What it’s Like When You Are The First of Your Friends to Have a Baby.

Alex Holder is Acting Content Director at ELLE UK. When she shared this list it sent shivers up my spine. Ben and I were the first of our mates to have kids and, I’ll cut to the chase, it was  shit and lonely, I cried often about feeling out-of-sync and misunderstood. The good news (for me) is they’ve all now popped out nippers too. So everyone’s FINALLY in the same boat (by boat I mean ‘up shit creak without a paddle).

Alex’s account is spot on:

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• When you tell people you’re pregnant their reactions range from ‘On Purpose?!’ to the more blatant ‘Are you going to keep it?’

• Cass is now a year old and people will still say ‘Were you actually trying?’

• Everyone wants you to come to the pub pregnant but no one wants a sober pregnant person still there at 10pm.

• You realize that previously you socialized in 12-hour chunks – lunch would turn to dinner which would lead to a 3am huddle in someone’s kitchen.  You now have 2-hour slots to see people and wonder how that will ever feel like enough time to catch-up. To be honest, it never quite does.

• None of your friends understand why when you’re pregnant you need the father-to-be to stay in with you on a Friday night.

• ‘But, Mark can still come out right?!’

• ‘Er, no he can stay in and research prams with me’.

• You have to accept that when you can’t see your friends for those 12 hour benders, the only time you will see them is after they’ve had 2 hours sleep and need a cuddle and a nap on your couch.

• You realize hungover people are incredibly flaky.

• People ask your age and you then watch them have a think and work out that 32 is a perfectly reasonable age to give birth to a child.

• And then you see that you’re only a couple of years off the NHS labeling you a ‘geriatric mother’.

• And that most of your school friends have already spawned 2 or 3.

• You become parents to all of your friends not just your kid. Mark and I answer to Mum and Dad a lot and Cass can’t talk yet.

• Your friends are genuinely interested in your baby. They’re not just a new person; in their world babies are an entirely new concept.

• Like losing your virginity first, you get a smug feeling that you’ve struck upon life’s gold a little before them.

• Cass has a lot of very fun ‘Aunties’ and ‘Uncles’

• Cass has received insanely wonderful, super stylish gifts. He spent the summer in a tiny tasteful poncho bought for him from Mexico and he was made a bespoke leather bondage mask for his first birthday.

• Those post midnight friends of yours? Well, you’ll never see them again, and if you do, eighteen months later on a rare night out, it’ll be really awkward.

• You feel very lucky that you have this new wonderful life as a parent, but also that your old life is still there fairly unchanged. It’s not like all of your friends have given birth and moved to Brighton.

• An evening baby sitter is pointless; unless I’ve got someone for the morning duty I stay in.

• That Friday evening group text ‘Spurstowe at 8’ can still sting.

• But the morning cuddle followed by a messy breakfast for three with ‘Saturday Kitchen’ on the TV makes up for it.

• The other first time Mum you meet who understands both your old life and your new one, who you can be both Mum-Alex with as well as pub-Alex, well, for a time she becomes all your friends at once. Find one other first time mum you like.

• It’s actually quite wonderful that your friends have no idea you scooped a poo out of the bath before coming to the pub and talking nap times with them just isn’t an option. It stops you becoming just mum.

• Also as none of them have kids it means they’re occasionally willing to look after yours and you can still join them in the pub on a Sunday afternoon without creating a buggy carpark.

• In photos of you and your friends you can spot you’re the only one sporting Mum bags under the eyes.

• Don’t expect all your friends to go on a crazy one just because you have a babysitter, they were probably out until 2 last night so lower your expectations.