Julie Jay: Friendships come second when we become mammies 

About seven years ago, I was invited onto a radio panel to talk about women’s issues, and a panellist made a comment that stuck with me. 

‘When you have a baby, you really find out who your friends are,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing how many people I would have considered a good friend fell away when I had my first.’

The rest of the panel, being mammies themselves, echoed her sentiments, and yet I couldn’t help but see it from another perspective. 

For me, who at that point yearned to become a mammy, I was finding it harder and harder to be around friends who had been lucky enough to start families.

I had actively distanced myself from friends who had babies because the truth is I was jealous. I couldn’t be fully happy for my friends who had got there before me. 

I struggled to believe motherhood would ever happen for me and had the failed Tinder first dates to prove it.

Only when I started looking into the potential of having a baby on my own did I feel I could join my friends’ parenting journey. 

Exposing a major character flaw on my part, it was easier for me to be happy for people when I had an avenue to access the same path to happiness. 

So, despite my comedy brand being built on ostensible kindness, I am a bit of a mé féiner.

Motherhood tests friendships because nothing changes a person like bringing a child into the world. Kids are the be-all and end-all, and they come before anyone or anything else. 

Society superstar and social media influencer Julia Fox summed it up pretty well in her memoir Down The Drain when she spoke about how her friends had always been her chosen family and how having her son had ‘messed that up, because now he comes first’.

What I loved about her memoir among other things (that whole chapter on Kanye was pretty mind-blowing. Note to self: if I ever start seeing a rapper, never sign the NDA) was how she talked about the impact of becoming a mother had had on her friendships. 

How the relationships she had previously valued most had changed irrevocably, and how she mourned their loss despite loving her son more than anyone in the world.

In the last few months, one of my very best friends had a baby. We have been friends for almost 15 years, and she is one in a million - the kind of person you want to be stuck at a border crossing in Central America with when you are minus a passport and have misplaced your ATM card.

Because she lives in Dublin, I don’t see her as much as I would like, but we managed to meet for a rushed lunch in May. (I completely misjudged the traffic - who knew so many people worked in our capital city?)

At the end of an extortionately expensive lunch where I paid €16 for eggs and bread, she shared big news: she was expecting her first baby.

Perhaps it was the pregnancy hormones in me, but the joy I felt for her was also tinged with sadness. Not a sadness at her news, of course, for that kind of good news couldn’t be topped, but rather a sadness at not knowing this was something my friend had wanted, in the deepest sense. I walked away, berating myself for not checking in more and allowing the distance to become more than a physical one. I vowed to stay in touch more and keep abreast of all her major life events.

But even as I made this silent commitment to myself while paying a small fortune for parking (€10 for two hours? I’m hoping this at least has me in the running for shares in the company), I knew I wouldn’t stick to it. 

Because the truth is when we become mammies, everything else comes second, even friendships with the OGs, the ride or dies, the people who have stood by you through ups and downs and terrible hair extensions.

Friendships that have persisted through the various fashion disasters and misjudged fringes are the ones built for the long haul and must be treasured. Yet friendship must also allow for change, especially when that friendship enters the stage of parenthood when nearly every phone call ends abruptly with a ‘no Tadhg, that oven is hot.’

At the risk of expecting too much of my friends who are not parents, I hope they will understand when I probably will not be available to head to a gig on a school night or when I have to flake on the brunch because a child has a stomach bug.

I am hoping against hope that, though I am currently in the parenting trenches, when I come up for air my friends will be there waiting for me, and it’ll be just like old times - only this time with slightly more comfortable footwear due to our lower back pain.

Of course, by the time that happens, I will also be able to leave the car at home because no doubt Metro North will finally be up and running. Failing that, I might hop on my hoverboard, an endeavour championed by President Andrew Scott in his 2044 political campaign for Áras an Uachtaráin and which really took flight.

For now, it’s a case of waiting it out and looking forward to the day I will once again quite happily spend €16 on eggs like a person without commitments.