I was reading a friend's Parenting magazine a while ago. They had an interesting article about things that people swore they wouldn't do before they had kids but ending up doing them anyway. Most of it was interesting, some of it was funny, but one response just bugged me to no end.
There was this woman who vowed that having kids wouldn't change her friendships. But, of course, after her baby came her no-parent friends started drifting away from her. (Or her them?) Calling each other less and less, going out less and less.... they just didn't understand what being a parent was like.
This annoyed me because it seemed so... soo..... stupid. Almost all my friends have children under 6 years old. Many have toddlers and new babies on the way! This is no way prevents me, the no-child woman, from being friends with them.
See, this is what I've learned to do:
1) Be accommodating with my schedule.
2) Always plan on the kids coming along.
3) Help Mom with children when possible to speed things up. (Like getting in and out of cars.)
4) Treat children like people, not like annoying "tag along's".
5) And be willing to talk about things relating to children. (I find this quite profitable since I learn a lot from people with kids that I can pass on to others, or to myself should I find myself in a parental type situation.)
It also helps if you have meaningful friendships. You know, ones that have more to them then going to bars or clubs. Or to have friends with hobbies or interests that don't require you going far from home for long hours.
It might also be that New Moms tend to drop everything else in favor of focusing exclusively on their children. Some of that can't be helped since babies are a lot of work (especially the ornery ones). But there's also a major priority shift that happens when a kid comes along. There's a tendancy, especially with New Moms, to make the children the center of their lives. Everything else is secondary, people (including husbands), pets, and hobbies all. If it's not related to their kid in some form it's just not worth their time (or energy).
Actually, it kind of reminds me of falling in love. You know, that obsessive exclusive type of love? Perhaps it's similar?
Anyway, I think this obsessiveness over children starts to wan as the children get older. More independent from Mom. Suddenly the parent CAN'T have the kid as the center of their world, exclusive to everything else. (Not unless they want to seriously mess their children up!) They have to find something else or go crazy.
This is where they start to find themselves again. It's not that they revert to pre-parent days, but that they start realize that they can't be in Mommy-mode forever. Some day those kids won't be there, some day they'll leave. What will they do when that happens?
Ah... they'll need something to do that does NOT, in fact, involve children. A hobby, an ambition... something they can do seperately from being a Mom. And so they go back and try to remember what they use to like, what they use to want to do, and start pursuing those things again. Or, if they were particularly immature pre-kid days, they find a new hobby or ambition to pursue. (Not that they exclude their Mom-ness, but they start broadening their horizons... adding things to their life.)
(This is my observation anyway. I might be completely wrong as I've never experienced being a New Mom.)
So maybe this woman had friends who were doing things that children could not be incorporated into (drinking and clubs) and/or that the woman herselve was suffering from "New Mom" syndrome.
There. Got that out of my system. :P
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