Written by Nell Frizzell

After having her son, Nell Frizzell found herself from feeling cut off from those close to her. It’s a common problem, so why does no one warn expectant parents about it, she asks.

One afternoon, as I was airing my belly on somebody’s sofa, a woman I have known all my life turned to me and said: “Babies bring you money and friends.” As a pregnant, freelance writer, renting a flat in London at the time, with a partner living on a student income, this was music to my ears. What she didn’t say – and what I’d probably now add to that little homily – is that you’ll also lose some of both along the way.

According to a study of 2,000 parents, carried out by the charity Action for Children a few years ago, 68% of parents felt ‘cut off’ from friends, colleagues and family after the birth of a child. Why? I could write the reasons along my arms in felt tip, across my walls in jam and down my sheets in blood.

If you’re a birth parent, then having a baby doesn’t mean a baby leaving your body; it just means a baby moving from the inside to the outside of your body. You will still have to carry that baby around for months, if not years. You will have to feed it. You will have to rock it to sleep. You will walk up and down the darkness of your bedroom for hours as it screams in your face. You will have to wipe it clean, at either end, several times a day, for years. They will vomit on you. They will erupt in rashes or twitches or fountains of snot. They will writhe in your arms and howl when you put them down. All of which makes your old routine, well, tricky. Doing paid work, especially if it happens outside of your home, will become tricky. Leaving the house will be tricky. Living according to a schedule will be tricky, which makes being on time tricky, which makes making plans tricky. All of which means that keeping in touch with your friends and colleagues will become, you guessed it, tricky. 

And yet, perhaps, the trickiest thing of all is that we are told that having a baby won’t affect our relationships. Or, even more unhelpfully, that it shouldn’t. We are told that good friends are your friends for life. That they’ll always be there. That you can share everything. That having a baby won’t change you. You’ll still be able to go on holiday and stay up late and remember their birthday and laugh at their jokes. Except you won’t. At least, you sometimes won’t. Thanks to the sanity-crushing effect of sleep deprivation you will, probably, start to forget what someone said to you three minutes ago. Thanks to the physical logistics of childrearing, you will arrive at a cafe 27 minutes late because just as you were trying to leave your home, your baby threw up so hard it actually filled up both cups of your bra and coated their face.

Thanks to the individualistic way we arrange housing in this country, you will spend the morning at home, blink, and realise that it’s gone dark. Just as someone gets to the punchline of their anecdote, your baby will make a noise like a saw cutting through aluminium and you will miss it. You will forget the name of the company your friend works for. You will cancel on them because you have to suddenly go to a health visitor appointment. You will spend two hours trying to settle a child to sleep just so you can send one email.

I’m not saying that new parents make bad friends, by the way. In many respects, new parents make the best friends. They are wide open, hysterical, around during the day, awake at 2am, shameless about undoing their shirts in public, desperate for adult conversation and will always have snacks in their bag. They are ravenous for gossip; for conversation that doesn’t revolve around naps and nipples and nappies. But they are, undeniably, living on a slightly different plane. 

In my book Holding The Baby, I call this The Partial Eclipse: the person is still there, their light is still shining as bright as ever, only most of that light is being temporarily absorbed by their child. When you are directly responsible for the survival of a tiny, helpless infant 24 hours a day, it can be tricky to do things like reply to text messages or catch a train. When we live in a society still largely designed by and for men: in the workplace, on public transport, in pubs, in seventh-story flats – it can be challenging to push your mothering body into public spaces. When you live along the very edge of life and death all day and all night, it can be a stretch to remember the details of someone’s kitchen renovation.

Instead of telling ourselves that having a baby won’t affect our relationships, it might be more helpful and more honest to talk about how they probably will. After all, getting a new partner, moving house, changing job and getting really into cycling can all affect your friendships, family and other relationships, so why on earth wouldn’t having a baby? You will almost certainly have to take a break from paid work, meaning you have less money and are therefore less able to do the things you did before. You may have different opinions on parenting styles. One of you might be experiencing fertility issues and find it hard to talk about the details of pregnancy and motherhood. You might need to move somewhere with more space, or close to your family or that smells slightly less of weed. You might become more anxious or start feeling like a Stepford wife or have nothing to talk about except the 14 videos of shark attacks you watched while feeding your baby at 3.14am. You might be touched out. Or desperate for someone – anyone – to stroke your hair.

The important thing is that this is a partial eclipse. It changes. It moves. As those babies learn how to sleep, how to push food into their own mouths, to be soothed by others, so their birth parent will simultaneously have more time to meet up, more of a short-term memory, more energy for the world. They will finish sentences and eat with two hands and keep their tops on and remember your address. Friendships – all relationships – are supple, subtle things. They can adapt or bloom or fade away or start anew. Since having a baby I have written four books, moved city, fallen out with people, bought a house, swam in the river, met new people, got married, taken on an allotment and bought a mobile barbecue. I do now have more money and more friends than I did when I was pregnant. That woman was right.

But I did lose some of both along the way. 

Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood by Nell Frizzell (Doubleday; £16.99) is out now. 

Images: Bekky Lonsdale

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