Parenthood (or lack thereof) and fitting in with other women

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So at my age, I'm still unmarried, single, no kids. I work around a bunch of women who have boyfriends, husbands, and children, some of them older and some of them around my age. I feel so out of place around them because connecting over raising children seems like a big thing for them.

Does anyone else go through this? I don't particularly want to start a family but it still feels strange.

I can relate, talking about their children is the standard small talk for all the parents in my workplace ... The cute and difficult things they do, how to approach parenting difficulties etc.
I can't join in, I don't have that commonality they bond over. The lifestyle gap between women in my age group and mine seems to just widen over time.

Yeah. I feel like that. I'm 35. Never been in a relationship. No kids. I don't feel a connection to other women my age.

I'm 52, never married, never had children. While I can talk very well now on most topics, I feel left out when this topic comes up. Life passed me by in that regard.

If it helps, I have a son and I still don't fit in with other parents. There's never been any kind of connection with them.

I think I have figured out why it is bothering me so much lately, on top of not being able to relate to the conversations... I can't say I'm tired/stressed etc without it being invalidated by the 'let me tell you about tiredness' statements.
All things being relative... I had enough of it today, and pointed out how blessed they were to have their own wonderful family who would be there for them in later life.

Unmarried, single and no kids here. I don't want to get married and have children, either. It all seems a bit choreographed; the perfect dream we must all pursue, to obtain personal fulfillment! My understanding is if you can't feel reasonably successful and happy in yourself to begin with, adding a partner and offspring to the formula won't make it any easier to solve.
Even on my best days I struggle to bond with women, far more so than men. Women feel more threatening socially and should they make it known they are parents as well, the gulf between us and any common ground we might have seems too much to overcome.

At my age, it's not too strange to not have kids, but I've never dated and when that fact comes up people act like they're in the presence of a leper. I do want a relationship one day, but from what I've seen from my friends, being in a romantic relationship with someone requires a lot of time that I just don't have right now in college. Plus, all the guys I'm attracted to are gay. Because most "girl talk" is about dating, I usually don't hang out with all-girl groups that often, and if I do it's with other geeks so we can talk about things that are actually interesting.

A lot of my friends are older than me and are getting married and having kids already, and I feel like I'm left in the dust when we have conversations because they'll start talking about raising children and I'll just sort of half-listen. Although, one of my friend's children is autistic so I've been helping her get an autistic person's perspective on things.

I would never want to have kids of my own because of the pain of childbirth and with how important sleep is for my mental health, but I do plan on fostering older children later when/if I'm married.

It's a bit the other way with me - my female friends that I go out with sometimes don't have children, don't want them or think 'maybe just before 40, I still have time'. I already feel like train wreck after a marriage and divorce and obviously parenting takes up so much time, so I feel like I don't fit in with those girls. Not a massive problem, they are still happy to see me and like doing something together with me, we just have different life stories. I can't fit in with NT motherly crowd, that's for sure - boring, boring, obsessed with cupcakes and musical potties, kiddie parties (horror), TV adverts, chicken pox parties I don't even want to pretend I'm interested.

I am married, and I have a whole boatload of children.

And I STILL don't fit in with other women.

They do things radically differently from the way I do them (and I see how it's screwing up their life and causing a lot of their problems because I have a different perspective, and can't resist the urge to offer very kind advice, and wish they would do the same for me, because I'm sure they see things I don't because they have such a different perspective, but that's not how it works).

They're worried about being thin enough, tidy enough, pretty enough, OMG what other people think. I am not, and wouldn't be if I were at a point in my life to have the time and energy to dedicate to that.

I want to gripe about stuff kids do and laugh about stuff kids do and talk about husbands. Yes. But not the same way they do.

I also want to talk about neuroscience and social issues and religion (and I don't mean what Suzy McPerfectPants did at church last Sunday and how hot the pastor is and why the Godless Muslims will all burn in Hell-- I mean like metaphysical stuff, like the meaning of the Bible and the nature of God and whether magick and miracles are the same thing) and politics and canning and mental health and...

Honestly, most of the people my age that I relate to are childless, and the majority of those individuals are men. The women my age that I can relate to at all are struggling with addiction or mental health or alphabet soup kids or all three. And most of the women that I can actually relate to IRL are postmenopausal. My "mom-friends" have osteoarthritis and COPD and cataracts, and some of them have died of old age.

Same thing here.

This is something I've struggled with for many years. I never fit in with those that wanted kids, and as time passed, more and more of the women in my life got married, had kids, and only seemed to focus on them. I've never been interested in having kids myself, and others were always quick to point out how strange I was for that. I was even pressured by friends, family and co-workers into having kids, even though I was never interested. I found that it caused a huge feeling of disparity when working with women my age, back in my mid to late thirties, as all they talked about was parenting, and I had nothing to talk about with them. It felt as if I was being deliberately left out and shunned because I didn't have a child.

I hit menopause early, at 41, so I am not 'off the hook' for procreation, and I am so relieved about that. Finally I can say 'menopause' to anyone who even hints at me having kids now.

I can relate to the strange feeling you describe, being one of the two women at my workplace who don’t have children. Still, I don’t think it would make any difference if I had children (or if the others didn’t), because settling down to family life is just one of the aspects in which we are different from each other: If it’s not about parenting, it’s about food, if it’s not about food, it’s about gardening, TV shows, fashion items, other people.

My colleagues are pretty liberal, though, and it didn’t take long until they stopped pestering me about my social/family life. I also observed that when I take a chance and just start a topic that is interesting to me (or crack a joke on my level, which doesn’t function for everybody ), there are always some individuals that go along and that have secretly been bored by topics like parenting, food, and gardening.

Has this been a problem for anyone with a close friend? For example, someone who you were very close to before they had kids and now things have changed?