I don’t know how to approach this at all.
Q:
My close friend has recently gotten sober and we’re all really happy for them. They said they were okay with being around us when we’re all drinking, but it definitely didn’t actually feel that way. It was...
Not meaning to be a party pooper but if it’s normal for your friendship group to have multiple drinks and then drive then maybe your sober friend has a point.
I do appreciate that there are different cultural norms around drink driving, but in the UK where I am it would be almost certainly illegal and absolutely the kind of thing your friend who loves you would try to stop you doing.
Yes!! I can’t help but react to that too as a European.
Ultimately I think that the sober friend is “in the right”, in so much as friends should want to support friends! I can’t imagine putting alcohol above my friends health? Like if someone wants to drink they can do it allll the other times they’re not with the sober friend. Go and watch basketball without being wasted?? it’s really not a massive sacrifice. I’ve never even thought to be drunk whilst watching live sports?
I think that the drinking friends have a somewhat troubled rlship to alcohol and should see what it feels like to just remove drinking from a few arenas of life.
L1. I don’t drink often and generally don’t feel the need to have a good time but my friends and I would still ask who is driving or something to that affect regardless if one was sober. It’s a fair question. Judgement or not DaD puts a lot of lives at risk. LWs friend may still be fresh in their sobriety to be able to hang in drinking situations or maybe they never will be able to but having a discussion, I think, is a good idea. Without either side making judgements. Empathy and grace go a long way. Making space for sobriety, other than “dry january” is not the end of the world.
L2. Buying baby clothes is a fashion addiction. There are so many cute and stylish things for little people your brain can go mush. That being said there’s always going to be someone who buys what they think is cute and *not* what you asked for. I see no reason to not exchange for something else in a different size. Babies/children grow so fast. If someone gets upset tell them you exchanged it for something baby didn’t have or more diapers. I do feel like a tutu is a must for any gender though :D
Q1 – I loved this question and responses because it’s just so human! such a human challenge!
The change of mind of being ok being around drinking reminds me of how when queers especially go through breakups it’s often like “and we’ll be friends!” and we often genuinely mean it when we say it — but actually we need a break before we can be friends. you’ve been in a throuple with alcohol and this friend, and this friend has broken up with alcohol, and now they have opinions about your relationship with alcohol (and are leaning into passive aggressive controlling behaviors which, while totally understandable, are not fair or helpful.)
one thing I’ve learned and loved from sober friends who are intentionally sober and are not just like oh-I-don’t-really-like-alcohol-and-it-messes-with-my-medication sober is that you do really have to be deliberate in crafting fun hang outs. Alcohol can make any medium fun thing into a quite fun thing so you get used to not having to make quite fun plans. For these friends, it’s often art projects but competitive activities/outdoorsy stuff/volunteering can also work. Personally, my favorite easy sober hangouts are volunteering at a park clean up or going to a farmer’s market, but I also love an elaborate art project.
Subtracting alcohol from an activity where alcohol is the thing that makes it quite fun and then having to pretend you’re having just as much fun sober as you would be when drinking is not a good plan. Planning fun sober hangouts is a good plan — even if they might take more work than just buying tickets for something or showing up at a restaurant. (Being deliberate about doing this stuff during the day rather than at night also can help.)
Many things can be true at once — this friendship is important and worth maintaining and also newly sober friend needs sober friends. The need for sober friends is not about the goodness of your friendship, but it’s genuinely just that newly sober people really benefit from having friends who really get it. (Just wanted to say that explicitly because I’ve seen people say it’s not fair to expect sober friend to make other sober friends — whether or not it’s fair it’s quite simply beneficial in the same way late diagnosed autistic people benefit from making autistic friends even while they can also love their longstanding friendships with allistic people etc etc.)
