Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, as a single, childless woman, I have to say, this is a mean thing to do to people you considered friends.

However, you are not alone. Many of my friends have dropped me once they have kids.

I now consider baby showers to essentially be going away parties for my friendship, because I know there is a good chance my friends will drop me and focus on only having mom friends.

It's pretty mean.

What the everlasting f are you doing on a toddler forum?

For the love of god, why don’t people like you understand that people read the “recent topics” forum? That is the only one I read. And this topic relates to me.

Right, but this is still a forum geared towards parents. It is bizarre that you read and post here. It is deeply, deeply pathetic to frequent a forum for parents when you are childless. Serious question, do your friends who have children know you post on here?

Np. No, in fact you are sounding more and more like you're so single mindedly focused on having kids that you don't realize how many other forums there are on DCUM. Is that true? Have you just not noticed? I also don't think you have the authority to gatekeep this website.

Is there something triggering about the subject of child free people?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can't relate at all anymore to my friends who don't have kids, especially the ones who treat their pets like kids (like I know someone who baby-wears her dog in a babybjorn-type thing), and feel like I'm letting those friendships fade and don't even really care... Is this common?

I mean…there are people without kids, and then there are THESE people.

To answer your question, I have definitely stayed friends with some of my friends who don’t have kids and I’m glad I did. The ones where the friendships have faded are the ones who can’t/don’t want to accept that my life has changed - zero interest in meeting or (ever) seeing my children, act like it is an inconvenience that I no longer want to have long boozy brunches every single Saturday morning, no interest whatsoever in - at least sometimes - meeting me where I’m at in my life. Those people were obviously not real friends, and the friendships have faded. And that’s okay

ETA there is one other friend who I sorely miss, but she slow faded on me…she badly wanted children and ran into fertility issues (as did I; and I’ve always been very open about them) and then she and her husband divorced. She has ditched me/previous friends who have kids in favor of an older, hard-partying childless crowd and barely even responds when I reach out. It makes me sad and I really miss the friendship we used to have, but I pretty much know why she did it and hope someday she will decide not to hold this against me

Anonymous wrote:I can't relate at all anymore to my friends who don't have kids, especially the ones who treat their pets like kids (like I know someone who baby-wears her dog in a babybjorn-type thing), and feel like I'm letting those friendships fade and don't even really care... Is this common?

I mean…there are people without kids, and then there are THESE people.

To answer your question, I have definitely stayed friends with some of my friends who don’t have kids and I’m glad I did. The ones where the friendships have faded are the ones who can’t/don’t want to accept that my life has changed - zero interest in meeting or (ever) seeing my children, act like it is an inconvenience that I no longer want to have long boozy brunches every single Saturday morning, no interest whatsoever in - at least sometimes - meeting me where I’m at in my life. Those people were obviously not real friends, and the friendships have faded. And that’s okay

It's nice to have friends who doesn't have children

Anonymous wrote:I can't relate at all anymore to my friends who don't have kids, especially the ones who treat their pets like kids (like I know someone who baby-wears her dog in a babybjorn-type thing), and feel like I'm letting those friendships fade and don't even really care... Is this common?

That's your issue. Your friends with pets seems nicer than you OP.
You seem like a fake person.
It's perfectly fine to not want kids screaming at you at 1 am. It's fine to not want children. They can like them but not raise them. Could be money problems. Are you gonna pay thousands for your friend's babies? Childcare, medical expenses?

Capitalism makes so hard to have children. There's not enough help for people

You will miss these friends later in life.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have 2 elementary age kids and I have several close friends who don’t have kids, some are single. I can understand and relate to their lives just fine - I was in my mid/late 30s when I got married and had kids.

They cannot understand my life and schedule. That ok, I don’t expect them to.

I enjoy having friends who have hobbies and interests unrelated to kids and kid activities. It allows me to have an identity and a life separate from being a mom.

Sure, if you share hobbies and interests with your childless friends, or if your personalities just click and you enjoy shooting the breeze together, you are not going to let go of them. But if my childless friends were obsessed with their pets or with clubbing every weekend and we had nothing else in common, then I wouldn’t invest time in them.

If you had nothing in common, why were you friends to begin with?

Maybe they had a superficial clubbing/brunch kind of friendship. When you are childless you have lots of time to fill so you just find people to hang out with. And maybe some of the weird hobbies (pets) came later.

I had friends who I used to eat out a lot with and play board games with (and we went to school together). I don’t have time to eat out and play board games anymore, so that’s that.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have 2 elementary age kids and I have several close friends who don’t have kids, some are single. I can understand and relate to their lives just fine - I was in my mid/late 30s when I got married and had kids.

They cannot understand my life and schedule. That ok, I don’t expect them to.

I enjoy having friends who have hobbies and interests unrelated to kids and kid activities. It allows me to have an identity and a life separate from being a mom.

Sure, if you share hobbies and interests with your childless friends, or if your personalities just click and you enjoy shooting the breeze together, you are not going to let go of them. But if my childless friends were obsessed with their pets or with clubbing every weekend and we had nothing else in common, then I wouldn’t invest time in them.

