December 23, 2014 Blogs & Columns » Vodka Yonic

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How having a baby can change your bff 

When your friends become moms, the game takes a turn

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I'm making a baby quilt. Again. It's my third this year. The making of baby quilts is a salve I apply when I'm hurt that my best friends have moved on and embarked on the mysterious journey of motherhood. It's an antidote for loneliness, a spell that protects me from envy and self-pity. It's also a solid piece of evidence I can point to down the road that says, "I'm happy for you! Just look at the quilt!"

While I am happy for my friends, I also ache for their companionship, their particular brand of humor, their shrewd observations and the wise advice they selflessly dispensed year after year. I ache for their time, their attention. They're now focused on breast pumps, interrupted sleep cycles and forgetting to brush their own teeth, because having a child is all-consuming. It even — as my own mother attests — may claim their entire identities.

In college, when my best friend and I marched in a Washington rally for women's right to choose, I didn't expect we'd each choose so differently a decade later. Our life trajectories had always matched up: We went to the same high school, college and grad school; we even worked in the same field. She introduced me to feminism and schooled me on the politics of identity. Now that she's a new mother, I don't know who I am without her holding my hand, but she certainly doesn't need that on her plate. She has another human to look after now.

I've long known that I don't want to have children, and the fact that my partner feels the same way certainly makes it easier. What I know from my best friends is that motherhood is a hatful of contradictions, both exhausting and invigorating, difficult and beautiful. It can bring both feelings of loneliness and a deep yearning for a moment of solitude.

Though my mom-friends try to make time to communicate, I imagine that they've been propelled into a world where I offer nothing of value for them. My daily dramas — arguing with people about politics, resetting fitness goals, over-analyzing my relationship with my sister — seem more trite and insignificant than ever. I feel like someone made us choose teams, and they were deceived. They were won over by the promise that their lives would be fulfilled by having children. They were convinced that nothing in the world would compare to the rewards of parenthood, and that if they chose wrong, they'd endure a toiling, joyless existence for the rest of their days. I, savvy to the machinations of the patriarchy, chose the other team, confident that they would see the error of their ways before it was too late.

But they didn't. They had kids. Beautiful, bright-eyed kids who will probably end up being just as intelligent, funny and wise as they are. They need friends who share common ground, who can sympathize with being woken up three to six times a night, living with sore, swollen breasts, and constantly making decisions that place others ahead of themselves. They need friends who can see the bigger picture in these many inconveniences, because I can't.

While I can be jealous of my best friend's new mom groups with their coded language of acronyms — that's another topic altogether — the fact remains that there is no one in the world who knows me as well as she does. The friendships of women are deeply intimate, the bonds sacred. We look to friends to preserve parts of ourselves from the past, to chronicle how we've grown, and to remind us of what we've fought for.

But when babies enter the picture, my friends have to do that and more for someone else. My best friend is no longer the independent, sardonic poetess who introduced me to feminism all those years ago. She's growing into many more things. So where does that leave me?

I recently turned to my aunt. She's still wildly in love with her husband, enjoys a career as a leader in her field and has made the difficult choice again and again not to have children. "It's heartbreaking," she says. "What you end up doing is making new friends who also don't have kids. With few exceptions, you lose the ones that do."

Having kids may in fact be one route to happiness, but it's not the only one. And it's not mine. If my aunt is right, then I guess there are plenty of women out there who made the same choice, are thinking the same thoughts and turning over the same guilt. They have just as much a right to feel important in this world as women who make the other choice. And they don't need a goddamn quilt to prove it.

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