Glamorousness interrupted

Everyone knows the phrase, kids ruin everything. It assumes there was, pre-kids, an everything to ruin. It’s long been my hunch that a certain amount of this involves people romanticizing their pre-kids lives, selectively remembering all the wild nights out, and forgetting… the nights in for no good reason, I suppose.

But we’re now in another round of mommy wars discourse. Can moms and non-moms be friends? The verdict seems to be yes, assuming the moms are wealthy enough to Lady Mary it and have so much childcare that they can go clubbing like in olden days unimpeded. But this is also assuming something, something not always 100% accurate, about women without children, namely that they are continuously hitting the town.

I was struck by the following passage, in Jill Filipovic’s newsletter entry into this conversation.

Children upend our friendships. Do they have to?

If you’re 35, and you’ve spent the last 15 years working hard, developing deep friendships, going on adventures, having a lot of fun, earning a sense of hard-won independence, and, crucially, structuring much of your life around friendship and not a nuclear family, a child changes everything, including, maybe, your idea of yourself — even if you really, really want to have a child.

This is not to overanalyze a specific newsletter post. Basically all the motherhood/motherhood-or-not writing geared at women in what is, I think (?), my socioeconomic class assumes a narrative along these lines. Towards, that is, a women who reads a paragraph like that and finds it broadly relatable. And I’m sure a bunch of women do.

But not all.