If you had nothing in common, why were you friends to begin with?

Maybe they had a superficial clubbing/brunch kind of friendship. When you are childless you have lots of time to fill so you just find people to hang out with. And maybe some of the weird hobbies (pets) came later.

Toddlers are vile. This subforum is for parents and nannies to commiserate. If you're a childless person non-nanny with a weird curiosity about these evil creatures from hell, at least pretend to be invested in the topic. Announcing you are a childless tourist here is just weird. But you do you!

LW, I have felt this.
I don't slow fade, I still make an effort and maintain those friendships, which are often geographically apart. I try to minimize the kid-focused conversation, have adult-only meetups, and listen to their stories of dating, their jobs, etc. But you feel the distance, and it's ok. It's like if you have a friend with different religious or political views. There's a barrier you don't cross but it doesn't negate them as a friend 100%.

I did have one friend, though, whom I met with and we were just so far apart in every way (politically, life stage-wise) it was like we spoke different languages when we met up: our general life concerns, views on things like education, etc.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, as a single, childless woman, I have to say, this is a mean thing to do to people you considered friends.

However, you are not alone. Many of my friends have dropped me once they have kids.

I now consider baby showers to essentially be going away parties for my friendship, because I know there is a good chance my friends will drop me and focus on only having mom friends.

It's pretty mean.

What the everlasting f are you doing on a toddler forum?

For the love of god, why don’t people like you understand that people read the “recent topics” forum? That is the only one I read. And this topic relates to me.

Right, but this is still a forum geared towards parents. It is bizarre that you read and post here. It is deeply, deeply pathetic to frequent a forum for parents when you are childless. Serious question, do your friends who have children know you post on here?

Sure they do. We laugh about some of these threads, and learn from others.

I'm always texting links to threads I think my friends will be interested in. They're usually not about kid stuff, or local schools or sports. Honestly, how can there be an entire forum devoted to lacrosse??! That seems deeply pathetic to me.

But give me a good off-topic about morons who take a month to back into a parking space and I'll be refreshing this site all afternoon.

I actually feel like the issue is not really that I can't relate to my childless friends (I can technically always relate because I used to not have kids too...) but that they don't relate to me and understand what it's like to be a parent. I don't think people understood just how time consuming and tiring and crazy raising kids can be (at least in the first few years), and so they might ask questions that seem senseless or ask you to hang out at the most inconvenient times just because they have no idea what's going on in your life. And then because of this, I find myself living in a somewhat different reality from those friends such that if we weren't especially close in the first place and I didn't have the time to cultivate that relationship through hanging out as much, what closeness there was seems to fade fairly quickly.

But obviously if your BFF didn't have kids and you stopped being friends because of that, that's more alarming.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have 2 elementary age kids and I have several close friends who don’t have kids, some are single. I can understand and relate to their lives just fine - I was in my mid/late 30s when I got married and had kids.

They cannot understand my life and schedule. That ok, I don’t expect them to.

I enjoy having friends who have hobbies and interests unrelated to kids and kid activities. It allows me to have an identity and a life separate from being a mom.

Sure, if you share hobbies and interests with your childless friends, or if your personalities just click and you enjoy shooting the breeze together, you are not going to let go of them. But if my childless friends were obsessed with their pets or with clubbing every weekend and we had nothing else in common, then I wouldn’t invest time in them.

If you had nothing in common, why were you friends to begin with?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, as a single, childless woman, I have to say, this is a mean thing to do to people you considered friends.

However, you are not alone. Many of my friends have dropped me once they have kids.

I now consider baby showers to essentially be going away parties for my friendship, because I know there is a good chance my friends will drop me and focus on only having mom friends.

It's pretty mean.

What the everlasting f are you doing on a toddler forum?

For the love of god, why don’t people like you understand that people read the “recent topics” forum? That is the only one I read. And this topic relates to me.

Right, but this is still a forum geared towards parents. It is bizarre that you read and post here. It is deeply, deeply pathetic to frequent a forum for parents when you are childless. Serious question, do your friends who have children know you post on here?

I do wonder about that. Is DCUM meant for parents or does the name need some updating?

Jeff has said many times that it is fine for childless people to use dcurbanmoms, just as it is fine for people outside dc to use the forums.

There are tons of topics on this forum that aren’t about having kids.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, as a single, childless woman, I have to say, this is a mean thing to do to people you considered friends.

However, you are not alone. Many of my friends have dropped me once they have kids.

I now consider baby showers to essentially be going away parties for my friendship, because I know there is a good chance my friends will drop me and focus on only having mom friends.

It's pretty mean.

What the everlasting f are you doing on a toddler forum?

For the love of god, why don’t people like you understand that people read the “recent topics” forum? That is the only one I read. And this topic relates to me.

Right, but this is still a forum geared towards parents. It is bizarre that you read and post here. It is deeply, deeply pathetic to frequent a forum for parents when you are childless. Serious question, do your friends who have children know you post on here?

No, it isn't. It's a forum that happens to have a lot of topics relevant to parenting. It has many more topics that are not related to parenting.

Actually, it started as a forum for people TTC. So technically if you have kids, you don't belong here.