OK But My Childfree Friends Send The Dankest Memes

“The beacon is lit. Gondor calls for aid.” Beneath the caption, a McDonald’s sign is on fire. A dude is making a weird face while crushing a watermelon with his chin. "I am straight up not havin’ a baja blast." A band sings "suckin’ on chili dogs" ad infinitum.

It’s not a fever dream, but a sampling of memes some of my oldest friends have sent me recently on Instagram. Sending a meme is the modern day equivalent to picking up a trinket at the store that reminds you of your friend. When I receive one, it’s an instantaneous reminder that I’m known and that my friends, though we don’t see each other as often as we’d like, remember the things that make me, me.

Stephanie, a neighbor-turned-close-friend, knows how much I love Lord of the Rings. Jarod, who I've known since I was 12, is a consistent source of dark humor memes about our poor mental health. Jackson, who I met in high school, sends the weirdest things from young guy Instagram, a corner of the internet I would never see without him. Joanna was my college roommate. She sends a steady stream of funny animal videos and weird humor that’s just how our brains work (see: chili dogs).

And each time I get one of these little trinkets that speaks to different parts of my Self, I’m reminded how one-dimensional my own algorithm is. My child-free friends bring their riches to my DMs, but it's hard for me to reciprocate, because my internet looks nothing like theirs. According to the algo, I'm one simple thing: a mother.

From the moment my algorithm clocked I was pregnant, the slapstick, Vine-style humor evaporated from my FYP. So too did content from musicians and artists I love. Instead, I’m constantly fed Tik Toks about who’s the asshole in a kids’ birthday party drama, “Sunday resets” and “closing shifts,” and all the baby care hacks from so-called experts who use social media to sell you their $10 PDFs.

There are some great parenting memes, yes — my husband and I constantly volley these back and forth. “You would totally do this,” we say, or “omg this is so Cooper.” His algorithm knows he's a parent too, though it's irritatingly obvious that the advice, how-to, mental-load-bearing videos are funneled only into my feed. When a friend sends me another Lord of the Rings meme, I mentally lament how I never see these things on my own feed anymore. My internet just assumes I no longer care, when frankly, I could use the laugh more than ever.

To insinuate that there’s an uncrossable divide between parents and non-parents — that they simply can’t understand one another anymore — implies a profound lack of empathy and imagination.

If you didn't have friends in the real world and went only by online discourse, you might think being child-free means you have an inherent disinterest in the lives of friends who are parents, and a distaste for the children that ruined a perfectly good thing. To insinuate that there’s an uncrossable divide between parents and non-parents — that they simply can’t understand one another any more — implies a profound lack of empathy and imagination.

This has blessedly not been my experience. Sure, my child-free friends have never jockeyed for a spot in the fairly priced swim school closest to their neighborhood, but we’ve all tried to nab concert tickets before they’re gone. It’s not a foreign sensation, and like normal human beings, and good friends, they can place themselves back in it for a moment to commiserate.

My mom algorithm was probably intended to meet my needs better than my old one, and to be fair, I gobbled it up. But while struggling to get my son to sleep, the social media advice barrage wrecked my confidence as a new mom while ratcheting up the anxiety and overwhelm. And in the midst of a spiral, it was actually my friends without kids who made me feel better. I didn't want to talk to my mom friends about our efforts to get more sleep — I didn’t want their advice (I’d already tried it) or their reassurance (easy for them to say it’ll get better — when?). But when my friends without children asked how I was, I was honest: I’m exhausted. The baby still wakes up three times a night. And it was them who gave me what I really needed: “Dude, that sucks. I’m sorry.” Straight up validation, on the rocks, no ifs, ands, or buts. It did suck, and that’s all there was to it.

Becoming a mom has been the most transformative experience of my life, but there were people who knew me before that, during all the other life-changing events that coalesce into a life. They knew me deeply before my child, and they know me now. They do not care whether or not I breastfed or if my kid is potty-trained yet. They are aware of how much I have changed, and also, how much I haven’t. In the first year of my son’s life, their friendship anchored me in a simple truth: not everything changed the day I gave birth.