View as: GRID LIST
Ever Been Dumped By A Mum Friend?
Jane and I were due a month apart. We ended up registering at the same hospital and taking the same antenatal classes. It felt serendipitous. We wanted to be in each other’s lives forever.
After our babies were born, we kept up the momentum of seeing each other. We would meet for coffees, we would cry about how hard breastfeeding was, we would debate the whole routine or no-routine books, we would talk about coping with sleepless nights. It felt like the same, but we had a physical extension of our previous discussions… our
About a year later, we both fell pregnant with our second babies a a few months apart. We were terrified, and thrilled and giggly. Still, nothing changed. The only thing was that we were in the toddler-stage with our first children, and along with being tired from the pregnancy, we were also trying to figure out rules, and eating habits, and discipline. She and I had different views on all of that, which is what life is about, right? She did things
After our second babies arrived, we saw slightly less of each other, which we expected. My husband and I were slowly moving out of London, but still commuting to work. However, that added about 30 more minutes for the journey to see Jane, so we tried to meet halfway. And sometimes, we couldn’t meet at all. But we were there, on the phone, on email.
At some point around the time when my second child was 2, Tom and I decided that we would move out to someplace semi-rural. He would still run his business from London, but it would make more sense for me to work from home. Jane and I met for lunch the day before I left work, and although it was a bit sad, we promised that we would make the effort to see each other as often as possible.
A year into me moving out of London completely, things started to feel
”Everyone has a
Duuuuuuude.
Facebook isn’t real, we all know that. It can be totally misinterpreted for a variety of reasons. I reached out to her privately and asked her what’s up, and if she was okay.
The email that I got back, was not one that I was expecting. Ever.
”I don’t agree with your parenting choices. So, as much as I like you, I don’t want to hang out with you *and* your children. It breaks my heart that you use the naughty step, you should really look into ’Unconditional Parenting’ and stop
Those two opening lines not only destroyed any hope for a future friendship, it also completely undermined the friendship that we had spent 5 years building. Oh, and, it also managed to totally blast my competency as a mother. Awesome. She did an incredible amount of emotional damage just with a handful of words.
The rest of the email was just as devastating, if not more, as she listed times in the past that she felt ’sorry’ for my children. She also talked about how she silently judged her
For obvious reasons, that was the day that ended our friendship completely. Well, that, *and* the email that I ended up sending her in response. I won’t go into it, but my husband told me it was the email equivalent of a ”Mike Tyson knockout punch”. It was over.
What’s the lesson? Don’t judge your friends, or specifically, your friends that are mothers. And if you’re doing it, stop it right now, because every child is different, and every parent is different. Celebrate all of it, all the differences and the choices and the weird paths.
*name has been changed not to protect her privacy but because I can’t even THINK about saying her real name out loud without breaking a plate.