Photo: Sergii Sobolevskyi/ Shutterstock
You used to go out all night, and now you're up all night. Here's what else has changed.
By Elizabeth Broadbent — Last updated on Apr 06, 2023
Once, you spent your Friday night drinking and partying. You slept until 2 PM, then woke up and did it again. At every bar, you posted duckface girlfriend pictures on social media.
You had drinking friends, intellectual friends, and friends who you called at 4 AM when your boyfriend broke up with you and you just had to talk to someone.
And then you had kids.
Suddenly, your Friday nights were devoted to spit-up and night wakings. Your drinking friends faded away. And your sense of grossness ... well, let's just say it changed.
Here are 8 things that are never, eve the same once you have kids:
1. Your late nights out
Pre-kids: late night is 5 AM.
Post-kids: late night is 9 PM.
You used to party until the sun came up. Now, your party habits are tied to a small, screaming person with his own agenda. If you're lucky, you can cart him to a restaurant and pray he'll sleep. But you've got to be home for his bedtime. Because if you miss bedtime, God help you.
2. Your night when the clock strikes midnight
Pre-kids: Midnight means partying.
Post-kids: Midnight means desperation.
Before you had kids, you might just hit the club around midnight. After kids, if you see midnight, you're seeing misery. Midnight means the baby's still awake, and you're desperately trying to get him to sleep.
You're rocking. You're singing. You're bouncing on a yoga ball. Your makeup's smeared, not perfect, and the only dancing you're doing is some kind of desperate sway. Midnight is a bad, bad thing.
3. Your friends
Pre-kids: Friends are for drinking.
Post-kids: Friends are for playdates.
You used to spend all your friend time with a beer in your hand. You drank. You talked. You danced. You hauled each other into cabs. Forget those friends.
Now, your only friendships involve parents with similarly-aged children. You don't need someone to hold your head while you puke; you have to have someone to answer your frantic questions about infant Tylenol dosage.
Your friends bond over breastfeeding, baby milestones, and the fact that they never go out drinking anymore.
4. Your social media accounts
Pre-kids: social media shares include duckfaces and political causes.
Post-kids: social media shares include the baby.
Maybe you used to be the person with the baby-block app. Now everyone's using the baby-block app on you, because to you social media is a vehicle for cute baby pics. The baby is eating. The baby sleeping. The baby doing various baby things.
Your mom loves this. Everyone else is totally bored. Your political cause posts have been replaced by articles loudly espousing your chosen parenting philosophy. Only your parent-friends care.
5. Your threshold for all things "yuck"
Pre-kids: You had a low grossness threshold.
Post-kids: Nothing phases you.
Before, the idea of someone else's urine grossed you out. Now, you touch it without thinking. Since you've had kids, you can catch someone's vomit in your hands without freaking.
Blood, vomit, feces — none of these will bother you, as long as it comes from your kid. New moms have to have some kind of hormones that make them impervious to all human bodily fluids.
6. Your views on poop
Pre-kids: Poop was disgusting.
Post-kids: You spend your time scrutinizing another human’s feces.
In your kid-less life, your only encounter with poop was joking about upper deckers, which was only funny because of its total and utter grossness. Now, you have a baby. Babies poop.
And since babies can't talk, and what goes in must come out, it's your job to spend time examining the baby's every bowel movement. You obsess over the color. You worry over the quantity. You worry about the texture. Poop is important. Your former self is shuddering.
7. Your level of cleanliness
Pre-kids: Clean meant Martha Stewart.
Post-kids: Clean means "not sticky."
You used to have time to clean — like really, seriously, deep clean. Then again, there was only one of you making the mess. Now you have you, possibly a partner, and one or more children.
Kids scatter toys. They draw on the walls. They exude a general stickiness; they drop food everywhere (dogs can help this situation).
You don't have time to scrub the floor on your hands and knees or arrange precious glass objects on end tables. Your end tables are devoted entirely to unbreakables, and you've bought stock in magic erasers.
8. Your idea of going out to eat
Pre-kids: Restaurants were no big deal.
Post-kids: Restaurants are a hella big deal.
Before kids, you ate out all the time. You picked a restaurant based on arbitrary criteria (prestige, proximity) and ate. You spent a leisurely time ordering from menus, then ate slowly. Perhaps you had dessert.
Now, with kids, a restaurant takes a battle plan akin to D-Day. You need to time it around naps, or at least around good moods. You have to cart along toys, or food if the baby's young enough.
You need high chairs and kids' menus, and then you have to bolt your meal because Junior's melting down. No dessert for you; you're stalking the waitress for the check and leaving a giant tip to make up for the circular region of thrown food.
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Elizabeth Broadbent is a writer and regular contributor to Scary Mommy. Her work has appeared on Today Show Parents, Babble, xoJane, Mamapedia, and Time Magazine Ideas.