Why people with kids stop hanging out with their kid-less friends

We’ve all been there. A friend has a kid, you go and see the little bundle of joy a couple of times, and then you never hear from your friend again. Sound familiar?

Don’t worry, it’s not you. You haven’t done anything wrong. Us moms don’t suddenly hate you, or think we have nothing in common anymore just because you haven’t yet spawned.  It’s not even us. It’s the kid(s). 

At first, it’s fine. The tiny infant is portable. He sleeps in his pram/baby capsule/portable bassinet where ever we go without any fuss.  Just give him some boob or bottle (which ever you prefer, I’m not judging here), then BANG, he’s out cold in a milk induced coma. We can meet our friends at a cafe, the shops, their house, wherever. We can chat while the baby sleeps, then our friend(s) can hold him and pinch his adorable little cheeks and talk to him in that annoying baby voice when he is awake. Easy.

When the baby starts sitting, we can still catch up with our baby-less friends. Maybe at their houses instead of a cafe or the like because now the baby wants to sit up all of his waking hours. Sitting up is obviously super awesome.  Whilst practicing awesome sitting, baby also wants to be amused, mostly by us, but also by some toys. So we need to have a blanket for baby to sit on, and a bunch of toys. That could get messy at a cafe, plus some unobservant patron could accidentally trod on our little bundles of joy.

Then the baby starts crawling. Just think back a little bit. Is this the stage you stopped hearing from your mother friend? Probably. The cafe is out. Imagine baby sitting in a high chair/pram/our lap whilst we attempt to have a conversation with our friend. Baby doesn’t want to be sitting. Duh. That is so 2 months ago. Now it’s all about crawling! Baby screams due to being restrained in a chair/pram/lap until we put him on the floor for his crawling leisure. He crawls like a mad man towards other patrons, goes under a table and tries to eat their shoes. Seriously, that is what they do.

Ok, so maybe we can go to our friends house. Seems plausible, right? Wrong. Child-less friends do not have child-proof houses. We could go over there, but instead of having a nice catch up, we’d be spending the entire time keeping our cheeky crawlers from pulling all of our friends books off the shelves and ripping them to pieces, banging his head on the corner of the coffee table as he crawls past, opening all of the kitchen cupboards and breaking all of the dishes, eating the toilet brush in the bathroom, pulling all of the DVD’s out of their cases, checking if Swarovski crystals bounce, etc. Not to mention baby-less friends don’t think about small objects that babies can choke on and hazards are everywhere in a non baby-proof house. This, of course, stresses us out, we don’t get to talk to our friends at all, and our crawling babies get annoyed that we keep taking him away from all of the breakable delights he has his eyes set on.

He will pull all of your things off of you shelves and attempt to eat them.

Maybe our friend is super awesome, and they put everything they don’t want to get ruined on a higher shelf that crawling baby can’t reach, just so that we can come over. So that works. For a while.

But then baby starts walking. Now even more stuff is within babies chubby grasp. Baby is way more coordinated and determined, and our friend can’t possibly walking baby-proof her house just so we can come over. We are too embarrassed to tell our friends that our rambunctious toddlers will tear her house apart unless we have our eyes on him every single second, coupled with many “no, you can’t play with that’s” and lots of tantrums. There is no point of going to our friends house because we won’t be able to have a conversation anyway.

Oh, and there’s the nap times too. Going anywhere more than 15 minutes or so away and actually being able to stay for a while messes with nap time. Did I say nap time? I meant mommy’s sanity time. Seriously, you don’t want to mess with that. You might think “oh, it’s just one little nap time, it can’t hurt, right?” Yes, it can. You’re not the one who will be trying to comfort a screaming child who is throwing himself backwards or banging his head on the floor and won’t calm down for anything at 5 pm when we’re trying to make dinner because he is over tired.

Our child-less friends often invite us out at night time, when the kids are asleep, but we don’t really want to be out late because babies/toddlers don’t know about weekends. They haven’t yet discovered the joy of sleeping in. Nor do they let us enjoy it. Ever. Plus, by the end of the day, we just want to sit on the couch and enjoy a moment’s peace, not drag ourselves out to some loud place where we will spend the whole time trying not to fall asleep.

So we kind of just lose touch. By the time the kids are old enough not to destroy everything in site and do as they’re told, we feel extremely silly calling our childless friends again because it’s been so long and we kind of feel like an ass.

Childless people, there is an easy solution to this problem: Go to your mother-friend’s house for a catch up. Call her, and tell her you know it’s hard to get out for a catch up, but you’d love to see her, so even if you have to drive for an hour, you’re happy to come over. Mothers off babies/toddlers are usually happy to have company that can wipe their own butts and speak in proper sentences. Especially if they bring lunch.

Then when the kids are older, we can go out to cafe’s and stuff again. Just bear with us, parenting is hard.

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Copyright 2012 Sheri Thomson