How do we divide up our friends?

I am not referring to distributing the plundering of shared friendships and acquaintances after a break up. What I am talking about is the separate pockets you start using to categorize friends when your life circumstances change --namely, when you have children.

Specialization occurs, as if talking about division of labor. This is not about a self-serving maneuver to align certain people to certain needs –although there may actually be something of that. What I really mean is that when you foresee that children will be the topic you feel the need to protect those who are in a different phase of their lives to spare them the suffering. Protecting may actually imply not including them in a particular get-together when they will be outnumbered. Because what can be fascinating for parents and keep them talking for hours will be easily summarized for the rest of humankind with a quick headline such as: “fact-is-my-child-is-being-potty-trained.” Period.

This is the reason why I believe it is many of us who when thinking of a social gathering (yes, meeting up for coffee is a social gathering) consider whether to go with or without the offspring, whether they will be the center of the conversation and, accordingly, who is target audience and who is not. And then, surely, since life goes beyond the offspring, there are many other circumstances when the more the merrier, and even some others when you are better off avoiding other parents in your situation to allow the interaction to flow freely so you can actually operate as something different than a parent, at least for a while.