Do most of your friends have children or not?

[SplashingPuddle]

Most of our friends who we socialize with are lesbians ranging in age from their 20s to 80s.  I love our friends for their depth of life experience, yet very few have the experience of having children.  Of course this is amazing because when they visit they have so much energy for our daughter.  Straight friends with children sit on the couch.  Lesbian friends give piggy back rides, spin in circles, and play countless games.  It is incredible and my daughter has so many aunties.

I am wondering how it is for other LGBTQ parents?  Do you connect more with straight parents or LGBTQ non-parents? Or are you fortunate to have LGBTQ parenting friends?  

[seraf]

We live in the sticks where queers are few and far between. Most of our local friends are straight parents. Most of DPs college friends, straight and queer alike, seem to be having a baby boom but we only see them when we travel.

[prettyisa]

none of our queer friends from before we started TTC have (or seem to be on the path to having) kids. Most of our straight friends who live in other places have kids, but like Seraf said, we almost never see them. We are lucky to be living in a place with lots of queer families, though, and through this board and talking to people with TTC blogs we've made a good group of awesome queer parent friends, which has been great. Our daughter's a little young to start making her own friends yet, but I expect when she does we'll start hanging out with more straight parents, too--I think it would be nice to add more variety to the types of families our kid gets used to seeing.

[pokeyAC]

None of our local friends have children, and our families live far away so we don't get to see those kids often.  I have met some other queer folks through this forum who are having kids and made new friends.  Our children will be around the same age.  My lesbian friends are very excited.  They have offered to babysit and one couple wants to have a playroom in their house for us and other friends who are having a baby around the same time.  That couple has done some foster parenting of a teen and may do so again in the future, and they are teachers so they have lots of experience with kids.  I wish more of our friends were in the same boat so we could share that but it's ok.  I'm sure we will make lots of new parent friends as time goes on.  I think it might be more important to find parent friends who you have other things in common with or folks who have similar parenting styles rather than just looking for queer families.  I live in the Bay Area though so finding queer families shouldn't be too hard.

[lisedea]

Like Seraf, we live in the middle of nowhere in the midwest....and we are pretty much the token lesbian couple of our town. Some of our straight friends have children but we tend to hang out with an older crowd--and their children are already grown.

[outdoorsy]

We have connected with other queer parents on a local meetup group, but we haven't actually met them yet because we're still preggo. It remains to be seen whether we will actually have anything in common with them besides being LGBT parents. Our existing friends are both straight and lesbian, but the lesbian ones tend not to have kids.

[carmen358]

None of our close friends (pre DD) have kids or are planning to. I've reconnected with a couple of old acquaintances who have kids and I've made new friends with kids :) All straight women. We meet up once in a blue moon with a queer family group but nothing consistent.

[DesertSunsets]

We have a handful of friends who are lesbian couples, but not a one of them have kids or are TTC.  They all say they're going to, but they've been saying that for years and nothing has come of it.  We'd hoped that maybe seeing us get pregnant and have a baby would encourage them to get moving, since they're all older than us, but no.  None of our straight friends really have kids, either.  

One of my best friends from high school and his fiancee got pregnant the exact same time as us, and their son was born eight days before our DD, so we see them pretty frequently. (And they're a part of the group I'll mention below!) 

Through the birth center (Centering classes and Baby Group), we met a group of five other families who all have babies 6 months and younger, and all of us are on our first child.  This group has been the most incredible, wondrous group.  I never dreamed we'd have this many families that we'd be so close with, so soon after Ever's birth.  But it's amazing.  Everyone is a hetero couple except us, and nobody ever batted an eye about fitting our family into the group.  We get together as often as we can, in any combination of people.  Recently, DW and I had onesies printed for all the babies with "2012 Dragon Babies" on the front and the baby's last name and date of birth on the back, like team jerseys.  There's a kind of support among new parents that doesn't exist anywhere else.  Even our most well-meaning friends without kids don't know what it is to have a new baby, and all these people do.  We love them all so much.

Now, DD is going to the same daycare as another baby in the group and several moms work on campus and our lives are really integrating.  What a gift.  But we didn't find any of them (except my friend from 7th grade, lol) until after Ev. 

4 of the 6 at a movie night! 

5 of the 6 in their new onesies!

[granite]

I have two close friends who each had babies this past September, but most are childless, with about half not planning to ever have any, and the other half waiting for the right time.  My core social group is almost all straight folks, and my main involvement in the local queer scene is organizing radical queer dance parties... And sometimes I feel really alienated from both when I'm fixating on TTC, because even the best intentioned straight friends don't get some of what I'm dealing with, and too many of the queers I know are just all about dancing until 4 a.m.!

Last week, we had dinner with old friends who are a lesbian couple in their 40s with an 8 year old son, conceived from donor sperm at the same clinic we're using. It was fantastic to hear their stories, and really reinforced for me how grateful I am to have you all on here to share with! They said that they lost most of their queer friends, all of whom are/were childless, when they had their kid... But that they made lots of new friends thanks to their new and ever-changing life as parents. It made me feel pretty optimistic.

[scorpioma]

The majority of my close friends have babies, with the exception of people in my law school, who are not there yet (I am a tad older than most there, at 28).

There are MANY queer couples here have babies by donor sperm, a few by adoption (I live in Ann Arbor, MI- a lesbian haven).

DP's professors actually had the experience of one partner carrying the other's egg. The dream!

It makes me feel a little insane at times, actually, how many people have babies here, as I am still TTC #1!

We do not connect very well with straight friends with kids, yet. We are in the TTC process and sometimes find it hard to relate to their experiences. But we love being with our queer friends talking about the ins & outs of insemination!