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The other day I was having lunch with an older friend who never had children. A gracious hostess, she gives the kind of sophisticated dinner parties where the guests linger. Whenever my husband and I are invited, we thoroughly enjoy spending such a grown-up evening.

But my friend was clearly miffed. Finally she blurted it out: "You haven't invited me to a dinner party in 10 years!"

I was stunned into silence; I had no idea she had been brooding about such a lapse. But then I realized what the problem was.

"You don't understand," I said. "I haven't had a dinner party in 10 years."

Ever since I became a mother, social events at our house have been -- umm, "informal" would be the nice way to put it. "Chaotic" might be more accurate. The only people we ever have over are other families -- the kind of people who understand why dinner has to be served at 6 PM to avoid child meltdown, the kind of people who will leave by 8:30 because we all have the same deadline: kids' bedtimes to attend to.

In other words, people like us. Harried parents with rambunctious children. We are all trying to keep it together, struggling with too much to do, too little time, and too little sleep.

When my husband and I had our first, a colicky baby who screamed constantly, we felt so overwhelmed that our socializing was limited to "pizza dates." We knew two other couples who had just had children; bleary-eyed with exhaustion, none of us had the time or the energy to give a proper dinner party, so every couple of weeks we would get together, order pizza, and wallow in the kind of conversation that is only fascinating to new parents.

As the years passed, I regained the will to cook actual meals, but even now that has its perils. A couple of weeks ago, another family came over and I felt adventurous enough to make complicated Thai food for dinner. But as everyone raved about how delicious it was, I kept disappearing into the kitchen, peering into the oven, and wondering why the plum cobbler looked so peculiar. It seemed to be -- well, liquid. I finally realized that there were so many children in the kitchen badgering me when I was rushing around making dinner while simultaneously trying to get dessert into the oven that I had forgotten to add the flour to the batter. So dessert -- sort of a hot plum soup instead of a cobbler -- had to be spooned over ice cream.

Only other parents can truly understand such lapses, so it is not surprising that your social life changes when you have a baby. But the adjustments can be unexpectedly traumatic if the arrival of children ends up destroying all your old friendships.

Former New York Times reporter Leslie Bennetts writes for a wide range of national magazines, including Vanity Fair.