New strains on old friendships

New strains on old friendships

About three weeks after my son was born, I went out to meet a friend for coffee. It took Herculean effort to get out the door — finding sweat pants that fit over my yo-yoing waist and a hat to cover my dirty hair, strapping my protesting infant into a carrier, packing diapers and blankets and pacifiers — and by the time I got to the caf , I was a sweaty, anxious mess.

My friend was wearing heels and looked sickeningly well rested. “Oh!” she said, “I didn’t know you’d be bringing the baby!” No, I thought I’d just leave him home alone, tended by our cats.

But I couldn’t blame my friend. Until you have one of your own, you can’t fully appreciate how significantly a child changes your life. It doesn’t really sink in that the baby — your baby — is your responsibility every single minute of the day. In fact there’s a lot about having a kid that’s just unknowable before you have one.

The past five months have been filled with these kinds of interactions. My husband and I are the first people in our large urban family of friends to have a baby. We’re not even particularly young, but in our world in New York City, it’s rare to be married at 30, and rarer still to be thinking about babies. Almost everyone we know is single and very, very child-free.

For our friends, we’ve become pioneer parents, the only couple homesteading on the family side of the Continental Divide, gazing back at everyone else enjoying carefree nights out, apartments uncluttered by garish plastic toys and eight consecutive hours of sleep.

Trailblazing is not without benefit. From the moment we told our friends we were expecting, they were excited as only first-time parents can be. They didn’t have to feign interest in our ultrasound pictures because they were the first ones they had ever seen in person. They participated enthusiastically in conversations about giving birth and threw us two giant baby showers.

Now, not only does our son, Emerson, have enough ironic onesies and miniature hoodies to overflow a closet, he’s the subject of thousands of photographs and the star of every social event he attends.

But as every pioneer can attest, forging solo into the unknown is a little lonely. Logistics alone are difficult: A double date for us now requires a baby sitter and a breast pump, and while my husband and I would like to have Sunday brunch at 10 a.m., most friends prefer to do something they call “sleeping in.”

Our friends want to be supportive, but so much about our new lives is mysterious to them. At parties, whenever it emerges that I’m still on maternity leave, I brace myself for the inevitable next question: “So what do you do all day?”

I never know what to say. The exhaustion and exhilaration of minute-by-minute care of a newborn is impossible to understand if you’ve never done it.

Instead, many friends seem to view my six months’ leave from my job as some kind jail sentence, and are sympathetic about how bored I must be, home with “nothing to do.” One friend helpfully suggested I take up “a hobby, like knitting” to get me through the empty hours.

And, as much as our friends love Emerson, I know too well that within every adoring honorary uncle and aunt lurks the razor-sharp judgment of the childless. I know because I used to be one of them. Sometimes I see them looking at Emerson and I can almost hear their secret whisper. “My kids will never do that.”

Perhaps the most surprising part of blazing a new trail to parenthood is our emerging role as baby evangelists. We’ve become proselytizers for our new lifestyle with a fervor that astonishes us. I find myself pointedly telling friends that I’m holding on to my maternity clothes just for them, and my husband has been known to take newly married couples aside at gatherings to encourage them to procreate. Do it, we say. Do it now.

It’s just that now that we’ve seen the other side we can say for sure the parenting frontier is less scary and more wonderful than it seems. We want to trade baby-poop stories with our favorite people, show them what we’ve learned and share with them the excitement and joy of parenthood.

At least we’d like some company on those early Sunday mornings.

XEmily Zeeberg is a writer for the Associated Press.