‘Don’t have kids, Rach’, my friend said to me once. “Why?” I said. Our conversation stayed with me for days after where it brought up so many feelings that I ended up writing her a letter. With her persmission, I am sharing it now:
Dear [Friend],
I have been thinking a lot about what you were saying when we talked about your friends telling you they were pregnant. I felt your disappointment in them, and your worry for them, in my soul and it made me think about how complicated friendships are, our own expectations of other people, love, control, all these kinds of things. So, I thought I’d have a go at writing something out and see where I ended up.
After all my musing I have realised that the way that you feel about your friends having kids is the way I have come to feel about my female friends getting in relationships. I am worried that they will value this relationship more than their relationship with me and I won’t get to spend so much time with them. Sure, I can say that for those in relationships with men I am worried they are going to be gaslight by even the most foreword-thinking lovely man in the world, and that on some level I feel disappointed that they feel the need for anyone or anything in their lives other than themselves and their female friendships, but most of all I am scared of losing them because they bring joy and happiness into my life. Deep down I want something much less admirable and harder to say, which is that I want them to stay the same and I want them to stay with me.
As with anything I worry about I don’t believe it is an abstract thing, I believe it comes from my desire for self-preservation and from hard-lived experience. I have ‘lost’ friends to their long-term partners and I have had close relationship irrevocably changed by a person having kids. It is a horrible feeling to believe that I am not as important to someone as I thought, or that I feel I am demanding time with them, or even on a deeper level that I have become dependent on them beyond what I could ever comfortably admit out loud. It is good to learn that people come and go from my life, that they change, and I must learn to love them in new ways, but it is still incredibly hard to live in that reality when my previous relationship with them was so strong. I resent having to experience two versions of life at the same time – one where I am happy for my loved one and the one where I feel like I’ve been left at the train platform.
I want people I love to be bright and happy and young for as long as possible and when they choose things that scare me it feels like that is at odds with how I wish them to be. I want them to realise what I’ve realised and do what I’ve done because it will keep them safe just like it is keeping me safe. However, it might not be keeping them safe at all, it might be keeping them from joy. I believe some people feel in their bones it is right for them to have kids or be in a relationship, and although I wish it were helpful for me to be scared, ultimately my fears aren’t an accurate representation of any real danger available to them. By trying to hold or control people I love, they will feel suffocated in my grasp and will not just leave me; they will run from me. I am understanding that friendship is the practice of trusting someone you love to live their life in a way that is best for them. Staying the same might be the worst thing for them and by extension the worst thing for our friendship, so maybe all it comes down to is giving them the freedom to be my friend and live their life. Hopefully they will do the same for me one day and I will be able to handle them with grace because I will know how much it may hurt them to see me grow.
