It happens. You have kids and suddenly you quit hanging around your single friends without kids. You quit hanging out with your coupled friends who don’t have kids too. You don’t do this on purpose but kiddie playdates kind of take over your world. You find yourself at a stream of endless kids parties and get togethers where parents who barely know each other stand around and talk kid shop while the kiddies dig into the ice cream and cake. Does this sound like you? Is there anything quite so boring?

I think the first few years of my kids' life on this planet I found myself doing this and single childfree friends tended to keep their distance too. After all who wants to talk to someone whose main fascination is the consistency and colored nuance of kid poop? There’s that mommy brain mush that happens so that you repeat yourself constantly and can’t put together words that have more than two syllables. So one tends to stay in the pack. But after a while a mommy realizes that perhaps she misses discussing what she read in the New York Review of Books. Perhaps it would be nice to ask after who has heard the new Tom Wait’s live CD and for that you need single and childfree friends (SCFs).

At first I felt like a drag on SCFs. After all who wants to visit the home of someone who cannot really concentrate on a full conversation because they are wiping butts, making lunch, correcting homework, and folding laundry at the same time? But you know? The closer they get to 40, the more they are wondering, well — what is that life like anyhow? If you are like me, most of your friends decided not to take the plunge into procreation (hooray for zero population growth) but are curious nonetheless. Visiting you gives them the chance to see what life is like on the other side. You serve either as great birth control or a great example of the possibilities of home.

Of course not all your SCFs are happy , healthy and loving the single childfree world. We all know the SCFs lost in the wilderness clinging to their anti-depressants and their next therapy appointment. But there are the strong ones too. The ones that entered into a SCFs world willingly and intentionally.

But the real beauty in cultivating those SCFs is that they bring so much to your children as well. As stay at home moms, our children see us in the home, carting them around, our children get a false sense of the world at times. It is their proverbial oyster and the world most certainly can look like it rises and sets on their behinds. But when the children have to reconcile their world view with your SCFs they have to accept that their are worlds that exist without children — and that’s a healthy thing.

To that end, my children have a great number of ‘aunts“ and ”uncles“ who have careers and interests that I love exposing the children too. Their honorary aunts and uncles are painters, photographers, musicians, scientists, writers, actors — all vocations that seem to need a focus and direction that child rearing can make difficult. I love knowing that my kids realize there are vocations outside of mommyhood for them in their futures. I love letting my kids and friends spend time together without me present. It's great to see the kids develop their own relationships with adults of their choosing. Since you know and trust your friends anyhow, it seems a perfect fit.

The SCFs are instrumental in providing this example. I think a good many of my friends would contradict me here and say yes, but you aren’t exactly a stay at home, Kraft mac n cheese mom yourself. True, I’ll give them that. But hanging around with other mom friends doing time in preschool land can feel like purgatory after awhile. Hanging out with the single childfree friends reminds us what our goals were before biology and socialization helped decide our fate. With any luck, more time with the SCFs will yield a return to self for mommy and open up possibilities for baby.