and re: letter writer’s own relationship with alcohol — you are allowed to have a fucked up relationship with alcohol. (I do!) there is no moral obligation to not use substances that make you feel good, AND also so many of us benefit from bringing more intentionality to our engagement with substances and getting a chance to really notice both the positive and negative effects and make more clear eyed choices rather than just using habitually. but the cool thing about being an adult is that your choices are yours — not your friend’s and certainly not random internet commenters who know two paragraphs about your life.
good luck and I’m rooting for your friendship and for your friend’s sobriety <3 <3
Q2: this is the kind of thing I felt conflicted over before my first child was born, and now 8 years into parenting 2 kids, I just want to reassure you that there is no single “correct” answer here… you can exchange/return, have them wear once to send a photo to gift giver and then donate (we donated lots of clothes to a local refugee and immigrant resettlement nonprofit that was always looking for lightly used baby/children’s items), or as Nico suggested—-mix it up. Also in a couple of years your child will express their own preferences and your perfectly calibrated non-gendered ideals will be challenged in new ways. Currently my 5 yo boy happily wears his older sister’s hand-me-down purple & pink rain boots, pink water bottle, fitted leggings, etc. because he is happy to use these items that she picked out (in spite of us previously having her don neutrals and clothes from the “boys” and “girls” sections both). Plus people will likely make assumptions about your baby and their gender and what it means even if you dress them seemingly neutrally! I guess my point is this is not a hill to die on. And when they tell your basically bald 2 year old girl “he’s so handsome” you too can say “yes, she is”
I was going to say this! It sounds like the letter writer cares a lot about their kid getting to have agency over their gender.
As a newborn it doesn’t really matter, but part of supporting a kid to feel agency over their own gender means allowing them to self-select into super gendered clothing if that’s what ends up feeling right to them when they’re old enough to choose…I have more than one set of queer friends who are parents whose kids are SUPER into princess/high femme-y stuff despite their best efforts to give them lots of options lol. One of those kids is a trans girl! So the openness was for the best, but I think a lot of us unconsciously hope our kids will pop out as, like, crunchy granola lesbians when they really might actually end up being the straightest of straight girls (or boys) :’) Gotta love them anyway lol!
And one other thought: Depending on where your kid goes with their gender in the future, they might actually end up being grateful for photos of themselves as a baby in super girly or super boyish clothes. Might as well give them options now! Photograph them in everything, even if just at home!!
Yep to both of the above! We were lucky enough to have hand-me-downs to dress our kid for the entirety of her first three years, and while a lot of those clothes were somewhere in the neutral part of the spectrum, there were also some super “girly” (bows, ruffles, etc.) and “masculine” (football stuff) items in the mix. We passed on the things that were just too much—for me, that was often those “cute” (barf) slogans like “daddy’s little girl” or “girl’s clothes” that sacrificed comfort/function for aesthetics, but ymmv—and then dressed her in everything else. Like herekitty said, we have no idea what our kid’s preferred gender presentation/clothing will be in the future, but no matter how it turns out, at least some of her baby pics will match!
Q2: Similar to what others have said, I don’t think there’s any way to truly avoid this with how gendered (especially baby) clothes are. We didn’t find out the sex of our baby before she was born, so people couldn’t buy her gendered stuff, but what this translated to was them mostly buying boy coded stuff because that’s what they read as “neutral.” And once she was here, it’s been so many girl coded clothes. While none of that particularly bothers me, there have been other things people have bought that I just refuse to use (whoever invented snap pjs can take a long walk off a short pier). When something has been gifted and I feel the person wants strongly to see my kiddo in it, I’ll often put it on, take a picture to send to the person, and then pass it along if I don’t like it or want to deal with it. There are so many people out there who have been happy to take the clothes off my hands. Something that has helped me a lot when I’m doing something as a parent that I think others in my life won’t like or agree with is a line my therapist gave me “we’re doing what’s right for our family.” I repeat it to myself often. You get to decide what is right for your family. Including clothes! Best of luck with navigating the mindfuck that is being a parent. You got this!