perfectly aged 3, in fact he's a much better sleeper than my niece who would have been happily left at 8 months or earlier.

8 months and breastfed is not the right time to 'force the issue'.

I'm wondering how many on this thread who think it's easy, or who would just leave their partners to it were ff by that point.

[FaddyPeony]

A DVD and pizza night would have been a just as daft suggestion as leaving my baby at 8 months. People who come around for pizza expect to actually see you, not your back as you disappear upstairs again for the billionth time that evening.

Haha. Yes, noblegiraffe, I hear you. There is something so dispiriting about having to do that in front of other people, even if it's just grandparents. I'd never have invited people over for dinner when dd was under a year.

OP you've gotten lots of food for thought on this thread, so I can only repeat along those same lines:

-It's very possible (even probable) that she has a baby who is very hard to settle and she is tired and rundown and trying to put a brave face on things.

-It can be a lonely place when you're the first of your group to have children. You're aware that your friends don't understand what extreme sleep deprivation feels like. You're aware that they think you have 'betrayed' the sisterhood somehow by being so focussed on the baby.

You sound like a lovely friend. Hang in there. Even though you're doing all of the work on the friendship right now, and that doesn't feel fair, you will both need each other again quite soon. She shouldn't be fobbing you off, though. How about a long walk with takeaway coffees? DS will sleep in the buggy, you two can chat and catch up, and maybe she'll open up a bit more about how frickin hard it all is.

[vvviola]

I'm going to now out of this discussion soon, because DD is actually asleep & I'm going to spend time with DH but I just wanted to comment on WannaBe's post ... sometimes you take "the easy way" because you are doing everything else the hard way. If you have a high needs/clingy child, or one with undiagnosed allergies like mine was, it's pretty guaranteed it's not only at night. So you pick your battles in the day time, and choose to take the easy way at night. It's not all easy or all hard.

And as for the breastfeeding comment. DD1 was breastfed, I left her overnight no problem from 8 months, went out relatively frequently from when she was young, even went to a school reunion when she was 6 weeks old. DD2, not so much, but then anything other than breastmilk or specialised formula which is vile had the potential to make her very sick indeed. I'm not sure what breastfeeding "did" to me.

[FaddyPeony]

wannabe well of course you'd worry about the mother's emotional state. She must be wrecked tired and fed up. Not necessarily heading straight for the looney bin though.

Sometimes babies just grow out of neediness, though. Why should you have to force it when in many cases it'll just work itself out? I left dd with Dh for the first time when she was 6months and went for dinner with friends. I was gone about 2.5 hours. She did scream, she did miss me, she wasn't interested in a bottle. So it wasn't a great success then (even though I had a blast), but just a few months later she was sleeping really well. Why? 1. Because I was blessed with a good eater, so she was full at night and 2. she was always knackered out from crawling and cruising. If I didn't have a good eater (and it's a lottery) and if she wasn't yet moving, she might still have needed boob all night. We were lucky that she grew out of extreme neediness early on. For other babies it just takes a little bit longer.

[BoyFromTheBigBadCity]

OP, I think you sound like a really lovely friend, who is being truly understanding and trying your best to adapt.
HOWEVER if my best friend had missed a big important event in my life (like your 30th) at the end of a period where I had been made redundant and broken up with my LTP I would be upset, no two ways about it.
Hang in there, you sound great.

[OnTheNingNangNong]

I used my son's lack of sleep as another excuse to cover up how low I was. I was terrified thay something would happen if I left him- it may not be the same for your friend, but maybe it is. I hid my true feelings for a long time and feeling like i should be able to go out made me feel a lot worse.

I don't think YABU though.

[Ragwort]

I think wannabe makes some very good points, and says it a lot more eloquently than I did .

I have a friend who is still woken every single night by her DC (age 8 & 10) and even her DH admits she has just not been firm enough. I know we are all different but I do find it hard to comprehend when a mother won't even leave their child with his/her own father until 6 months or whatever ............... OK, do things your own way but I do think in some cases there is a clear element of controlling / martyrish behaviour.

[Oblongata]

A friend and I had babies 2 months apart. We'd been close friends up to that point. I had my baby first so I recognised they needed time to adjust, but after months and months I realised she was spending all her mental energy on the baby, hardly seeing anyone, and tbh it really hurt, I felt pretty rejected.

Then after a year, events came to light that showed the extent of her partner's emotional abuse. He was lying to her right, left and centre (about friends, work, workload, their whole lives, really) and she truly felt she couldn't leave her baby with him as he'd groomed her to accept that he wouldn't be capable and that everyone was against him so best not have them involved. Coupled with her natural Pollyanna-ish personality and a perverse enjoyment of martyrdom, there was no room for her to assess anything normally so she genuinely didn't care any longer about anything except those two people.

It was very sad and I worry about her a lot (she lives abroad now, 'fresh start' driven by him).

Sorry that doesn't much help the OP but I did immediately wonder if your friend's partner is kosher.

[WoTmania]

'but I do find it hard to comprehend when a mother won't even leave their child with his/her own father until 6 months or whatever' - in my case I suffer from oversupply and would have either spent my whole time in the loos hand expressing. Not my idea of a fun night out. I often used to take them with me in a sling.

And IME you don't have to force the issue sleep-wise. The DC worst at sleeping in this house is the one we tried to 'be firm' with. We took the 'easy way' from the start with the younger ones because the experimental one DS1 wouldn't sleep without Big Person Contact whatever we tried.
They all sleep fine, in their own beds now.

