Last week, this very topic was echoed in a conversation I overheard while ear-wigging in the playground (as you do).
Can friends who are parents remain 'really' close friends with friends who aren't?
Oooo, controversial!!! And I can hear you all thinking of fine examples to immediately dispel this theory (and my non-parent friends thinking, charming!!!).
Bear with me.
What I'm getting at, both from the point of view of parents AND non-parents, is that although staying close in a friendship after the arrival of children might not be impossible, it certainly isn't easy.
The conversation I overheard at school was about a group of forty-something-year-old girl friends who had been trying, for many years, to plan a short trip away together, just the girls!
It had never happened; running the home, the demands of kids, taxi duties and sheer exhaustion, had always got in the way.....until one day.
On that day, the ladies decided to still go away, but.......take the kids with them. Eureka!!! Suddenly it was do-able and the trip was planned within hours!
I'm not just coming at this from the 'parent' perspective and bemoaning my own lack of time and opportunity to meet up with non-parent friends, without the kids around. I ashamedly admit sometimes struggling to understand why my friends can't just drop everything to meet me when I have an hours gap between football training and street dance class. How mean!!!
In reality, how wrong I am. For one, I selfishly forget that my friends without kids have a much wider circle of friends, more diverse hobbies and busier social lives. More importantly, they all work a hell of a lot more hours than I do, in very stressful and demanding jobs, and therefore their spare time is also a rare and precious commodity.
In some ways, FaceBook has provided us with a new level of relationship, filling the gap between BFF (Best Friends Forever) and FOF (Fallen Out Forever); where we can maintain contact through regularly sharing family / social / work and hobby news and photographs. We can stay in touch with all our busy friends without actually having to stay in touch, if you see what I mean. (Yes, that's right, I've gone soft on FB)
I guess it's just practical that my social timetable as a mum fits in better with friends who are mums, making meet-ups more logistically manageable. The kids are, of course, usually around but at least they can play together while we chat. We just accept that during such mum-to-mum conversations we never actually finish sentences; there's bound to be an interruption from some small person needing a bottom wiped, or in my son's case, something urgently needing sellotaping (two non-linked examples, I hasten to clarify).
Likewise, before I had the boys, in meet-ups with already-burdened friends, I recall being frustrated at such seemingly trivial interruptions from their snotty kids. I simply didn't understand why bum wiping was more important than discussing my boyfriend trauma or hairstyle dilemma (those things being of equal importance at the time).
I guess it's all about compromise and finding the middle ground where mums understand the varied stresses and strains of everyday life without kids and, in return, our friends understand that since we've given birth to the darn things we're apparently morally and legally-bound to give them priority with regard to that most precious of commodities; time.
At the end of the day, all friendships that survive childbirth or any life-changing event are surely worth working at in real time, and not just through a FaceBook post (see, I'm not totally convinced). Meet-ups may be less frequent but non-the-less special and worth making time for.
PS: I've gone all serious and pensive again so I'll throw in another one of my pet hates, courtesy of 'motorway management' and specifically the signs warning drivers that there are pedestrians in the road.
Rather than having to repeat these signs for miles and miles to hundreds, nay thousands, of drivers, why not just have one sign directed at the pedestrians saying: GET OFF THE ROAD YOU FOOLS!?
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| Friends. Happy days, when sentences were never finished!!! See you soon, face-to-face, or on FaceBook. |
