Becoming a mom means life changes — fast. One minute you're dancing on bar tops and the next you’re worried that you won’t have time to pump before work. It’s especially hard if you’re a young mother, as evidenced by one recent story on Reddit where a 20-something poster shared that her friend was starting to feel “left out” of their friend group because they weren’t going to “family friendly” activities.
As the original poster explained, the people in the friend group are all in their mid-20s, “so we’re still very much the type to go out and have fun at bars, parties, nightclubs, travel to new places you name it.”
But a close friend who’s recently given birth is having a hard time accepting that the party is over — or at least, it's changed a bit. The OP swore that she’s always been supportive — “even planned her baby shower for her and got her home ready for when she came back with her newborn but recently she came to me a– backwards and went off on me bc I apparently do not accommodate her & her child,” she wrote in her post.
Her friend explained that she was upset that their friend group was doing stuff without her because of the baby.
She mentioned that after her baby shower, a few people in their group went out to a local bar and she couldn’t go because “she was very pregnant and they smoke inside that bar.”
“I asked her what the issue was bc I had spent the entire day making sure she didn’t lift a finger for her baby shower and my friends wanted to treat me to some drinks after all the hard work I did,” the OP explained. “It was after we had cleaned up for her baby shower & she was even complaining about how tired she was.”
Then her friend argued that their group was only going to places that weren’t “child friendly.”
She told the OP that it wasn’t fair because she “deserved to hang out with her friends too, but she actually does hang out with us all the time.”
“Every few weeks our friend group does a barbecue where she can bring the baby around us and hangout with us,” the OP explained. “We even visit her on separate occasions just to spend time with her or invite her out to lunch.”
The group also recently went to an “adults only casino cruise” and her friend was upset that she couldn’t go.
She asked why couldn’t they have gone on to a family resort “where she could bring her kid.”
“We are all heavy drinkers when we party, when we want to party, we f—ing party and that’s no place to bring a 6-month-old baby no matter where we do end up going,” the OP wrote. “We just want to have fun and not worry that little Billy has to have a diaper change and the music is too loud or vulgar.”
But it all seemed to come to a head when their group went to a new bar downtown after work and her friend couldn’t go.
The OP wrote that they did invite her, but she never showed up and later accused them of “purposefully excluding her.”
“To that I simply replied, ‘I’m sorry you’re feeling that way but we’re a bunch of single 20-something-year-old people working 10 hours a day 40-70 hours a week and wanted to have a drink or two, we didn’t choose to have a kid with you therefore we don’t have to always worry about accommodating you," she recalled. "You had a baby, life changed for you. I have no issue making more time for you but I’m not going to stop going to some of my favorite places with some of my favorite people whenever I want to and can bc you have other responsibilities now' and she got very very angry & hung up on me.”
“So I want to know AITA for not always accommodating with my friend?” she asked.
Most of the comments section agreed that her friend was being unreasonable.
“[Not the A–hole]," one person commented. "She had the kid, and having kids comes with adult responsibilities and giving up the party life in this stage of her child’s life. You said you all have been accommodating and do invite her to child friendly things, which is a compromise. It’s not fair or reasonable for you all to drop your fun time plans because she became a parent."
"JESUS CHRIST," another commenter wrote. "If she wants to go that badly she can get a f—ing sitter. I am a mom to a 3-year-old, and I would never behave like this. Being a mom means you can't go to absolutely everything, and also means that you can't force your friends to stop having fun because you had a kid. That's ridiculous."
While a third commenter put it this way: "[Not the A–hole]. It sounds like you're doing your reasonable best to make her feel like you still care about and want to hang out with her. Her expecting you to only ever do things that she can bring her baby to is selfish and unrealistic. She chose to have a baby. She doesn't get to expect you or your friends to change your entire lives, hobbies, and interests to fit her choice."
But some people thought the OP could be more understanding.
"Empathy my friend," one person advised. "She’s going through a lot and doesn’t really know who she is right now. Plan something to do together. You will need her later when you settle down and she knows all the important info."
“[You're the A–hole]," someone else wrote. "She is not upset about every single incident. She is upset about the pattern of refusing to think outside of your alcohol-filled box and excluding her for everything but a BBQ once a month that happened before that anyway. She is upset, because she is losing her 'friends' and finding out that those 'friends' don't care about her as much as they care about getting drunk several times a week. Seriously, there are places where you can drink and bring a baby, at least at the beginning. You could help her find a babysitter. But no, you change nothing, not even 10%, of your activities to suit a so called friend. Why not admit you don't care about her to her and let her move on from the disappointment?"
Later in the thread, the OP shot back that she thought she'd given her friend plenty of "empathy."
"After work I’ll drop by with things she needs, babysit for her so she can go out with our group, bring her food after my shifts, go out to places where she can take her kid," she explained. "How much more can I possibly do?"
"I am not her husband, I will continue to go out and live out my twenties how I please if she can or cannot be apart of it," she added. "That’s like us telling her 'why did you get pregnant what about coming out with us instead? Or why did you get married, now you have to be a wife?' she chose to be all this."
"She just thinks we should basically do what she says cause she has a kid," she added.
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