Don’t invite me to things

I have a baby, I can’t go.

I wholeheartedly believe the parenting choices my husband and I make are in the best interest of our daughter and they also limit my freedom. Going to any sort of social gathering means redefining what “going” means in this season. It’s no longer a yes-or-no question but a series of compromises that often end with someone disappointed, including me.

Before having a baby, I watched friends have kids of their own and their lives didn’t stop. They returned to work, they went on field trips and attended weddings, they maintained hobbies, all within months of becoming mothers. I was fully sold on the idea that life carries on in motherhood. And that can absolutely be true! As long as you create the freedom for yourself.

I subscribed to this entirely. I still do, in theory. I imagined motherhood running parallel to my existing life. In New York, that version of parenthood is very common, there’s a thick rolodex of available nannies and sitters that enable busy, social parents to keep their calendars and lifestyles. Nights out remain nights out because care has been outsourced and sleep has been delegated. I remember looking at sleek diaper bags meant for all-day adventures and thinking: we’ll just go all together. Brunch, drinks, a baby who sleeps wherever, or someone else can handle it for us. After all, we deserve to have a life too! What I failed to anticipate was how one’s parenting philosophy governs reality. Freedom isn’t an aesthetic or a declaration—it’s an infrastructure and that infrastructure depends on a level of separation my husband and I have chosen not to build.

New York doesn’t just offer freedom for parents, the city is one giant advert for it. Having a baby doesn’t remove you from being a New Yorker. You see parents at upscale dinner reservations you thought would be impossible with kids, babies asleep under tables at restaurants that don’t offer a high chair, mothers juggling multiple children while looking perfectly put together like they’re hiding an extra set of hands somewhere up their Veronica Beard bell-sleeves. Here, if you want your old life badly enough, you can keep it. The help exists and there’s plenty of it! However, choosing not to use it feels like a little pause from the full scope of the city we love and pay top dollar to live in. I haven’t been back across the river to Manhattan since we had a baby and she taunts me from our window, dangling a martini and Pastis burger over my headspace. You up? Miss me? C’mon, you can just get a sitter for an hour.

We were at a friend’s house this last weekend, they just had baby #2. I’m over here melting down internally over the possibility of two under two and while their kids are three years apart, they’re thriving. The three year old is more independent, the freezer is full of pumped milk, the night nurse makes date nights possible, and the nanny lightens the load during the day. And voila! Freedom by design. I see examples like this and I admire it, truly I do. And I also think to myself, that’s not the version of parenting I signed up for. I want to put my own baby to sleep every night and I love the closeness of breastfeeding too much to put it in someone else’s hands with a bottle.

I want to be very clear about this part: the parents I admire most are doing it a hundred different ways and I say all of this with zero judgement! My way is just different. The mothers who leave pumped milk and go to dinner are not abandoning their babies. The parents who let a sitter handle the bedtime routine once or twice a month are not choosing convenience over love, and the families who build routines that allow for distance are not less devoted. They are designing lives that work for them. My choice isn’t morally superior, it’s just what feels right for us — at the cost of time away, spontaneity, and balance between parenthood and the life we had before.

I can try to explain myself, but unless you’re an “attached” parent like me, it’s not explainable to the parents who have chosen the opposite. When I say that I can’t go to something because the baby needs me to feed her and cuddle her to sleep, I’m met with these looks, as if I don’t know that childcare is an option.

“Every parenting decision is so personal.” A friend texted this to me when I politely declined her invite for a Galentine’s Day dinner. I meandered through how the baby still wakes to feed and that can be anywhere from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. “I’ll be able to attend things again in a year or so,” I said, with the little melting face emoji. This emoji has started to define my motherhood, drowning a bit but still smiling!

“See, I’d love to go to that thing, but we need to read our baby a book before bed and then we need to do the shooting-star thing with the reading light and kiss our girl on her sweet head and remind her that we love her to the moon and back. And then I spend 45 minutes to an hour cuddling her until she feels safe and sleepy, before I sneak out to the living room for a cup of my evening tea and return whenever she needs me again. But have fun without me! I’ll try to get to the next thing!”

I still don’t have an example of anyone who parents the way that we do, and this often makes me question my entire way of doing things. Not because I think it’s wrong, but because I have so few mirrors of how this shakes out long term. Is my way really the loving way? Am I screwing up my baby by not giving her an ounce of independence? And then I remember she’s still a baby, she needs me — independence cannot exist before dependence.

But I feel so validated when a neighbor admits to me that they co-sleep too or when I hear another New York mother proudly proclaim her baby is also exclusively breastfed. I get this shiver of shame whenever our pediatrician talks to me about sleep training or how the baby should really be self-soothing by now instead of nursing to sleep. It takes all of me to not tell her to, respectfully, fuck off, seeing as she doesn’t have children of her own yet. That would be a low-blow and the outburst that would follow might get me banned from the pediatric practice, but I feel my defensive claws coming out anytime someone so much as implies that I’m not doing it right.

Attachment parenting gets a reputation. Usually, it’s framed as regressive or extremist— too much closeness surely can’t be good for the baby! “How do you ever do anything for yourself?”, friends ask. “But why do it that way when you don’t have to?” What rarely gets discussed is the part where it works—where a baby feels deeply secure and has every need responded to. This style of parenting is often reduced to the martyr mother and I frankly don’t recognize myself in that portrayal. What I recognize instead is a series of choices that prioritize my baby and why I couldn’t wait to be a mother.

