My best friend decided we can no longer be friends and I truly think its because of her kids.
I'll start this off by saying I was naive and ignored so many signs. I used to come on this sub and tell people that people with kids as friends aren't all bad and used my (ex) best friend as an example.
I am sorry. I was terribly wrong amd I learned a really hard lesson from this.
I was best friends with this woman, whom I met in my 30s. We were very different from each other but I liked that and embraced learning a new perspective from the eyes of someone else. When we first met she had 2 younger kids and 4 older ones that could care for themselves. She then got pregnant with the 7th kid. Something drastically changed. Before she would find time for just her and me. We could hang out and go places together without kids but then once she had the 7th, she would never go anywhere without that one young kid. I dealt with it for a long time and just assumed she needed to be around to help the little one. Then they got a bit older and it was still going on. Then she got a boyfriend, she is married and they are ok with that dynamic and I supported that.
She would put the bf over me and our time any chance she got. At first, I was trying to be understanding still. Then she would ditch me, show up multiple hours late for plans we had made, or not show at all. When I brought it up to her, she cried liked a 2 year old, made it all about herself and how she's the victim and told me her relationship with her new bf was not the same as her and my relationship, that her love for her bf was much stronger than our friendship. This really hurt me, and my therapist said my only two options were 1. reevaluate the friendship to the terms of how my friend wants it and deal, or 2. end the friendship that wasnt doing anything for me anymore. I decided to continue the friendship because I dont have many girl friends and really wanted this to work.
After that day I thought this could still work, I just needed to stop being so needy in the friendship.
So I still tried. Which meant anytime we hung out, I would have to be around all 7 of her kids all of the time. I hated it. I loved her so much but I hated being around her kids and never getting time alone with her. It was like I wasn't worth her time. I felt sad and lonely in the friendship even with all of these people around me the entire time. I even tried to embrace it and took her 19 yo daughter on as my apprentice at work. We got along fine but her daughter was a gen z kid and terrible with social skills, which is needed in my profession. I worked with her daughter for a year and 4 months before I fired her for being lazy, having no social skills, and not showing up. The moment I fired the daughter, my friend came at me harshly..told me her kid has so much talent (she did not) and that she was so proud of her for going through such a hard life (which she did to her daughter by being in a weird cult when she was younger).
I told her thats fine but her daughter just wasn't cut out for the job and she needed to find what she wanted to do in life instead of wasting my time teaching her things her mom should have already taught her. Before this, we made a pact on how if it didnt work out and I fired her daughter we would still be friends. She agreed completely and said she knew how to keep things separate. Well guess what? That wasn't the case. She sent me a long winded text stating our friendship was not one she wanted to continue anymore because Im too strong headed for her and "intense". She's more of a rainbows and butterflies kinda woman and always has the mindset of an innocent uneducated child. I threw it off like she was positive and saw the world in a different light than I did. I sad and heartbroken my friend of 7 years decided to drop me as soon as I fired her kid.
Moral of the story, people with kids will never be your best friend. They will never choose you first. They will never have respect for your time or feelings and I should have listened to all of the stories I read on here. But I had my rose colored glassed on and couldn't see. I'm sorry I didnt listen. You were all right.
TLDR: my best friend dropped me after I fired her daughter from an apprenticeship and I thought she was different from the rest. She was not.