i think every parent would agree that having a child really causes you to loose touch with the outside world. you become consumed with your immediate family and life just seems to slip away and you begin to interact less with those you had grown so close too. my wife and have talked about this at great lengths and get pretty down when we think about all the friends we had and how close we were before we all had kids. it's pretty sad but unfortunately it seems to be a fact of life. if you want friendships once you have kids, you really have to work at it and the sad part is, if you don't work, you forget who your friends are. even if you don't mean to.
this past weekend two friends of mine and their wives drove up from houston to surprise me for my birthday. i've know one of these friends 16 years and the other 8 years. we still chat occasionally and see each other a couple of times a year but we were all so close before my wife and i moved to austin and then when we had calli it got worse.
i was completely shocked when they pulled up late friday night. when they walked through the door, it was as if nothing had ever changed. it felt really good to reconnect. calli latched on to all of them from the get go and it made me really sad as they drove away. calli was blowing them kisses and i started to think about the next time she would see them. i couldn't honestly tell myself when that would be. hell , we have friends here where we live that we hardly see much less 3.5 hours away. but i truly want to make an effort to keep these friends close. i have a pretty small family and she's going to need these extended aunts and uncles in her life. i know it's going to be tough with both my jobs and trying to match up schedules but in the end it's well worth it.
essential.
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9 comments:
Amen Brother.
I felt the same way. I think about this often and it really makes me sad. We have so many good friends that we see so infrequently...
It's tough. Even our friends that have kids are hard to meet up with.
We don't even have much family here, so we're very self-contained. It's a bit lonely at times.
My wife and I have this discussion regularly. We have lost so many friends since we have had our kids. Alot of our friends chose not to have children. We work and go home. We rarely have any social life outside of work. It is depressing at times, but I wouldn't give up my family for anything. I just need to find TRUE friends that don't mind us being parents.
Friends will always be friends, but having kids means you will meet new folks with kids and make new friends. I know that is how it works for us. We started having a family early on (24,25) and all of our friends were still doing the bar scene. They were years from marriage and even further from kids...but as your kids grow you will be best friends with them, I know I am. Peace!
We are lucky....our kidless friends all LOVE Calli. They dote on her and she loves them back..many of them are close to having kids themselves. It's just that we work so much and Calli goes to daycare so any time we have at home, we just want to be together, as a family. We find it hard to even get together with our friends that have kids. Also, when we go home, where our parents are, we have so much family down there that we have no time for friends there either...sigh...
Wow, 16 years... I feel old...
Seems like the first 16 went by slower than the last 16.
Glad you enjoyed our visit!
how's it go...
make new friends, keep the old
some are silver, the others are gold.
I like it.
What you say is so true. I have some good friends that live just four miles away and although we talk on the phone and e-mail fairly regularly, we haven't seen each other or gotten together in more than a year. It's sad.
I thought things would change when they had a baby and joined the club. It hasn't. They're just as busy as we are now.
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