NO KIDDING!
Buy a stroller, find a nanny — dump your BFF? Moms and child-free women agree that babies are breaking up their friendships
WHEN Brie Winfield, a 28-year-old nanny, asked her old friend to meet her at a bar last month, she thought it was clear that children were not welcome.
Winfield had it all mapped out: a lovely Sunday afternoon mimosa date on the Upper East Side. But the plan went south when her friend of a decade refused to leave her 4-year-old son for a few hours.
“She could have gotten a baby sitter or had her husband watch him,” Winfield, a Williamsburg resident, tells The Post. But she wouldn’t — and Winfield didn’t back down. “I told her, ‘We’re going to a bar, we can’t have kids there,’ ” she says.
Things escalated, until Winfield says her friend blew up, calling her “child-free and child-hating.”
Winfield says they’re no longer on speaking terms.
Forget mommy shaming: For real drama, look at friendships between moms and the momnots. More and more women are choosing life without kids — the national birthrate is at an all-time low, with New Yorkers averaging only about 14.1 births per every 1,000 female residents, according to 2016 numbers — and it means that besties aren’t always taking the long journey into mother- hood together. The shift is causing a schism: New moms often struggle with feelings of isolation and depression, while childless women say they face insensitive questions and social pressure.
Winfield, who says she loves working with children, describes herself as “child-free” — a label she prefers to “childless,” because it has the element of choice baked in. She says her decision not to have kids has created a rift between her and her old friend group, most of whom are moms: “I feel like they can’t really relate to me anymore.”
Kate Leaver, author of the book “The Friendship Cure,” tells The Post that there’s some truth to this sentiment.
“There’s often a disconnect between women who have children and women who choose not to have children,” says Leaver, whose book stresses the importance of
maintaining adult friendships in this tech-fueled “age of loneliness.”
That’s precisely what filmmaker Maxine Trump learned soon after her best friend had a baby.
Then in her mid-30s, Brooklynbased Trump (no relation to Donald) says she was just starting to realize that she didn’t want to have children.
Trump says that one day she announced to her closest friend — a harried new mother — that she thought that people with big families were “selfish.” She was musing about the environmental and economic impacts of having kids and wanted to talk about it.
But her friend was insulted, and cut her out — for good. Trump, now 48 and married, recounts this painful experience in her recent documentary about her decision not to have children, “To Kid or Not To Kid.”
Today, she chalks up the fallout to bad timing: She had been a needy friend at a moment when the new mom didn’t have a lot to give. “I was expecting a lot [of her],” Trump says.
Jen Simon, a stay-at-home mother of two young boys, says she craved that kind of empathy from her childless friends after she had her older son, Noah.
Simon, 41, says that before she got pregnant, she loved going to the movies, shopping and grabbing drinks with her best friend. But all that changed after she gave birth, and she felt herself pulling away.
“I just had a really hard time leaving [my son],” says the South Orange, NJ, resident. “I remember this one time I tried to meet her and this other friend for a drink, and I got through like two sips . . . All I could do was just wait to go home.”
Months later, Simon learned that she was suffering from postpartum depression and anxiety. It took her years to recover, but Simon says that the friendship didn’t survive the rough spell.
“It really hurt. I loved her,” Simon says of learning she wasn’t invited to her former pal’s wedding. “If I had a wedding party, she would have been in it.”
Today, Simon has taken refuge in a new group of women — “almost 100 percent” of whom are moms, she says. She says that it’s great to be able to “commiserate” and support each other.
Leaver says it takes work for women to overcome the tempo- rary hurdles created by their differing lifestyles, but it’s far from impossible.
“I think it all comes down to compassion,” she says. “It’s certainly possible for someone who doesn’t have children to imagine the madness of parenting, and equally, it’s perfectly possible for someone who is right in the middle of being a parent to imagine what it would be like not to [have children.]”
It’s not always easy, but two elementary-school pals, Leslie Weissman and Dani Alpert, have discovered how to bridge the divide over the course of their 40year friendship.
Alpert, 52, says she never even considered having babies, nor did she and her pals talk about how their futures might involve them. So she was shocked when Weissman got married — and then pregnant — in her late 20s.
“I had a reaction of like, ‘What do you mean [you’re pregnant]? We’ve got a good thing going on here,’ ” says Alpert, a writer who lives in Midtown. She was used to regular, carefree dinners, movie nights and long, uninterrupted conversations with Weissman.
When Weissman’s son Matthew was born, “Things started changing,” Alpert says. “The phone calls weren’t as much. We certainly didn’t see each other as much. I felt abandoned.”
Alpert stopped reaching out to make plans, and found other friends without kids. Months would pass between conversations with her beloved childhood buddy.
Weissman, now 52, says she felt jealous — “[I was] like, ‘Wait, I want to be the better friend!’ ”
Still, after she went on to have her second child, Justin, her life of family dinners, sports games and kids’ birthday parties didn’t leave much time for socializing.
Weissman, an artist, still lives in their hometown of Chappaqua, NY. For many years, she refused to travel into the city for girls’ nights or to bail on family time.
“I do have a little bit of an oldfashioned sense of putting dinner on the table [every night],” Weissman says. “It’s really hard for somebody who doesn’t have kids to [understand why] I’m not coming to hang out in the city.”
But as time passed, the two women worked on reconnecting. “It was about finding mutual downtime,” says Weissman. “It would end up being coffee on a Wednesday, or occasionally, she would be up at her parents’ house, and I would sneak away for a couple of hours on a weekend to meet up with her.”
Now that Weissman’s boys are 24 and 21, she’s able to be more accommodating, regularly meeting Alpert for brunch on the Upper West Side.
“Things are good now that the kids are gone!” jokes Alpert.
She says that getting her pal back has taught her the value of patience in friendships. “Relationships go through phases,” she says. “If you’re one of the lucky ones, you’re in for the long haul.”
“What do you mean [you’re pregnant]? We’ve got a good thing going on here.” — Dani Alpert to her best friend Leslie Weissman