although neither is it in any way about regret. I guess I am just trying to come to terms with reality, and wondering in part if my experience is a little different than other peoples'.
1. There was a Wall Stree.t Journal article last week about a woman detailing her IF struggles. In it she laments that her friends with kids did not sternly admonish her to start trying to have a baby at 26 (no idea where that magical number comes from), that she did not seize every one night stand/casual boyfriend as a possible opportunity to get pregnant, the usual lament of a single, infertile 42 year old. And reading it I was thinking about what I would say if one of my friends asked about the ideal time to have a baby (and related I'm 99% sure that the colleague I am having lunch with today is going to tell me that they are "just about ready"). And I'm really not sure that I would say 26 (by which point we'd already been trying for a little while and were certainly fully enrolled in our IF clinic). Not that I have any regrets at all, and in my case given the litany of IF problems I had I cannot imagine having anything other than eternal thanks that I both had a partner and the resources to be doing an IF work-up at 24 ...
2. Since JD is currently on leave and thus home before 11 pm, it would be quite easy for me to go out one night with friends for a drink, a movie, exploring the big city. So it came as a rather sad realization that I don't have any friends to do that with. I turns out that I do 100% of my socializing over the heads of my babies so my local friends are either working mothers who are too busy to get together or SAHMs who want to spend time with their husbands at night. My pre-baby friends? Gone. I have 2 close work colleagues but they are both guys and I'm pretty sure neither would consider going out for a drink at night with me (one because of the gf, one because of the lack of a gf). Let's put that more succintly: I live in the city that never sleeps and I don't have a single friend to go out and have a drink at 9 pm with. Or see a movie. Or go shopping. And that is because I "decided" to have kids before 30, because my college and grad school friends are still living life without schedules and naptimes.
3. Two of my close mom friends just moved to the suburbs. Since they both work full-time, they are well-aware that their lives will now consist of daycare drop-off, pick-up, bedtime routine. They are not going to meet local moms, they are not going to be able to squeeze in a 4:30 pm playtime, as we did quite happily with both of them. My best friend (who is a military wife) says she has no friends from the last 2 places she's lived that she plans to keep in touch with. I am just not sure that I can live that way.
I guess that the breaks in our routine are so few that it's just now that I am realizing the extent of the change.
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5 comments:
I miss in-person friends, too.
My friends fall into categories such as: those with older kids, those with brand new babies, those with kids similarly aged that either live too far for a convenient playdate or ar SAHM who don't understand that I can't get together mid-day.
Grrrr, to just not being in the same situation with anybody else, right?!
Please know that if we did live close by, I would absolutely drag you out for drinks (plural), or at least some unfiltered people-watching.
Is it wrong that I am giddy about some friends who are just now having their first baby or a baby after a big gap from prior, so they will understand how frazzled I am sometimes, lol?!
You would have this problem even if all of your friends had babies at the exact same time as you. My local friends all had their first (and now second) kids within ~2 years of each other. We go out in the evening on occasion, but it takes a LOT of advance planning, to make sure that all the husbands can be home at proper times and nobody has work commitments and nobody is traveling, and even then one of the kids usually gets sick and screws it all up. I think this is less about who your friends are or where you work, and more just about the reality of having young children.
We also do lots of full-family brunches on weekends with groups of friends. If you get enough people, even very young kids will entertain each other, allowing for real adult conversation. My mom friends and I also like to send the kids and dads to the park for some quality time while we go out for lunch on weekends, which is much easier to manage for us working moms than drinks on a weeknight.
I hear you. H went out with a colleague for a drink earlier this week, and I kept thinking that someday, it would be my turn to go out and have a drink. And then, I realized that I don't have anyone to meet for a drink. There are some moms in a local playgroup that I belong to, and on occasion, they try to schedule a girls-night-out sort of thing, but to be perfectly honest, although there are some sweet women who are part of this group, I don't know many of them all that well outside of kid-stuff, and there are a few who I *really* don't want to get to know any better, so going out for a "girl's night out" with them doesn't sound like much fun.
And beyond those local mom friends, I don't know anyone else that I'd really like to hang out with. I wish there were people who lived closer (next time you visit Random South City, I may insist on meeting up for an adult beverage, even if it means dragging a kid or two along... though I'd love to find a way to go out without them!), but the truth is, I've built many friendships online, simply because I'm actually a little bit shy and somewhat awkward when it comes to IRL interactions. And I'm also persnickety and don't have much patience for sorting through the baloney to try to make deeper IRL friendships. It's too hard sometimes.
Anyway, I had been thinking about seeing if my mom would fund a trip home for me so I could see some of my old friends and hang out with them (I've got a birthday coming up in a couple of months), but then, I intercepted a random, incredibly kid-unfriendly comment between two of such friends (one lamenting that she couldn't make her FB page kid-free because she was tired of seeing pictures of/reading about her friends' kids), and I felt really stung. Because, in truth, I have no real life outside of the Twinkles right now, and if I were to meet them for a drink, I don't know that I could manage an entire evening without referring to my kids. So, basically, I now feel like I have nothing to say to any of my non-kid-having friends because I know they don't want to hear it, and I'm too pathetic to have anything else to say. Sad.
As for the proper age to have children, weirdly enough, my fertility was in much better order from 29 on than it was before then. Somewhere around 24, a switch flipped in my head and I knew that I wanted to have kids. Sadly, I didn't have a partner in sight at that point who I'd want to have kids with, and since I wasn't ovulating all that frequently, it wouldn't have mattered anyway. So, for me, although I would have understood the 26-years-old thing from the 42-and-single perspective, the truth is that your life sometimes needs to sort itself out in order for you to find yourself at an appropriate place. And yeah, it would be awesome if that sorting-out happened before there were age-related infertility, I would find it hard to recommend to someone that they disregard that sorting-out time, unless they were truly desperately dedicated to having their own genetic offspring and raising them by themselves (but also willing to risk having someone permanently in that child's life who they may not know or like all that well, since fathers naturally have rights as well, even if they are just a one-night-stand-style "sperm donor"...). I think the only advice I would give regarding age is to simply remember that fertility medicine has it's limitations and that whether we like it or not, our fertility declines with age and we should be mindful of that.
I've been feeling this big time lately. I realized the other day that only 2 friends made the effort to actually meet my son. And that was one visit in 8 weeks. I offer to meet other friends & no response. It's tough & discouraging & if I was closer than 2 hour away we'd be drinking a delicious red together! And you can bet that if I doake it up there you will be hearing from me!
I hear you. On the flip side, the loneliest time in my life was when I was 37ish, single, and living in your fair city. My friends were already parents, and the single women were all much younger than me. All I wanted was a nice husband and a couple of kids, but all the men I met for many years were single for good reasons and definitely not papa material! It was a tough time.
But parenthood? Yeah, it definitely changes things, limits some possibilities. Community-building has to become very intentional, which to me is hard because it takes so much time that is in such short supply.
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