Things you only know if… having a baby shifted your friendship
when i texted my girlfriends on our Whatsapp group one morning shortly after my daughter was born, I didn’t expect quite such a telling off from the four of them. ‘Sorry, boring mum question,’ my message began, before an enquiry that was probably about sleep or poo, given this was the extent of my repartee for at least the next six months.
It was the group chat we’d set up ahead of a big girly holiday a few years ago – one full of blurry photos taken in dodgy bars and links we’d shared on everything from politics to celebrity haircuts. I was aware my boring mum question was lowering the banter bar somewhat – but the replies still came as a surprise.
‘Don’t you DARE apologise for a mum question ever again,’ one of them fired back. ‘OMG, what else are we here for?’ said another. ‘Don’t kid yourself – this group is only boring mum questions now,’ sighed a third. Even Mary, who had her baby ahead of the rest of us and never seemed to mind how crap we all were with her in our mid-twenties, didn’t care that I was boring.
I was overwhelmed with love for them all: I was feeling my way through every aspect of my life in that blurry newborn daze – even the parts I thought I knew well. It might have been the best part of a year since we’d all been in the same room together, but they still knew exactly what to say when I needed to hear it. There was a time when most of us lived in the same flat together, but we are now strewn around the country and the world, with nine children between us.
I first sat down to write my novel The New Girl, about a fashion editor who spirals into paranoia and suspicion on maternity leave, to attempt to rationalise the many thoughts my own head felt so crowded with while I was off work with my baby. I wrote while she slept and tried to riddle out how to be a good mother, good at my job and a good friend ALL AT THE SAME TIME when each one of those things pulls you in a different direction. Is it any surprise that my protagonist Margot goes slightly loopy?
I knew having a baby would throw my carefully ordered life into disarray. I knew there would be chaos and unpredictability, and that everything would change. But I wasn’t prepared for how it would affect my friendships – these, I thought, by this point in my early thirties were set in stone. I’d done the hideous roller-coaster of falling out and being excluded during my teens; in my twenties, I’d shed the bonds that had been too hard, too toxic, too imbalanced. The pals that remained were fixed in place now, like landmarks on the map of my life. But even maps can become outdated – how often does life ever stand still?
‘We tend to focus on the physical changes after motherhood,’ says the psychotherapist Lucy Clyde, host of the How To Cope podcast. ‘But the internal shifts are so profound and huge they have their own name: matrescence.’ This is the process of becoming a mother, and a thing quite apart from anything you might go and see a GP about. It’s learning to understand your relationship with your child, how to respond to their needs, how to fit their life into your own – especially when there doesn’t seem to be enough room for both of you to thrive. Fitting friends in on top of all that at times felt impossible; it sometimes took me days to reply to Whatsapp messages on maternity leave, emails even longer – a combination of having a brain almost as leaky as my boobs, and no guarantee of spare hands 80% of the time.
That’s before you factor in what a minefield having kids can be within any group of women. I had no idea until I joined the cohort of people trying to get pregnant how fraught with difficulty the process can be; how for many women it is laced with frustration and tragedy. I took healthy babies completely for granted until I had to bring one into the world.
I know someone who went to a hen do recently where one friend was pregnant and another had just found out her third round of IVF had failed; both topics of conversation were off the table and everyone was warned in advance. She said it was like there was a bomb on the dinner table. Likewise, a woman who read my book got in touch to say she’d lost a close friend when her baby died soon after birth – as happens at the beginning of The New Girl. ‘She couldn’t handle it,’ she told me. ‘So she just started avoiding me.’
Maternity leave is such a fuzzy bubble – and new mothers are so emotionally porous – that a careless comment can feel pointed, plain-speaking becomes barbed. I found things I’d usually laugh off stung relentlessly, while worrying about having upset people kept me up at night as much as my daughter did. Babies make some women smile, others bored rigid, and yet more curl up with either guilt that they don’t want one or grief that they can’t have one: imagine bringing one to a picnic and trying to gauge all the reactions around the rug. Now imagine doing that having had no sleep. Communicating around this stuff is difficult and I didn’t always get it right, but the only way to fix it is to start talking.
Since I had my baby, I’ve learned that only granny is as interested in your child as you are. I’ve also learned that asking questions is better than speaking, and getting in touch is better than not – no matter how awkward it feels or how long it has been. I’ve also learned that discussing the boxsets you’ve binged recently is a fail-safe route back into somebody else’s life again – whether they were breastfeeding as they watched them or not.
‘The New Girl’ by Harriet Walker (£12.99, Hodder & Stoughton) is out now