Photo by Sai De Silva. |
I recently had a conversation with me about a friend of mine who is also a single, non-child-having person about how much we love our friends' kids.
We aren't biased or anything, but our friends clearly have the cutest, smartest, most promising kids in the whole dang world. We love the opportunities we have to be a part of their lives, spoil them like aunties, and join in our friends' family activities.
Of course, we also love when we get some alone time with our friends and can have adult conversations, but we know that won't be every time and we are VERY okay with that!
Why am I sharing these not-so-hot takes about the fact that we aren't jerks to our friends' kids? Because we also discussed how it sometimes feels like our friends think that we resent the fact that their kids' existence has had an impact on their lives. We don't!
FRIENDS WITH KIDS: PLEASE STOP APOLOGIZING FOR YOUR KIDS' EXISTENCE!
Your friends get it!
We get that our conversation will be interrupted a billion times by your children. We get that all things revolve around bedtime. We get that exposure to germs is now a very big deal. We get that your apartment will be a mess of kids' stuff for a long, long time. We get that it will take 20 minutes to walk somewhere that would normally take us 5.
We get it! We are cool with it! We LIKE it, even!
Basically, you can feel free to stop projecting whatever fears you have about being annoying or not enough or whatever it is onto us and just let us continue to be your friend in this new phase of life. We are here for it.
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