You're Not a Bad Friend, You're a Parent

One of my favorite memories from college were New Year's Eve parties with my friends. For some people, New Year's Eve is a lot of alcohol, getting blackout drunk, and doing other things that lead to regret. My friends weren't that type. After spending Christmas with our families, we would all drive over from our different places in Texas my friend’s house in a small town and do New Year's Eve with board games, shooting Roman candles at each other, staying up late, and eating southern comfort foods. And it was my favorite thing. I absolutely loved it every year and then it eventually just died.

I was convinced that this party would continue on forever each year. I felt that no matter how big we got, no matter who gets married, when kids come in the picture, regardless of where we live, we were going to come together every year. I was very wrong. Obviously we grew up, we got jobs, we moved off, and so it just became difficult. But there was one thing that truly killed this cherished tradition.

The thing that really drove a stake into the heart of this party was when we started to have kids.

Please don’t get me wrong; I love kids. I love my children, and I love my friends children. But it's really, really hard to start cramming everybody in a house when you need room for four pack-n-plays, and you need a space for everyone to be quiet on one side of the house so the babies can sleep while the parents stay up. And when kids wake up at 6:00 a.m. no matter what, staying up late is not something that's fun anymore. And then on top of that, the travel wore us all out. After trying to survive the holiday seasons of taking little ones to see all of our family members, the idea of coming together with our friends was just too much for most of us.

Although a lot of factors contributed to it falling apart, kids were what made this thing not exist anymore. Now I'm lucky to see any of these friends on occasion, and these are my best friends from college- guys that were in my wedding- and I'm lucky to see them maybe once every other year.

There are two guys that were part of this group that I lived with in college who now live in my same city. We never see each other. One day I actually ended up at the same restaurant as one of these guys. As I was walking out, I was excited to see him and his wife and we caught up for a minute. We both talked about how we need to get together. “We live in the same city, let's do this!” We even texted a couple of times about it, but our lives as parents are such that we just couldn’t muster up the energy it takes to coordinate two different family schedules to make a hang out happen.

People I love dearly that live in the same city as me, I don't see anymore.

And it's primarily because of my kids. Some people say life is over when you have kids, and I hate that. I hate when people say that. When my wife was expecting our first child, I was used to sharing the news with people and a lot of people would say, “get ready, your life is over when you have kids.”

It was such a negative reaction that I stopped wanting to share the news with people. And when I did share, I always braced myself for the negativity. One day I shared it with a guy, an acquaintance, and he said, “that’s awesome! Aren’t you so excited? Being a parent is so great!”

I said, “What?”

“Aren't you so excited about having your first kid? Parenting is so cool.”

And I was taken aback. I said, “thank you for saying it that way. I'm getting a lot of negativity from other parents.” And he said, “oh, well, those parents are selfish.” I could not believe how blunt he was with that information, but it was exactly what I needed to hear.

He said, “Listen, the people who say their lives are over and they don't love their life anymore because they have kids. They're just selfish. They weren't ready for what it takes to be a parent, and they only see how children take away from the things they love and don't add to things in a new way.” This was life changing for me to hear; to have someone articulate so clearly the selfishness behind this common response to the news that my wife and I were expecting.

People who say this are selfish about parenting; they are selfish about their life. They don't like how kids interrupted the status quo. And it's easy to get that way. When I think about my New Year's Eve party, that's one of a million different things that kids have shut down for me. And it's easy to say, “my life is over,” but I want you to understand it's not, and it's not right to think that way. Obviously we have these feelings of regreat sometimes, and some people weren't ready for parenting or they were thrown into it in a way that they weren't ready for.

But when you have kids, your life isn't over. It's just really, really different.

But one thing that's different is our friendships. It's ironic that parenting is so lonely because you literally can't get a second alone. I'm not exaggerating when I say parents can't even go to the bathroom without someone banging on the door or barging in on you, wanting to sit at your feet.

There is this scene from Bluey where they take a break for Bandit, the dad, to go to the bathroom. They then cut to the bathroom and his kids are leaning on him and Bluey says, “eww, it's stinky!” And Bandit says, “you're welcome to wait outside!” And the reality of that moment struck me. You're never alone because your kids always want to be with you, but you feel so lonely.

You see these friendships falling apart. You see people you love dearly, drifting away to where you only see them on social media and maybe have an occasional text conversation. It’s easy to get lonely. And then on top of that, not only do these established friendships start fading away, you don't have the bandwidth to make new ones.

