being boring

The Daily Mail has an article on whether mothers and childless women can be friends. It includes this quote:

You don't become a woman until you have held your first child in your arms 

which is all kinds of offensive. The childless writer offering an alternative view considers her friends who have become mothers as boring company and unreliable due to childcare issues. In my experience it's not children or becoming a parent that makes people boring, it is being boring that makes them boring. As I've got older I've realised how exciting and energising it is to meet a genuinely interesting person. People who only have one thing to talk about whether it's their children, a relationship or a hobby will always be tiresome company.

However, there are stages of our lives where what we are experiencing is so all consuming that we require our loved ones to cut us a bit of slack. During my recent pregnancy, I found it difficult to think or talk about anything other than my pregnancy. I was consumed by it in an obsessively anxious and unhealthy way. Thank god for my mother who was nearly as obsessed as I was: we would talk most days about the things I needed to buy or get sorted before the baby arrived; my partner also spent a serious chunk of time listening to my worries and worse case scenarios. However, I reigned this in when talking to friends - especially friends who do not have children - and often I escaped into these friendships, relieved to be talking and thinking about things that were not baby related.

Some friendships will accommodate the changes in our lives; others might ebb and flow according to these changes and there will be a few that fall by the wayside. But there is one constant: life is too short to spend it with boring people, whether they have children or not.