The Great Divide: How to Navigate Parenthood Without Losing Your Friends
Thinking through what happens to friendships post-kids, if they can survive (spoiler alert: they can), and advice for how to maintain the friendships worth keeping
It’s no secret that friendships—like your career, sanity, and even personal hygiene—get harder to maintain once kids enter the dynamic. No matter how much we lie to our friends—and, let’s be honest, ourselves—that “nothing will change,” that all goes out the window once baby arrives and the chasm between you and who you once were and you and your friends steadily widens.
As a mother, your social landscape inevitably shifts in accordance with your time constraints, desires and financial priorities. Many activities you once enjoyed with friends lose their appeal: late-night concerts sound more like waterboarding than fun, two glasses of rosé renders you incompetent for a week, and Saturday night childcare is nearly impossible to secure. You’re tired and, truth be told, more often than not, you’d rather spend Saturday night at home on the couch with your partner sipping a glass of Barolo and pretending like you might actually have sex (you won’t) than spend $200 on a night out.
The reality is, you’ve changed and, as a result, so have your friendships.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some friendships actually strengthen when a new baby arrives—typically, the ones involving one friend, who is already a mother, welcoming another friend to hell…I mean the fold. There are new activities you can do together with your children, commiserate with one another about the trials and beauties of motherhood, and connect over shared experiences in this new phase of life you’re navigating in tandem with one another. There are also the somewhat more rare instances in which a childfree friend leans heavily into—or, at least, takes a deep-rooted interest in—their friends’ children. These friends tighten the bond through their genuine enthusiasm and support. I’ve been lucky in both regards.
But there are other friendships that tend to suffer in the postpartum era. And more often than not, I have found that it’s the friendships between mothers and non-mothers that struggle to weather the relationship’s necessary and inevitable evolution.
About two years ago, The Cut published a viral article on this tumultuous dynamic. Entitled, “Adorable Little Detonators: Our Friendship Survived Bad Dates, Illness, Marriage, Fights. Why Can't It Survive Your Baby?”, the piece struck a nerve with readers on both sides of the parenting divide. The author, who is childfree, explores the slow collapse of her friendships following her friends' transitions to motherhood, articulating the resentment and disconnection many experience but few openly discuss:
The friendship divide is not some dramatic breakup but a slow-rolling tectonic shift that neither side notices at first (especially the parents). The fissure often starts as an abstract fear of unknown agents of change (an emerging baby and an emerging parent) and the shared realization that two lives, which had been more or less plodding along a similar path, are about to diverge. While one friend veers off into colic and diapers, navigating the way a new child gives new meaning to their sense of self while simultaneously taking a wrecking ball to it, to their ownership of their bodies, their sleep schedule, and their understanding of their careers, the other, childless friend is, yes, dealing with their own wrecking balls (partnering up, divorcing, trying to have children, deciding never to have children) but is otherwise living in a fairly unaltered state.
What the author describes is more than just a physical disconnect from her friends but a sort of emotional abandonment: “Once the babies are here and we try to make plans, I bristle at the tinge of superiority I imagine in their unapologetic assumption that everything operates on their schedule (though I know to some degree it has to). And when I complain about my life, I imagine that my busy work schedule, double-booked social calendar, and fatigue from opting to stay out late the night before are trivial to them, so I hold back details while wondering why they aren’t more curious about my life. Don’t they care?”
I’ll never forget when my best friend called me shortly after we’d gone for a walk in Central Park to tell me she loved me but she felt like I didn’t care about her life or what she was saying because she wasn’t a mom. It wasn’t true, but I could understand why she felt that way—motherhood has a way of distracting you in a manner that can feel both self-involved and self-important if left unchecked. I felt like ass about it and was frustrated with her and myself but, more than anything, I was grateful she called. She called not because our talk in the park was friendship-ending but because she cared enough to make sure it wasn’t.
Of course, the dissolution of a friendship between a mom and a childfree friend as well as the extent to which feelings of resentment (and what type of resentment) builds is somewhat context specific. Friends who are childfree by choice and never want to have kids may be agitated for very different reasons than a friend who has been struggling to conceive or a friend who wants to have kids in the future but isn’t ready just yet.
But it’s not only the childfree friends that can find themselves feeling alone and unimportant in their friendships once their kids are born. Any mother will tell you how isolating parenthood can be, especially in the early days when the novelty of a newborn wears off and visits and calls to check in become increasingly less frequent. Emotions are high, everything feels new and uncertain, and all you crave is the comfort of the faintly familiar pieces of the life you once had. So when your friends don’t express interest in diaper rash or immediately grasp the gravity of colic or stop asking you how you are altogether, it’s easy to default to wanting to scream, “YOU JUST DON’T GET IT.” And, it’s true, they don’t. The question is, are they trying to?
Not everyone is. Not everyone wants to get it. And, as such, I’m going to say the thing you’re not supposed to say: some friendships simply aren’t worth keeping—the ones in which neither friend makes the effort to understand the other. These are the friendships that, most likely, rested on a faulty foundation to begin with: the ones that lacked an authentic love for one another, shared values, mutual respect, and genuine care or were born out of convenience. While many friendships are seasonal, others simply go up in flames, running their course at the first sight of a roadblock. Those friendships will naturally fade. But others—the ones where their presence fills you with joy, their love swells your confidence, and their support makes you feel like you can take on the world (or, at least, your baby)—are worth fighting for.
