Before you have children, people fall over themselves to tell you how little you know. It’s the national pastime of parents to scoff at anyone who dares suggest they have an idea or a feeling about how motherhood might be, and woe betide anyone who hasn’t procreated who seeks to suggest that they might retain some unchangeable personality traits after their child was born.
Personally, motherhood has been much as I anticipated it being. But there are things – a small but fairly significant list of them – which I didn’t clock before I had kids, which I’m not sure I could have known, but that I wish my child-free friends understood.
The hardest point to convey to your friends about having children is the corseting that it provides for your life. It’s not unpleasant; in some ways it’s sort of nice. But it is inflexible and undeniable. I have to be in the same place at the same time, every single day. Children love structure and routine and unless you’re going to provide a wildly untypical childhood, that means being reliable and predictable.
People understand that I can’t drop everything and go to Istanbul for a four-day bender. But they don’t seem to understand that I can’t see a show which starts at 7pm in central London. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I have to put my daughter to bed, and the reason she sleeps 12 hours every night is because we’ve had an iron-clad routine for her entire life, which means me doing bedtime at 6.45pm. This is so deeply ingrained in me that I sometimes even forget to tell friends that I can’t meet for drinks until 7.30pm at the earliest.
So many times I’ve had people ask “can’t you just leave a bit earlier?” or “are you sure you can’t just miss a nap?” and I hate saying no because I hate being inflexible. If it were about compromising what I want, of course I would. But children feel safest in routine and I can’t – won’t – start messing with a system which makes my daughter feel secure, in order to fit around other people’s plans. I do occasionally wish my friends understood how selfish I feel when once again I ask to meet at my house to save money on a babysitter, or ask them to kill time for 45 minutes after work so we can meet at a time which suits me.
There’s always someone well meaning – and it genuinely is a kindness – who says “oh it’s fine! Just bring the baby along!” It’s the kind of thing I say all the time, and there are attachment parents who love doing that. But for a lot of us, “just bringing the baby” is actually a great way to ruin the evening.
There is no “just” with babies, and if I brought mine to a social event I’d then have to set up a travel cot, a baby monitor, a white noise machine, and then make sure that the evening’s activities weren’t going to wake her up. And even if I did that, I’d have to stay sober and keep one ear open, so I absolutely would not be having fun. I’d rather get a babysitter when I can afford to, and miss out entirely when I can’t.
Logistics have been one of the biggest issues between me and my child-free friends. Until I had a pram I had a very privileged view of London’s Tube system. It might not have been my favourite place, especially in rush hour, but it did the job. After I had a pram I discovered that two thirds of the Tube network are not step-free. So yes, I had disposable time to “pop” out to meet for a coffee, but getting somewhere five miles away now means dragging a buggy down four flights of stairs while people watch and don’t help you. Even worse, buses are only capable of taking two buggies or one wheelchair, so if the space is already taken then you’re unable to use the bus you’ve probably just waited a quarter of an hour for.
It means constantly showing up late, stressed or sweaty, if you’ve managed to convince yourself to go out at all. Every time you want to leave the house it’s a carnival of planning, of weather appropriate outfits, the right number of snacks – the mental load is exhausting.
Generally speaking, in discussions which pit parents against non-parents (very popular on the internet these days), I have always been on the side of the non-parent. Other people’s children are often annoying. Parents who expect people to move to let them sit together on planes, or boycott child-free weddings, are unreasonable. But I do often notice a real lack of compassion for parents, as if because the experience is so common it can’t be hard. But it is hard. I love it, but it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it’s made me (at least for the moment) a less good person, because I’ve had to become very selfish.
When I feel guilty about my selfishness, and sad about the friend I used to be, the thing I cling to is that my selfishness doesn’t have to last forever. One day, when my baby years are long behind me, I’ll go back to the person I was before kids – bending over backwards to facilitate other people’s needs when they’ve got young children. But for now I’ve had to accept that it has made me less reliable, less flexible, less easy going. And I’m sorry for that. I promise that I’ll make it up in kind, one day.
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