Jennifer Horgan: Is it possible to maintain our friendships when we have children?

A dream highlights an unresolved feeling of jealousy, prompting Jennifer Horgan to think about how relationships change when we become parents 

My dream seemed to suggest what is perhaps obvious — that our children break up our friendships or at least threaten them. It is impossible perhaps, to hold onto old friendships while having children, certainly if friends are not at the exact same stage.

Stepping out onto a freshly painted zebra crossing, my friend spots me.

I’m sitting alone at a roadside cafe. It’s hot, the street broad, the light suggesting it might be Australia, where I lived for a short while, decades ago.

As she turns back towards me, waving one hand in recognition, a breeze billows her top. I trace the outline of an early pregnancy, follow her arm down to a little dark-haired boy, tucking himself neatly behind her thigh.

As they approach, she crouches, searching through an enormous bag to find a miniature, blue car. Mother and boy share a mischievous smile. I feel something intensely, and then I wake up.

I understand now why Freud was so fascinated with dreams. They are like the poetry of the mind, layers deep in meaning, a ribboning back into and through that dark cave where we like to hide things from ourselves and others.

Dreams reveal us to ourselves. According to the Sleep Foundation, we use “imagined contexts” in dreams to create enough distance for us to work through real life feelings. How clever!

This was one of those dreams. So, what was the difficult emotion I was processing? Can you guess?

It was jealousy, pure and simple. Seeing the small, dark-haired boy, and the pregnant line of my old friend’s stomach, made me feel betrayed, replaced, left out. In this dream world, her pregnancy was a shock; she hadn’t told me. And for whatever reason, her small boy was a stranger.

Reality check: this friend doesn’t have a boy, and we are well past the pregnancy stage. But through my mind’s trickery, my brain’s processing, I realised some strange illogical part of me has always felt jealous of her second life, her life with children and a husband, her life without me.

My dream presented me with a truth I would never otherwise have been able to articulate or control. Isn’t that amazing?

My initial response to having this dream was to feel guilt. I mean, for God’s sake, I also have children and a husband. I also became around-the-clock distracted for a good 10 years there. 

Nonetheless, on some ridiculously irrational level, I had carried this wound around with me, this feeling towards a friend. Had I ever acted on it? I hope not. But according to Stanford professor of marketing Baba Shiv, only 5% to 10% of our decisions are made rationally. Emotion is by far the bigger influence.

Logic doesn’t matter to our feelings. Our feelings exist beyond logic altogether. Even their complete absurdity won’t diminish them. It’s helpful then that dreams might. Having the dream helped me process the feeling. The dream did its job.

It allowed me to think more generally too about keeping friendships alongside child-rearing. It’s possible other people experience the same jealousy, consciously or otherwise. 

Other people might also feel pushed out by the little humans and/or big humans who enter a friend’s life from stage left and go on to absolutely dominate the show. Maybe we should all be more honest about it.

My dream ballooned into a bigger conversation for me, not just about my own friendships but about what it means to have friends and to also have children. My dream seemed to suggest what is perhaps obvious — that our children break up our friendships or at least threaten them. It is impossible perhaps, to hold onto old friendships while having children, certainly if friends are not at the exact same stage.

Even if two people manage to sustain a friendship, it is perhaps impossible to hold onto it fully, without knowing one another’s children. One friend of mine had a fantastically honest response to the birth of my first child. I remember suggesting we meet in a park with a playground. Single and childless at the time, he responded he wasn’t into parks because they were dull, and he definitely was not into playgrounds. He told me he didn’t want to be friends with my child, only me.

I loved him for his honesty and for the fact he still identified me as a separate, autonomous individual, when the rest of the world seemed to have forgotten. And yet, even though I loved him for his straightforwardness, we absolutely drifted apart. I was no longer a single entity, as much as I wanted to be. My ‘baggage’, at least in those early years, was omnipresent.

The ideal situation is that you and your old friend enter your second lives or second acts together.

I never managed it. My friends had babies later. I moved away. They moved away. At this stage, we don’t and probably won’t ever really know each other’s children. The small dark-haired boy represents the little children in all my real friends’ lives. 

Of course, we share messages, pictures, exchange cute and not-so-cute anecdotes, but that’s about it. They’re gorgeous little strangers to me now, albeit blessed with achingly familiar features.

So, I think there is truth to the idea that children break up friendships, leaving us too busy or emotionally spent to hold onto the relationships that came before.

On a more positive note, children also make friendships — of that I’m certain.

My husband and I brought up our babies abroad, so I’m no longer in the lives of my mama tribe. I know for certain, however, that if we were to see each other again, we would switch right back into gear, the way cousins or siblings do.

Rearing children with others creates an incredibly strong bond. It is as close to family as it gets. They see you on those mornings when you have nothing left in the tank. They see you laugh and cry, lose the rag and then find it again, slightly more frayed than before. 

They get to know your child alongside knowing you. You can be up front and personal in a way you can’t be with people who don’t know your children. It’s the glorious flipside of the coin — forming those new relationships.

But how lucky people the people who get to bring up their children with their oldest friend. I know a few — the ones who meet their best friend for coffee, two buggies or maybe two toddlers in tow, circling the park. When I see them, I feel a perfectly logical kind of jealousy. They’ve really hit the jackpot.

But back to my dream — my crazy, irrational dream.

My dream reminded me emotions often don’t make sense, but they exist and indeed persist anyway. They may even influence our decision-making.

I’m grateful to have processed my irrational jealousy. I’ve labelled it as unhelpful and I genuinely don’t feel it anymore.

It’s frightening to think of all the people who might be out in the world, working from an emotion they haven’t yet processed. It’s presumably quite a few of us quite a lot of the time.

Perhaps dreams deserve far more serious attention than they’re currently given. Perhaps one of our most basic skills could turn out to be one of our most useful.