It’s an old saw, of course: have kids and you’ll lose your childless friends. They’ll be off carousing and generally doing, y’know, adult things, leaving you to discuss poopy diapers with other breeding members of your circle.
For me as an at-home parent, though, connecting with my friends without kids isn’t that hard: the real challenge is keeping up with my working-parent friends. As I wrote this week at GNM Parents:
I no longer see my working-parent friends — by which I mean couples with kids where both parents work. Our childless friends have a key quality in abundance: flexibility. They can come over after bedtime for a late dinner or swing by on the weekend on their way to dodgeball or hang gliding or whatever it is people without children do. And, of course, our friends without kids dote on Boobaby, and she dotes right back.
The social schism isn’t on the kids-no-kids axis; it’s workers versus at-home — even my "working mother" of a wife gets social time with other working parents at, well, her work. But not me, and that’s what I blogged over at the other blog about.
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I have also noticed this – the relationship with working parent friends also becomes like walking on eggshells lest you give them something to regret about not staying at home, or that they make you feel like you’re wasting your education or your talents staying home – it’s just easier not to deal – and very sad!
Yeah, there’s that, too. Most people who regret working when they have kids move out of San Francisco, where the idea of a one-income family is almost unheard of. And the “wasting your talents” comes up sometimes, but then again, I was a teacher, so my talents are getting used pretty well!