It didn’t occur to me that I was an “attached parent” until this was just our normal way of doing things. The baby brezza has hardly been used, the beautiful crib has become more of a play pen where no sleep happens, and closeness and comfort is all our girl knows. So there it is, I’m an attached parent. If you called me that months ago, I would’ve likely taken offense. I’ve mocked mothers like this before I knew better. Can you believe she lets that baby run her life like that!?

The decisions I’ve made for my daughter prioritize her comfort above mine in all things. We nurse to sleep, we feed on demand, we cuddle for as long as it takes, I am the food and the bedtime routine. It means I am required in a very literal way, especially in the evenings, when social life tends to happen. It means there’s no clean handoff, no interchangeable caregiver slot that can be filled, and it means evenings are not mine. When I leave, her care and comfort come with me and I just can’t bring myself to outsource any part of that.

I love to say “we’ll have a sitter by then!” My birthday dinner? We’ll have a sitter by then. Our anniversary? We’ll have a sitter by then! That wedding we have coming up? We’ll definitely have a sitter by then. Tragically, this has become a figure of speech in our house. Potato, potato. We’ll have a sitter by then!

Last year, two of our best friends got married in New Hampshire. They agreed to let us bring our baby to the wedding because I didn’t see any other way to attend. We had bags packed and the dog was already with the sitter and just after the final nap, we were unexpectedly headed to the pediatrician. The baby was sick and boom! went the wedding trip. Within a matter of hours, our best laid plans blew up and we decided I’d stay back and David would go represent our family at the wedding. It broke my heart to miss it. I called the bride in tears. “I’m supposed to be there! I’m so sorry I can’t show up for you on your big day!” This time, it was harder for me to accept this is what I’ve signed up for, to relinquish control and predictability forever. Even if we had a sitter lined up for the weekend to stay the night, I couldn’t possibly have a good time somewhere else.

In motherhood, there’s FOMO, JOMO and SOMO. The fear, joy and sadness of missing out.

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): The awareness that your social world is continuing elsewhere without you, paired with the uneasy feeling like you should and want to be there but knowing you can’t be in two places at once, i.e. a girl’s dinner.

JOMO (Joy of Missing Out): The relief of choosing to stay home because going would exhaust your capacity, both physically and socially, i.e. watching football at the pub like you used to.

SOMO (Sadness of Missing Out): The grief that exists even when the decision to stay back is right, even when some moments can’t be postponed, replayed, or fully replaced later, i.e. the weddings and the birthdays.

There’s some relief in opting out, some grief in being absent, and anxiety about what absence means long-term. Will people stop asking? Will I forget how to show up when I’m ready again? And when I do miss out, friends might text, “We miss you! Wish you were here!” Those words feel heartfelt and also feel like an accusation.

Oh, how badly I miss getting dressed up for a black tie event and getting a little sloppy on the dance floor. Or laughing with friends and rolling myself into the door well past my bedtime. And that sort of fun will come back, I just can’t bring myself to indulge in fun at the expense of compromising on what my baby needs from me.

There’s no perfect solution to this. A wedding, for example, becomes less a celebration and more of a decision tree. Let’s imagine a kid-friendly wedding scenario, in a world where I’m brave enough to bring a baby to a wedding very well knowing it will keep me from enjoying myself:

Option 1: Ceremony Only, No Apologies
I could attend the ceremony with the baby, skip the reception entirely, send a nice gift, and go home to my 7pm life.

Option 2: The Irish Goodbye
I could take a chance on a sitter and go for the ceremony and cocktail hour. I could show my face, hug the couple, eat something, and leave by 7. No one who has had a baby will be surprised and anyone who hasn’t can be ignored.

Option 3: I Don’t Go
A wedding with an EBF baby at home is objectively hard. If going creates more stress than joy, doesn’t it make more sense to decline warmly? This is a short season, and there will be other weddings and events, as much as it sucks to miss the current milestones and celebrations for friends who showed up for us.

It’s not that I don’t want my social life back or that I don’t want date nights and dinners with friends, it’s just that I’m needed more at home right now, next to my baby. There will be so many more occasions and I’ll be there with bells on, dressed to the nines! But the thing is, she’s only this little for so long and she won’t always need me this way. This is easy to say and difficult to defend, but there will be more plans and parties, the closeness to my baby doesn’t come back in the same way ever again. I don’t expect this to make sense to everyone and I don’t need it to. I can admit I’ve been afraid of the judgement from friends for choosing to parent this way but my kid comes first.

This city will still be here when I come back to it. I hope dear friends won’t give up on me because of the chapter of life I’m in. The dinners, the weddings, the late nights—they’re patient and babies aren’t. This sweet, smooshy version of my daughter is already leaving me, I can feel it. She wants to be held a little less and falls to sleep a little more easily. If my world looks smaller right now, it’s because I’m hooking myself to something that won’t stay so demanding for long. These early days feel so important, I’d never forgive myself if I picked wrong. As she gets older, I’ll crawl back out well past my bedtime, I’ll cross the river for martinis and I’ll show up at weddings, ready to lose my shoes. In the meantime, I’ll send gifts, I’ll arrange flower deliveries and I’ll call and text to make it known that I wish I could, but I can’t right now.

So please believe me when I say I want to be there, but don’t invite me to things. Or do, but understand that no is not a referendum on my happiness. It’s just where I am right now and I’m very happy at home with my baby, cheering for the life milestones from afar, big and small, with all the extra love I have to give. You can have my husband, he’s the life of the party anyway, I’m just the arm candy. Just please have him home by morning so he can hold us both too.

This stretch of early-parenting life will pass, and I’ll be sad when it does. I’ll be back out there doing things again, but for now, please forgive me for staying curled up next to my baby.