Your Child-Free Friends Miss You, Too
It happened somewhere amidst the painfully long stretch of interstate systems between Texas and Tennessee. Always the passenger as my husband carefully shuttles us around, I steered the conversation in a direction even I wasn’t prepared for. “I think I’m having a hard time because,” what felt like a golfball sized lump began to form in my throat. After taking a sip of water and a few steadied breaths, I mustered the words “I miss my friends.” The tears began streaming down my face at an accelerated rate. It was something I’d been feeling for a while, but saying it out loud made it painfully real.
I miss my friends.
A simple statement. A complex issue. I fumbled my way through elaborating.
At 38 years old, the majority of my friend circle has children. Their lives revolve around school and sports and bedtimes and bath times and doctors appointments and playdates and pick ups and drop offs and routines. They are doing the very difficult but necessary work of raising up the next generation. And by all accounts, it appears to be an absolutely exhausting (and often thankless) effort, which is likely why I don’t have children of my own at this point — much to my mother’s disappointment. They are on a different life path than I am. Not to say I’ll never be on that journey myself. It’s one of many things in my life I am still ardently trying to sort out. But it isn’t just that they have children, it’s that women tend to be the primary caregivers in society. Their bodies create and sustain life, which more often than not, strikes an uneven balance from the jump. My husband goes out to meet his friends with kids on weekday nights. The chances of my girlfriends that are moms doing the same are incredibly slim.
The onus isn’t on them solely. I work long hours. My schedule is entirely inflexible. My office isn’t a convenient place to meet up over a lunch break, and I couldn’t be away very long anyways. I’m tired from managing multiple existential crises (that is partially a joke). It just seems like there’s never enough time. And maybe something about covid and isolation made some of us a little too good at being self-reliant? I guess I would consider myself a member of that faction. I don’t know. I think deep down, I keep waiting for something to change, but I don’t know what that is.
I count myself very fortunate to have many wonderful friends. Generous, kind, thoughtful, funny people. I’d just like to see them more. Or talk on the phone (even if they’re preoccupied with a screaming toddler). Making friends is hard as an adult. It’s true. But I want to send a clarion call to my friends with children:
I still want to hang out with you.
I want to be invited to your children’s birthday parties.
I will go with you to a work out class or the grocery store or on whatever random errand you need to go on just to hang out with you (except maybe the post office).
You already have a friend. Right here.
Your child-free friends want to be a part of your life.
And with all of the distractions around us, I think it would serve us better to try to connect more. Community is important and necessary, no matter which side of the kids or no kids coin we’re on.
I hope you take a moment to reach out to someone you love this week — maybe even someone you haven’t spoken to in a while — and just let them know you’re thinking of them. I tend to create all kinds of narratives about why I don’t see or speak with certain people more, when really it’s just that we’re all busy, the weather is dreadful this time of year, and we’re all just doing our best.