Here’s how:
Meet Each Other Where You Are
As with any relationship, friendship requires some level of give-and-take—a willingness to compromise and make an effort to understand one another. Almost invariably, this give-or-take is less pronounced when both parties’ freedom is less inhibited by responsibility and the players’ lifestyles and interests are more in sync. But values, likes, and priorities inevitably shift in motherhood while your friends’ habits, routines, and ongoings may stay somewhat stagnant or, at least, may not be quite as drastically altered as your own, creating a physical and emotional gap that requires tending to.
The same way mothers expect their friends to sometimes bend to their (and, more importantly, their baby’s schedule) and engage in child-friendly activities in order to spend quality time together, childfree friends are also entitled to expect that their mom-friends will also make a similar effort to go out to dinner and participate in adult-only functions.
But meeting each other where you are not only pertains to a night out. Perhaps more important is the requirement that you both take an active—and genuine—interest in each other’s lives. Your friend is going through a bad breakup? You show up for her. She has some fun gossip that she’s excited to share? You listen and you engage. Just as you would hope that your friend wouldn’t brush off your concerns that your child might have a nut allergy, you don’t brush off the things that are important to her.
Meeting your friends where they are can be difficult, especially in the absence of childcare or the presence of severe complicating factors such as postpartum depression or other health implications. But it’s worth it. You may even find you’re relieved to be sucked out of your world and into theirs, even if only temporarily. We all need a little escapism sometimes.
Acknowledge the Effort
When either of you go out of your way to accommodate or please the other, acknowledge it and say thank you. It’s a small gesture to simply say that you understand that the circumstances might not be ideal for one party but you appreciate the effort. While not necessarily Herculean, these gestures shouldn’t be assumed or taken for granted. They matter. So say so.
Check Your Judgment
It’s easy to scoff at your friend who is calling you to rant about the fact that the fuckboy you told her was a fuckboy behaved like, well, a fuckboy. It’s also easy to be dismissive of her complaints of a shitty boss when you’ve been up all night with a newborn. But don’t get too comfortable on that high horse of yours and think it’s a good idea to start judging them for having complaints outside the scope of motherhood. Your friends shouldn’t be judging you for opting to spend all your time with a stinky poop machine and then calling them to complain about it for an hour. And you shouldn’t be judging them for how they choose to spend their time or their grievances. Listen with care and without condemnation. Judgment leads to censure, which builds resentment and distance. Withhold judgment or, if you can’t help yourself, keep it to yourself.
Celebrate All Wins
Remember that Sex and the City episode where Carrie goes to a friend’s home for a baby shower and when she’s asked to remove her Manolos, they subsequently go missing? When Carrie asks the hostess, Kyra, to replace them, Kyra criticizes Carrie’s lifestyle and decision to spend money on fancy footwear. She replaces the shoes only when she realizes that Carrie has not only shown up to celebrate her marriage and her children but has also shelled out some serious cash on wedding and baby gifts in the process. The episode, while playful, highlights the notion that all friends’ choices and milestones should be respected and celebrated.
As moms, we expect that our friends celebrate our babies and our journey through motherhood—they attend baby showers, school plays, bat mitzvahs and sweet sixteens with a smile on their face and, often, a gift in tow. And while there isn’t the same societal expectation or emphasis placed on wins like promotions, a successful date, or finding the perfect apartment that occur outside the realm of marriage and motherhood, these things matter. Celebrate them.
Discover New Common Ground
The things you used to like to do together or talk about may no longer be feasible or all that interesting to you. Finding your new common ground may not be obvious, but it is worth it. You may find that refocusing your friendship on new activities and/or subject matters may actually strengthen your bond.
Accept That You’re Both Giving What You Can (And Be Ok With It) Or Ask For More of What You Need
It’s ok to just accept that your friendship isn’t what it used to be: you don’t see each other as often, you don’t talk on the phone every night, you don’t even text once a month. Perhaps when you do find time to chat the conversation is surface level at best. It’s ok to say this is what we can each give right now and that’s enough for the time being. It doesn’t mean the friendship is lost for good or unable to be revived. In fact, it often just means that you’re secure enough in your dynamic to know it will come back to life when the time is right.
Alternatively, you may decide that you don’t want the friendship to take a beat. In fact, you need more from your friend and you need it now. So say so. Not everyone will be willing or able to bend, but they won’t know you want them to unless you’re honest about your needs.
Be Vulnerable
And, on that note, be vulnerable. Your friend can’t understand why you may be desperate to cancel your primetime Chez Fifi reservation in favor of sitting on the couch with a hefty portion of Pad Thai unless you open up to them. They also might be under the false impression that they’re not needed and, to the contrary, may see themselves as a burden. Despite the optical illusion presented on social media, motherhood isn’t all rainbows and butterflies and your life isn’t perfect just because you had a baby. Be real with your friends.
Ultimately, The Cut’s author is right in the sense that friendships do, invariably, require more intentional effort in the postpartum era. But the friendships that matter are salvageable and can even deepen through this transition. And while I might not get it right all the time, I’ll certainly always try because, the truth is, in many ways, my friends are my anchors, my safety, and my joy. The key is recognizing that both sides need to adapt and being willing to do the work.