You may be in a new season of life, at a new school with your kids, or a new church. You just don't have the bandwidth to get outside of your house and coordinate schedules with grown ups to have a real conversation.

Although you're never alone because kids are always around, it's easy to feel lonely.

I was getting overwhelmed with this feeling once, when for a rare, weird occasion, my wife took the kids out of town to visit her parents, and I couldn't go because of a work conflict. In the same weekend I had a co-worker who had the weekend off as well. Her family was out of town and she was talking to me about all her plans for the weekend.

She talked about grabbing dinner with one group of friends, and then meeting up for some other people the next day for an activity and then she asked me what I would do with my kid free weekend. I shared with her that I might watch Netflix and then fall asleep early. I had no plans to hang out with people because any friends I had were in the same stage of life.

The idea of finding someone who's miraculously available to hang out on the same weekend as me was impossible. I didn't have friends that were going to be free because they also had families that were demanding all of their time. I told her I just don’t have friends I can hang out with like that. And she said, “well, one day you will.” And asked, “how is this going to get better?”

She said, “my daughter is 17. She drives herself everywhere. She has her own friends. She goes out to eat with her people. She doesn't need me nearly as much as she did when she was five years old. I've got my life back a little now. My daughter is on her way out of the house and I’ve got friends.”

Before this, I knew that parenting was was seasonal. I know that my kids aren’t going to be in my house forever. But to hear an actual real life adult say, “hey, your kids get older, they need you less, you end up having more time for yourself”- it was a new thing to me to hear someone say that, and it gave me some hope.

Your life with littles is temporary.

The demands of your life piled on you from these little humans is only for a season. And there will come a day when you can rebuild friendships and make new ones. However, even though this season is temporary, it doesn't make it any easier. You likely still feel like a loser.

You either feel like a bad friend because you're ignoring texts and you're not connecting with people that you love, or you feel like a loser because you don't have anyone that you could connect with at all. You just don’t have the energy to make new friends and to get a community to build that village I see a lot of people talking about on social media.

If you move away from your family, it's almost impossible to rebuild that village because it takes so much energy to meet people, build a connection, and grow trust. So it’s easy to get discouraged. And although this season is temporary, that doesn't make it any easier to face this reality for the next few years as your kids demand a level of energy from you that is so hight that you're unable to build or take care of adult friendships.

So the question for parents is how do we restore old friendships or how do we make new friendships? And I think we first need to lower our expectations. You probably have this dream that you can go back to the way things were when you were younger, before kids or in college where you had buddies you could always hang out with.

That's never going to happen again.

You're never going to have people that can just drop everything they're doing to go grab coffee. Your life before kids was a unique season of life that no longer exists. So lower your expectations about what your friendships are going to look like during this season and into the future. And honestly, it's okay to focus most of your energy on your kids.

I think a lot of us feel guilty and say, “Oh my gosh, I need to text that person back” or “I need to grab coffee with that friend; I know she needs to hang out.” It's easy to feel guilty about that, but you need to fight that urge and lean into the demand that your kids have.

They are not going to be this demanding for that long. They are not going to want you around this long. So as they are at their extreme level of neediness, just dive in! It is okay to push those friendships to the side because you can go back to those later or build new ones, but you're never going to have this season of high demand from your kids. They're not going to want you around after a few years. So lean into that. Parenting is that one time of life where you have someone that demands every ounce of your attention and it's okay to lean into that.

We all know those friends that we've had who are a little bit too needy. They wanted us to hang out too often. They checked in on us too much. We loved them, but they wanted too much from us. Kids are like that times a million.

Kids want every second of us.

The other day I was feeling guilty about screen time for my kids, and so I turned off the TV. I said, “Hey, let's take a break. Find something to do for fun on your own.” Immediately, immediately what they chose to do was bring their toys under my feet- literally under my feet! They have this high need to be relational with us. And if you've got someone demanding this relational connection at a high level, it's okay to let those other relationships in your life fall apart for a little bit because your kids want that relationship with you so badly.

And honestly, if your friends have kids, they get it. And for your friends without kids, I'm sorry. They are not going to understand what you're going through. So check in when you can, text them, but lower those expectations on what those friendships are going to be and lean in to the needs your kids have for you.

