What would you do?
Hey, so I am pregnant and I’m also a single mom of a 15 month old who has been very challenging recently for me. He wines and has tantrums and is full of big feelings. Normally, I have a lot of patience but as I’m pregnant, he is really spread thin and I’m exhausted and I really need help. I have a friend who lives about a 30 minute drive away. She’s been a friend for 20 years. She is older than me. Around six years old and has grown children. When my baby was an infant she invited me to her house on Saturdays so she could hold the baby while I slept. Well then it felt like she was being very helpful, I now have the suspicion that she was doing it just to hold the cute baby. As I was doing the work of driving to her house with a newborn, which was very stressful. She stopped doing it once my baby got mobile and would get into things. It has become very resistant to the idea of helping. I even asked her if she would be able to watch my baby what I went to the hospital to give birth and she said it would be too much for her. She knows that I don’t have any parents or any support System. I asked if she could take him overnight just once so I could sleep when he was going through her sleep regression and was up at all hours at night. And she said that would be too much. Basically I haven’t seen her in months and she invited me recently to dinner at her house. It’s always at her house. She has been to my house once and I have lived here for a year. Dinner at her house means completely ruining bedtime and making for a really difficult night for me as he will fall asleep on the drive home and then be up for hours before going back to bed again. Though I know if I decline going to her house, they aren’t going to come to my house. I want to just say no I don’t want to make that effort, but if I decline all the time, I won’t ever have any community at all. And I really feel the need to have people in my life right now because I’m really struggling a lot. I’m crying as I write this. This is so fucking hard. What would you do? Please don’t tell me she’s not a friend etc. because she really is that. I know that’s just her limit that she can’t help with my toddler. But I don’t know what to do about my feeling of resentment right now.
