Everybody has a baby

I was having a conversation recently with fellow Singleton who had been approached by a Married friend. The friend, who I will call "Married Mary", wondered if they would still be friends and hang out and do fun stuff if she had a baby (as she and her hubby were thinking about starting a family.) "Sally Singleton" was both surprised and hurt by the question, but reassured Married Mary that of course they would still be friends and still do fun things together; she just hoped that Mary wasn't going to talk about her baby 100% of the time. Sally asked me if I thought this question was strange and if perhaps there was something about her that said "KIDS NOT WANTED" (because she does like kids actually quite a lot.)

I thought about it for a moment and told her that I thought it was more about Mary's concerns about motherhood than Sally's actual behavior because "everybody has a baby." By that, I mean that everybody has something in their lives that takes up a lot of time and mental energy, and therefore a lot of their conversation becomes focused around that particular subject. For some people, it is their children; for others, it is their pet; for some, it is their job; while another person could love a club they are in or a craft they do (looking at you, knitters!) And for some of us, it could be a whole country/culture...

I speculated that maybe Mary wasn't really asking about Sally's reaction to the hypothetical baby, but was voicing some of her own fears about how she was going to handle parenthood. Maybe what Mary was really feeling was, "Oh dear god, I don't want to become one of those mothers who talks about her baby all the time. No one will ever invite me out to dinner again or want to come over to watch movies. I will lose all of my friends and will forget how to talk to people over the age of 3!!!" and she was looking to Sally to say, "Of course, we will still hang out and talk about fun things and drink wine and say hilariously inappropriate things (after your child has gone to bed.) You will be a great friend and a great mom!"

Fortunately for both Mary and Sally, I have plenty of friends who are examples that you can still be the fun and lovely person that you were before you became a mom: look at PunkRockMom and RECK. Not only are they mothers who have lots of interests outside of their children, they have interesting children.