My best friend is child-free, and I’m about ready to stretch and sweep with my second child now one week out from the due date.
We’ve read the viral essay by Allison Davis in The Cut, Why can’t our friendship survive your baby. We’ve listened to Gina Rushton’s The Dilemma with its recently released episode on the subject. And we’ve shared a number of culture newsletters tackling friendship navigation at different ends of this seismic life stage.
My partner and co-parent is important to me. My children, for many months, literally part of me. But my friendships are something else. A source of energy, a reminder of who I am, and to be completely honest, a huge source of safety in giving me the agency, choice and support that I’ve needed both before and during parenting.
Yet, despite the insights and tips that we draw on to evolve our friendship, I feel let down by the guidance I’ve received, and in fact confused on a subject that pre-children, I felt only too well equipped to navigate.
It seems to me that there is now all matter of evidence-base and shared understanding of how to support friends through sensitive life developments. Whether that be mental health challenges, gender-based violence, grief, chronic health issues and hopefully more.
I have also found a shared understanding among friends on how to navigate the partners we don’t like, betrayals and painful breakdowns in social circles. Yet the simple question on whether to organise Friday night’s dinner at a child-friendly time, has caught my group chats off guard on more than one occasion – potentially ending with a heated text or sly remark to follow.
Should I invite kids to the wedding? Should I invite friends without kids to endure the Frozen birthday party? Should our group catch-up be at yet another kid friendly-venue? The dreaded questions that hang in the air.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve learnt some things along the way. For parents, there are three key rules: engage in non-child related discussion; allow friends in by providing opportunities for meaningful child engagement (if it is wanted!); and most importantly, create child-free spaces for unbeatable one-on-one connection.
From a child-free perspective, I’ve read: be patient at this time of mighty change; don’t be afraid to ask for the support that you continue to need; and keep clear boundaries on what you are and are not willing to accommodate. And while these three pointers sound solid, I’m not yet convinced.
On one-hand, we have a friend accepting being largely on pause, only now with the new onus to proactively advocate for the care they’re after – likely to a distracted parent, over and over again. On the other-hand, we have a friend working overtime to compartmentalise huge parts of their life.
Not to be a downer, but no wonder our friendships are struggling to survive the baby in the room. Amidst the emerging discussion on this issue, one glaring gap I haven’t seen tackled is a nod to what impact the oppressive institution of motherhood has on all of this.
Not only are mothers in Australia facing higher rates of depression with one in five women experience postnatal depression (twice as high as their male counterparts), and one in three birthing people estimated to have experienced birth trauma, many mothers are disproportionately navigating the ‘double shift’ of professional work and domestic labour at night, and importantly, are facing the ‘maternity ceiling’ where women in Australia who have children earn significantly less than those without – for more reasons than we can point a stick at.
Surely, the unachievable and oppressive institution of motherhood across our culture and structures, not only harms women’s health and agency, but impacts the relationships that they love and hold dear.
The confidence to de-mask among friends, the ability to find space and time, and let’s face it, have access to the disposable income they once had to invest in the getaways, dinners and social engagements they may pine for, have in very real-terms diminished.
I also take issue with liberal-feminism too quickly discounting mothering as gender-essentialism, meanwhile all but celebrating women’s independence and self-reliance. Does child-free have to embody Destiny’s Child’s 2009 lyrics, “I depend on me”?
As the Australian Association of Psychologists advocate for the establishment of a Loneliness Minister amidst the NSW inquiry into loneliness, perhaps it’s our wake-up call to focus on fostering interdependence, communities of care, and in fact finding the strength of women at all stages of life who are able to care and be cared for.
All said and done, I can’t help but think it remains the very same capitalist-patriarchy that leaves all women heavily judged, feeling misunderstood, and being penalised for their reproductive and mothering choices, whichever these are.
Practising patience and going above and beyond in our friendships will only get us so far. There are bigger ideologies at play that will need to be debunked if women are to feel truly seen and able to maintain our deep friendships when we need them most.