However, for our mental health, it's not ideal to totally cut ourselves off from the adult world. That’s not what I am telling you to do. We still need to have adult conversations and a lot of us have jobs with coworkers that we can connect with or parenting partners that we have a good time with.

But single parents don't have that, or you may not have a good relationship with your partner, or if you're a stay at home mom or dad, you don't get to go out and have those coworkers. So for our mental health, we must have some form of adult, meaningful connection. We all know that. But how do we get it?

I'm going to give you some advice that I think many mental health professionals would balk at. Here's the reality:

We can lean in to digital community.

We can lean in to the friends, the people in the trenches in the same kind of life stage as us digitally. Right here on social media you can find great connections with real life humans that are going through the same things you are.

And of course, you may not be able to grab coffee with them, but you can build friendships online. There are so many people on social media who aren't there to create. They're there to connect with others that they've never met in their life. Ten years ago, social media was all about connecting with people you knew in real life, but that isn’t the case anymore. Those days are over. Social media is so much bigger than that. And so you can lean into those digital connections. Mental health professionals might say that that's not a good idea. They may say, “well, it's ideal to have real friendships and you don't need to lean on digital connections too much. You really need to have real life human interaction.”

And I agree. For the rest of your life, if all you did was connect digitally, that wouldn't be good. But let's say that you are dying of thirst in a desert and you come across a case of Dr. Pepper. Ideally, Dr. Pepper is not going to nourish you. If all you drank for the rest of your life was Dr. Pepper, you just wouldn't survive unless you're that one old lady that lived to 104 who only drank Dr. Pepper.

But other than that one lady, if all you did was drink soda for your entire life, that wouldn’t nourish your body. But if you're dying in a desert for a season and you find Dr. Pepper, you're going to drink it. You're going to drink that whole case and get what nourishment you can, and then when you get out of the desert, you're going to go back to water to rehydrate.

That's what digital connection is. It should never be your primary form of connection for the rest of your life. We absolutely need to be hugging, and making eye contact with people. But while we're in this desert, while we're in the desert of parenting, where we can't have those meaningful connections in real life, digital connection is 100% okay.

And you can lean into that for the season without any shame. TikTokand YouTube comment threads, Facebook groups, and other things like that can help you connect with people and build a community. That's actually why I'm here. If you're looking for that community, share this post so that more parents can see it and follow along, so that you can become part of what we're doing here.

Because this is a way that you can get to know real life humans where you can feel that you're not alone, where you can make connections and build a community while you're in the trenches, while you're in the desert alone with these kids.

One digital connection I'd love for you to consider is a Facebook group.

Facebook is a dumpster fire in many ways, but the one saving grace for them are their groups. When we first moved to our new city, my daughter was one year old and my wife had been in a Facebook group that was a national group of babies born in winter 2016. She found it to be a great resource for tips and ideas form moms with kids in the same age range. But when we moved to a new city, she thought, “Oh wow, this Facebook group world is a great way to make real connections.” And so she found a Facebook moms group for our new community, joined it, and a few weeks later she put out an invitation to meet up at a park.

She chose a public and safe location, and brought along one of her “real life” friends, and eight or nine women and their kids showed up at this park to hang out! Digital connection became real life human connection. And this group became real friends. They threw baby showers for moms who were expecting new kids. They grabbed dinners, they went to each other's houses. We hosted girls nights at our house with these women. It was an incredible, perfect example of how the digital space can turn into real life community. And so if you're wondering “how do I get community if I don't have time to hang out with friends? If I don't have time to rebuild friendships or make new ones, what do I do?”

I think Facebook groups are a great place to start. Look for the parenting groups in your community. Put some feelers out, get to know them a little bit, and then just set up a park play date in a safe and public space. You're going to be surprised at what kind of friendships come from that. And beyond that, in the dating world, we have all these apps that you can kind of connect with people, and many of us are far removed from that, but so many of these dating apps now have friendship sections where you can connect with people like you in a similar stage of life. This is another way to take digital connection into real world, meaningful relationships.

One day it will become way easier to manage friendships.

In this season of life, take what you can get. I know that you’ve got great friends that you’ve left to the side, and you shouldn't feel bad about that. We can check in on them, texting every now and then, but lean into these digital connections if that's what you need for this season. You can then pick up those other friendships or build new friendships in a more traditional way as your kids get older. For now, just remember that you're not a bad friend, you're a parent.