I am eyeing the baby warily, as though it were an unexploded grenade.
It is my friend N’s baby and he is lying on my living room rug. (Cream wool: can you think of a more on-the-nose symbol of my own absence of children at the time?)
N has just finished feeding him and has placed him there, briefly, while we talk.
I don’t really want to look directly at him and yet my gaze is drawn back to him, over and over. His curled, prawn body. His tiny fingers still balled into reflexive fists. I can feel my eyes flicking over, furtively, hungrily.
It is 2017. Two weeks ago, N gave birth. Two days ago, I had my first miscarriage.
It had been her idea to come over and sit with me that day, when we told her what had happened. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to come. At the same time, I was desperately glad that she did.
I’ve been thinking about that particular afternoon from six years ago quite a bit recently. You may, by now, have read the viral New York Magazine article ‘Why Can’t Our Friendship Survive Your Baby?’. You may also have read some of the follow-up discourse, such as this or this.
You probably don’t need me to tell you that the politics of mothers and non-mothers/ parents versus non-parents is fraught.
And many words have been written about the impact of maintaining friendships – or not – across this divide. But there has been an obvious absence in much of the discussion of the friendship-baby conundrum. What happens to your friendships after babies, when babies, for one reason or another, have become an exquisite source of pain for one of you?
Often, the assumption is whichever ‘side’ of parenthood you’ve landed on is largely a matter of choice. Or, at best, asynchronicity – you’re simply at different life stages.
But what if you have, in fact, reached the same life stage, only one of you has had a better roll of the reproductive dice than the other? Friendships across not only a parenthood divide, but a fertility divide adds a whole other layer of complexity.
All those same things that have been endlessly picked over – the clashes in lifestyle and schedules, accusations of selfishness and self-absorption on both sides – still apply. But with the added complication that other people’s pregnancies and babies can be the embodiment of your grief, your trauma, your lack, your shame, your failure…
There they are, just toddling around…or lying on your living-room rug.
When I asked in this thread and on social media earlier this week how your friendships have been affected by pregnancy or baby loss and/or infertility, it was frequently described as one of the most difficult aspects of these experiences. The deterioration of friendships was almost a ‘secondary loss’, as one person put it.
I write this now, as someone who has felt this from two perspectives. I have been the person for whom bumps and pregnancy announcements felt like a daily assault course; a personal affront. I have also been the person with a burgeoning bump – and then a newborn – while knowing that more than one very dear friend was going through fertility treatment.
Now that I am emerging – I think – from the rush-hour of pregnancy announcements I feel like I can see the situation a bit more clearly. And, without wishing to undermine what an emotional flashpoint this can be for friendships – sometimes irreparably so – I do think, know, it is possible for friendships to survive.
Let’s get something out of the way first: whether you lose a baby or they never come, there can be some spectacularly bad behaviour from people who are supposed to be your friends. While I’ve been fairly unscathed on this front, when I asked for your experiences it was incredibly common for people to say that they had at least one friendship break down entirely.
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