When you have a baby, it changes your whole life. That was clear even to me. But how serious this new phase of life would affect the whole social life, one only guesses, when the small worm is already there.
I can divide my friends into 5 categories by and large.
There is the category owls and party animals.
This category is the friends with whom you went out a lot, drank a lot, had fun a lot. As a rule, you were very close friends because you have conquered the after hours and nights almost every day after work and on the weekend. This category of people is always looking for distraction, recreation, a man for a night or life. Once the baby is there, there are hardly any overlapping scares with these people. It’s a pity because you spent such a nice time together. But you are simply too tired in the evening, even if you have the time, you rather go to bed one hour earlier. This category of people does not understand completely what you as a new mom are going through and what temporal restrictions you have. The intersection is conceivably small from one day to another. And the lack of understanding on both sides is great.
And then there is the category, which I call busy bees.
These people are so important or involved in their job that they never have time before 10 pm. Even the weekends are planned months in advance. Also here you suddenly have little intersections in the interests and topics of conversation. Certainly, this category of people doesn’t want to waste a lot of time talking about your baby’s sleep problems. Once the little worm has arrived, you realize that you can throw any planning overboard. Because you never know how the day will be if the night was good and how the little one is on it. That makes long-term planning really difficult.
The “strictly no babies” category.
The friends in this category said goodbye to your life when you told them you were pregnant. These power couples are usually also in the category busy bees and are very successful and busy professionally privately with fancy events and parties everywhere. Children just do not fit the lifestyle. Since this was clear to all those involved, that one has relatively little in common in his new phase of life, there are no “hard feelings” here. At some point, when the kids are big, you can bump into it again.
Many years of my life I belonged to all three of these categories. So I was one of those people who had little understanding that you can not even go out in the evening despite the baby. Or when long-planned appointments were canceled last minute, because the little ones have a cold. But most of all, I just did not feel like talking about babies all the time and found it strange that there was no other topic in a young mother’s life. Seriously, when one after the other girlfriend told me that she is pregnant, I thought secretly … well – again one less in the circle of friends, with whom you can do something. That’s why it’s a pity, of course, and it hurts a bit from time to time that these old friendships simply take on relatively little place in his new life. But it is understandable too. It is probably just karma.
Even if you lose one or the other friend in this phase of life, you win some (again) to it.
For example from the category Lost and Found.
These are friends or people who have had children long before me and to whom I had just lost contact. Suddenly the friendship works again. One has similar experiences and lots of things to talk about. It is so nice to reconnect with these old friends you thought you lost along the way. However, their children are usually already much older, so that their timings are still different to yours.
Fortunately, there is still the category “New in the Job”.
These are all young mothers who, like me, know little about this new Job called motherhood. With these mothers, you have an almost infinite amount of topics and common available time. Rarely have there been so many babies in Hamburg who were born at the same time. And so you can find potential new friends everywhere in all kinds of birth preparation courses, in the recovery courses, pekips, in the cafes during the day, on the playgrounds, flea markets, and kindergartens. These young mothers are very open to new contacts and long for an exchange according to the motto “together we are stronger”. I was fortunate enough to get to know a bunch of nice moms at the beginning of my baby trip who I can call friends today. Catching up with these friends is so wonderfully easy. You have mutual supreme understanding, if the baby is cranky for example, there is always someone who has something to eat, if you forgot it again. And the little ones can play with each other. the most important thing, however, is that you can simply exchange experiences. I believe that is also an important component of mental well-being during the first year of the strenuous life with a Baby. In my old life, I would have called that a win-win situation.
Every phase of life has its own social life with all its advantages and disadvantages.
So dear ones, see you soon!
