Kids wrecking your friend eroup? Stop being a baby

As conversations about friendships being divided by children increase, Olivia Petter asks if we’re buying into stereotypical narratives about what it means to be a woman today

- Olivia Petter

Sitting across from one of my oldest friends over dinner, I found myself staring at yet another ultrasound. That’s why you ordered a virgin mary,” I nodded, putting the pieces together. It was my friend’s third baby and ninth in our friendship group tidily completing the family life that also comprises a three-bedroom house, a cockapoo and a husband. Our lives couldn’t be more different, as she pointed out when, three sips into my second Negroni, I felt her tone shift: “Do you ever think about wanting any of that?”

A part of me wanted to bite back. No, the part replied, all stinkeyed and Medusa-haired, I’m too busy trying to pay my rent and find someone to date who isn’t completely awful. I don’t have time to think about if I want “any of that” because “any of that” is a fantasy so far removed from my reality I can’t even imagine what it feels like to want it. I won’t let myself. How rude. How entitled. How smug.

There’s an entire cultural canon that has taught me to respond this way, one that is predicated on divisions between thirtysomething women: those with children and those without. It’s a perpetual conflict that, despite all societal progression, hasn’t really changed in decades – consider the Smug Marrieds in Bridget Jones’ Diary. It’s something I’m constantly reminded of, too. And not just because so many of my friends are having children; three of them are due to give birth this month.

In 2023, there was Allison P Davis’s viral article in The Cut, which documented how friendship groups were being torn apart by the arrival of tiny, crying humans, and earlier this month, another