[cosydressinggown]

I have been on both sides of this, and can see it from both of your points of view. Now I am a mother, who has had a demanding baby, I feel very embarrassed about how little I understood before. I think probably one day you will have a baby and you will suddenly understand why she wants to spend her birthday with her friends and the person she loves most in the whole world - her child. Her entire world has been turned upside down, and anything else seems less important. Similarly, when she comes out of the baby fog, she will probably regret not being there for you and not going to your birthday.

In truth, you're just in very, very different places right now, but as long as you keep the contact, it'll come back.

[wickeddevil]

I would suggest that the single biggest factor in whether your friend feels able to go out or not is whether or not her little one sleeps through the night.
In my experience there were distinct before and after phases; before was a fog of exhaustion and survival in which we did what we needed to to get by, after was when I got my mojo back and was able think for myself again.
My point is that I could not imagine any kind of social life in the sleep deprived phase (and with DS1 it was past a year). After a few whole nights sleep, and it really didn't take long, I was able to get some perspective.
Hang on in there a while longer. I am sure your friend will emerge from her bubble, and be only too glad of your company. Good luck.

[stainesmassif]

Regardless of your friends' parenting choices, I think you're just entering a new phase in the friendship.

I've known my closest friends for 25-30 years now and our relationships have all waxed and waned over the years as we have moved to different places, had children, been married, divorced. Our 30's were the biggest period of change and it seemed at times we would lose touch all together. However, in our 40s I believe we value each other even more than we ever did.

Think of the long game. Your friend is being a bit pfb but she'll get over it. Your friends are the family you choose for yourself. Don't give up. But I'd say give her a bit of time to get used to parenthood and relax with it. I literally felt like a car crashed into my life after ds1. Now we've had no3 it's a piece of cake!

[DontmindifIdo]

I would also like to counter the " you just need a good routine" view - with DS, we did have a great routine, and once we established it, he would then sleep. We did manage to go out in the evenings, but I needed to feed until 7pm, then again at 10pm - that was enough if DH and I had a babysitter to go somewhere local for a quick dinner or a couple of drinks, but not really if say, one of my friends was going to do a big evening somewhere that was more than a 15 minute drive from my house.

Now, you always get people who say "oh, you could just flex their routine a bit, it doesn't hurt them" don't realise that with a baby like DS, flexing the routine even by the tiniest bit meant he would not sleep that night. Pushing routine out by 30 minutes would mean 4 hours of less sleep - at least. It would have a knock on effect on the next 3 nights and normally it would be best part of a week before we'd be back on track. We very, very quickly learned - you do not fuck with the routine - to do so would mean DH would be trying to work on no sleep for at least half the following week. I would be crying a lot again, and family life would be shit.

I'm sure some people thought we were being rude turning down invitations, but I'm of the view that the first 6-12 months with your first DC is all about survival. If you have a totally chilled baby who can fit round your life, great, if you don't, then you do what it takes to survive.

[wickeddevil]

Dont mind. Totally agree with your last point re survival.
We have dear friends who we used to invite over when our DCs were small. They had no children at the time, and were happy to fit in, understanding that if was easier for us to meet at our house, and have a meal or takeaway.
Trouble is their stamina was so much greater. They would be wanting to do shots in the small hours, when DH and I would be praying for them to go home, knowing we would be up in just a few hours.
The penny dropped when they had DCs themselves.

[oscarwilde]

YANBU for feeling this way but I think you can see from the posts that it may not be as simple an issue as your friend being totally pfb. Or it might just be that.

I'd accept that in this instance her 30th birthday celebrations are going to be totally different to your expectations. For one, she will probably want to start earlyish in the morning. A nine month old will need some puree fed into him and will then be put down for a nap in his pram or tent (I kid you not) for a snooze. She may want to have a picnic lunch at 12 so meeting around 11, so she can chill with you guys while he sleeps, or not if she is unlucky.
Be prepared between you and your friends to offer to walk alternate laps of the park with the pram if he won't settle - it is her birthday after all.

Expect that she will want to be home by 5 pm to give him his dinner and put him to bed. She's unlikely to be sticking around or inviting you all back to hers so don't be offended if that happens.

Lastly, try not to openly talk about going to the pub to continue the day there - it will only make her feel isolated and a bit shit even if she chooses to be pfb about his bedtime.

[Purlesque]

Hi
Could I just add that we never have people over in the evening, my ds (21 months) gets very anxious when people come round and takes a while for him to settle, he's always been like it, so now just to have a calm evening environment we don't invite people.
Not that people have never visited but we try to avoid if possible.
I had to let my FIL in the back door once during dinner because if DS had seen him he would have screamed and then not eaten.
Sounds odd but it's just how it's worked out.
I also have to go to bed with DS as he's up all night.

Perhaps she has a high need baby too!

[Purlesque]

What I'm saying is don't take it personally.

[MorganMummy]

There are easy babies, and there are difficult babies. I certainly never chose to abandon my friends and do nothing for over a year, but I wasn't going to force my difficult baby to learn to drink from a bottle or not have trouble settling by doing CC, sorry, it just happened that I couldn't leave him. And unless my friends have a similarly difficult baby, they probably won't ever understand it really, but I don't care! When I did try to be social or normal in that year I was awful company anyway and miserable, sleep-deprived or manic.