some of my friends will never have kids, and i kinda like it that way

we all have our fears about how major life changes will impact our relationships.

when i was pregnant everyone told me i needed to join parenting groups since i was the first person in my friend group to have kids, by three years and counting.

“it can get lonely without mom friends,” they said. “nobody else really understands what you’re going through.”

the thing is, i wasn’t really interested in being misunderstood by my best friends. they are the center of my world, an extension of my family. just because they hadn’t gone through the process of trying to conceive, miscarrying, childbirth and the forever responsibility of raising children didn’t mean that they couldn’t understand what i was going through.

i knew it wasn’t an option for me to shrug my shoulders and sigh, “you just wouldn’t get it.”

i needed them to get it.

there are so many aspects of my friends’ lives that i will never personally understand, doesn’t mean i can’t empathize with their unique lives. i can imagine the environments in which they grew up, the struggles they’ve encountered with their loved ones, and the stressors from their very-different-from-mine jobs. we’ve always shared what we’re going through, becoming a mom was never going to be something i omitted from the conversation.

was i self-conscious to finally understand why moms never stop talking about breastfeeding? sure. but once i personally understood how physically demanding it is to feed a baby from your chest i wanted to share why it’s all that mothers can think about.

during my first year of motherhood i stopped journaling and i had no desire to read a book. as someone who had chosen to move into the role of around-the-clock childcare as a full time mom, i was sure that all of the warnings i’d heard were coming true.

“i need a job to actually use the other parts of my brain.”

“the work of childcare is monotonous, you’ll lose your mind.”

“i’d be so bored.”

“you’ll lose yourself without a career.”

“i could never be a stay-at-home mom, that’s the hardest job ever.”

on and on.

i could imagine why people said these things, i could practically feel my brain atrophy. postpartum vocabulary loss took over to such a debilitating degree that i could not even remember the word for “cabinet” when asking for an item in the kitchen.

but if i was honest with myself, i didn’t find any of the warnings to be true, not in the slightest.

as a new mom my brain was on fire and i was using every skill and ounce of intellect i’d accumulated throughout my entire life, schooling, and jobs.

not only that, i had to wake up the sleepy parts of my mind that hadn’t been accessed since grade school.

there is not a single job that has required as much mental math as being a mom demands of me.

i converted ounces of milk into days of sustenance so that i could build back stock and take time off. i left my breastfed baby for five days when i was four and a half months postpartum so that i could take my annual solo trip, that year to mexico city.

i calculated how many grams of protein i needed to consume in a day to sustain myself and my baby. i tracked wet diapers, soiled ones, hours slept, times fed and for how long on each breast. i anticipated when i needed to order the next size up in baby clothes (a dizzying task in the first year.)

my operational mind went into hyper drive organizing a kitchen overrun by meal-prep and bottle sanitization. there was so much stuff that i refused to buy more than a handful of bottles because we barely had enough room for the six we’d shoved into the cabinet next to the mixing bowls.

people warned me that i would be bored, but i found life with a newborn utterly fascinating. there was no task that felt mundane to me, i was deeply curious about it all.

and i was shocked by how much i loved it, full time childcare. i did not miss going to work and i was in love with the life i was building with my new nuclear family. the internet warned me about how awful all of it would be, i felt borderline guilty in my joy. but it also felt important to share the reality of my experience, of course my friends would want to hear about what i was going through, they always did.

throughout the city and at every mom gathering i’ve ever been to i hear the same sentiment over and over again,

“mom friends just get it, you know?”

“i don’t even know what i have in common with my friends without kids anymore.”

and my personal favorite,

“i just can’t listen to their problems anymore, like, try having kids and then we’ll see if your work stress is actually that stressful anymore.”

i refused to subscribe to the idea that my life was suddenly more meaningful, harder, or important than theirs. i don’t think that you need to have children in order to have a rich and meaningful life.

while i personally understand that the pressures and responsibilities of early parenthood are heavy, i know that my friend going through a career change and deeply budgeting for a year while job hunting is also going through it. although sleep with a young child can be inconsistent, i know that my friend with a restaurant is also losing sleep over what sales are going to look like.

my problems are not suddenly greater than anyone else’s just because i had a baby.

we all have things that make life hard, it’s not a competition, and a child is not a trump card.

and then there is all of the fear and insecurity that comes up as one friend enters parenthood while the other does not.

my best friend and i had many a teary-eyed conversation imagining what my transition into motherhood could do to our friendship. we expressed our fears plainly and out loud and once they were spoken they sounded totally ridiculous, but we knew of plenty of instances when friends grew apart for just this reason.

we promised to stay by each other’s side, to ask for what we needed, to be there for each other no matter how drastically different the details of our lives became. “i don’t want to lose you.” is a phrase we whispered to each other often.

as my belly grew, so did our plans.

she organized my meal train so that i would have homemade food and friendly drop-ins throughout the first months postpartum. i continued to ask after her work, her dog, and her husband’s bar.

when my baby arrived she texted me at the top of each week to choose a time to visit. as is her nature, she always reminded me that i could change my mind last minute. i don’t remember if i ever did.

while this was a totally above-and-beyond level of support that would have been frankly overwhelming with more than just one friend showing up like this, it was exactly what our friendship needed.

we were so worried about slipping away from each other, we needed to be physically close. i needed to hug her, she needed to hold my baby, and our angsty fear of losing our person crumbled into dust.

i realized that my fear of moving on as a new parent without her was just as great as her fear of getting left behind.

during pregnancy i not only considered my potential struggles as a new mom, but i imagined how anxious i would be as the childfree friend watching my best friend step into an entirely new phase of life without me.

