Do Your Non-Parent Friends Get It?

Once you had a baby, did you find yourself out of sync with your childless friends—or worse yet, feel they were silently judging you for not being the same person you were pre-baby? This post by Emelia Symington Fedy of the blog Trying to be Good has been popping up in my Facebook feed. It resonates among my parent friends because she ‘fesses up that no, it’s not just in your sleep-deprived head—your friends are indeed annoyed that you’ve changed. But even better, she admits to a big change of heart when she spends an afternoon with a baby herself:

“I am sorry.

For judging you because your style went down the tubes.

For being annoyed when you forget to call me back.

For thinking you are not being a very good friend anymore.

For saying ‘I’ll lose all my baby weight, I’ll make the time.’

For telling my partner ‘we’ll be much sooooooo more relaxed about parenting than they are.’…

For wishing you could just feed him and talk to me about my next career move at the same time.

For not getting it. Any of it. At all.”

I was the first of my friends to have kids, and it’s been secretly satisfying to see them all start their own families, and begin to understand why it takes me a week to return calls, why conversations are punctuated by asides to my kids, and why I will always choose a good night’s sleep over a late night out.

Do your feel your friends without kids can’t quite understand? Did you have remorse for a way you judged a mom friend before you had kids?