Sticking a pin in the friendship

Going on a sort of platonic break.

There are a lot of think pieces about the complexity of navigating friendships between women who have children, and childfree women. Which I sometimes find strange, because I’ve found my childfree friendships easier than my friendships with fellow mothers.

That sounds a bit dramatic, so hear me out. Before I had a baby I was A Good Childfree Friend. I cheerfully accepted that in the early days of motherhood, I was going to be the one who made the effort. I got on trains to visit friends who lived far away, brought food, listened to the kind of disjointed conversation that comes from a sleep deprived woman with a torn body, and I understood that this was my time to be unselfish.

When I had a baby, people did the same for me. They came to my house so I didn’t have to go out, brought presents for me and for the baby, listened to my exhausted monologue. Such is the circle of life. When you have more bandwidth, you give more bandwidth.

This only really works when one person in a friendship has that freedom. Which is why I think it’s much harder to maintain your friendships with fellow mothers. Some of the women I love most in the world have had babies over the last couple of years and it has - though no fault of anyone’s - changed the game. You’d think that two people with small children would be a perfect combination to socialise together but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

Mine naps in the morning, yours in the afternoon. I guess we could meet for lunch in the middle? But hang on, we live on other sides of London. And actually, we have ballet in the class, so we can’t leave until after that. Maybe we could wait until the school holidays when weekend classes aren’t running? And then suddenly it’s six months later and you realise with a huge rush of guilt that you didn’t ever follow up and you’ve missed a huge chunk of the other person’s child’s life, and you still haven’t had that glass of wine you really wanted to have with them. Even worse if they don’t live in the same town or city as you do, because you want to go and stay with them, but how the fuck do you get there? Can you carry a pram and a travel cot and enough clothes and bottles and snacks? And when you get there and your child freaks out because they’re sleeping somewhere they don’t know and the suspect you might be about to dump them on these strangers, is it even worth it for all the stress?

So many of my friendships now exist as rushed, guilty exchanges over Whatsapp when we mutually have a moment, shoving as much news as possible at each other. One of my very dear friends who lives abroad has become an email pen pal - we send each other bullet points about our lives when we remember or have a second. And all of this come with two problems - the first being that you love your friends and you want to see them. The second that you feel so guilty for being a bit shit.

The other day a much loved friend of mine did something revolutionary, which I wish I’d thought of first. She messaged me telling me that she was sad that at the moment we’re not able to get it together to see each other, and that she’s excited for when we’ve both got more flex in our lives and we can make that happen. And I responded telling her that I feel the exact same way, and that I know it’ll be wonderful when we get it back, because we put a lot of really happy years in, and that doesn’t just go away.

After her message I felt an astonishing sense of freedom and relief. I realised that maybe for now I need to treat some of my friendships as long distance, because distance is more than miles and if you’ve both got children with different schedules and different needs, that’s just as much a distance as one of you living in Brighton and the other in Sheffield. But when someone moves away to a different part of the world, we don’t write them off and mourn it. We just accept that the friendship will be different for now, that we’ll see each other when we can manage it, and that it’ll still be there if and when circumstances are different.

And actually, maybe this isn’t a kids thing, maybe it’s just a life thing. One of my friendship groups recently went through a long period of being terrible at meeting up in person, stuck in that making a date and then someone bailing at the last minute cycle. I felt horrible about it it, but eventually life shifted and now we’re dramatically better about it, and we have a dreamy time when we meet. Maybe it would have been easier to take a beat, acknowledge that life wasn’t set up for hanging out for that time, and come back when we were ready.

So that’s what I’m doing now. No more guilt, no more hand wringing, no more mutual pretence that we want to have a stressful, rushed trip somewhere with overtired children. I’m going to be grateful for my childfree friends who generously fit around me, I’m going to delight in seeing the mum friends who live close by, or have a nap schedule which fits mine. And I’m going to stop thinking about what a failure it is when some friendships need a pin stuck in them for a little bit, and be very excited to reconnect with those women when the time is right.