“will she even want to tell me about what she’s going through if i can’t relate to her leaky nipples?”

while many women spend their pregnancy designing a picture-perfect nursery, my husband was running his business out of ours and what i actually cared about was how i would welcome my childfree friends into this brand-new-to-all-of-us phase of life.

i reached out for help and i asked for what i needed, but i also tried to tune into what they might need.

if i were them i’d want to be included. i’d want to be pulled in closer, not cast aside. i’d be so excited to meet this tiny human that they brought home. i’d want to get the text in the middle of the night and the request to run a random errand that used to be so easy for them. i’d want to get to know their kid and tell them how freaking cool their parents are and how lucky they are.

i’d want to be there.

so instead of assuming my friends would want nothing to do with me, i trusted that they would want all of me and all of my baby too.

i remain fascinated by what it’s like to be the childfree auntie to your bestie.

the friend who doesn’t know if they ever want to have kids. the friend who desperately wants to have children, but hasn’t found her person yet. the one who never wants to become a parent. the one who wanted to be a mom, but had too many external factors to make it possible. the one who is getting ready to start trying, but is enjoying life without the scientific timing of conception sex. the one who froze her eggs for maybe one day. the one who is taking her time to decide.

these are my best friends.

it doesn’t matter if they never have children, they will always take an interest in my life as i will in theirs. they love me and they love my child. hell, they even love my husband and my dog.

they are the proudest aunties you’ve ever met.

i wonder if it might be easy to forget what it was like to be these people, folks without kids, once you become one. after having days, weeks, months suddenly shrink-wrapped into high-stakes chunks of time when all that matters is this tiny human right in front of you. it’s easy to lose sight of the world around you when you’re holding it in your arms.

i get it.

i also think it’s damaging to “other” our buds with a before and after delineation that might forever hold true. i once heard a woman say, “you’ll just make new friends. over time people without kids become too hard to relate to.” my god, i wanted to throw up.

i sat there quietly, as i often do, letting the moms take umbrage with those without children for reasons totally delusional to me. everyone is going through something, i always try and remember.

but mother curious is my space to speak up and say what the actual fuck.

i built this substack to be inclusive, to imagine what it might be like to become a parent, to ask for more from life as a mother and to bring our childfree folks along for the ride.

i hope that in sharing some of my experience i can add to your own mental emotional toolbox as you strengthen, rediscover and/or redefine your sense of self, no matter where you are on the parent spectrum.

this blog is for those who are considering becoming parents one day, but aren’t quite sure. for people who are about to be parents. maybe parents who want to do things a little differently. and people who have no intention of being parents but are simply curious about what all of this can look like.

mother curious, article 01

february 26, 2026

the auntie edit is for my best friends, all still childfree, who raise my kid with me and my partner in brooklyn.

not necessarily their individual voices, although one of them is on the docket <3, but the voices of childfree folks who have something to say on the matter but not have a space on their own substacks.

those who don’t want to be left behind when their friends become parents. those who maybe feel excluded from parenting spaces, but are curious and involved members of their friends’ family life.

it’s also for the moms who forgot.

those who are so understandably preoccupied with the realities of life with children. it’s nice to have friends with kids, but not all of us will become parents.

i hope the stories of the auntie edit can help bring a level of compassion and closeness to an often divisive dialogue. maybe these stories make you feel a little brave to share what you’re going through, invite a friend into your world. perhaps it inspires you to take the night off and jump into theirs.

i am unbelievably grateful to have a home for these stories, with over 2,500 sets of eyeballs to reach. this is the next phase of mother curious and i couldn’t be more excited to share these voices with my favorite corner of the internet.

thank you for being here <3

i launched the auntie edit last week, a monthly article from a guest writer to explore the baby question, childfree by choice, and what it means to become an integral auntie to friends and family.

no curious mothers of substack this week, my parents are in town and i’m feeling very sparkly about it and trying to soak up all of my time with them—we’re in vacation mode! if you have an article you’d like be featured next week, please send me a note, i’d love to read what you’re writing!

mother curious will begin paywalling by september. i’m still working through what that looks like, but i’ll keep you posted before it goes up. in the meantime, those who sign up for an annual subscription will receive a little sumpin-sumpin in the mail from yours truly.

for those of you who have been here from the beginning, those who like a random note, and those who have just joined, mother curious doesn’t exist without you! i am so so grateful for every single like, share, comment (public and private), subscription, and referral and i cannot wait to see what this next chapter has in store!

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no AI here

i’ve turned off the ability for substack to feed my words to AI to…test for AI because i don’t feel super comfy with the implications of a bot learning my work at this time. i do not believe that the bots have any right to my hard-earned writing. i hope you can trust that this work is one hundred percent human, typos and all.

CONNECT: thank you so much for being here! i hope you enjoyed reading mother curious today. i’d love to hear from you! say hi to me on instagram, watch me try to figure out tiktok, or leave a comment on substack. the best part about substack is the conversations and connections we build together and i look forward to getting to know you too.