My best friend is pregnant. I’m happy for her but not good with babies. How can I be supportive?

Children vary just like the rest of us, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. You don’t know you’re bad with this baby yet, because you don’t know them yet

My best friend is having her first child. I am so happy for her and I know she’s going to be a stellar parent. However, I am not good with babies and have issues I need to work on from being told and not asked to babysit a lot as a teenager. I don’t know how to respond without coming off as a total jerk if she ever asks me and my fiance to babysit.

What can I do to still be a supportive friend and how do I clear the air on the matter?

Eleanor says: It sounds as if you have a bit of trepidation about this child’s arrival into your lives. As though it may repeat the same pattern. Being told and not asked that you’re expected to help; maybe even an expectation you’ll automatically and preternaturally love to be around kids.

But that imposing pattern from your adolescence hasn’t actually repeated yet. Your friend hasn’t asked you to babysit yet. We don’t know yet whether she will.

And you don’t know yet that you’re “bad” with this kid. I know what you mean; there’s an ease that some people seem to have with voices or games or knowing how to hold an infant. But kids are ultimately people. Small people, pre-people, but people. Especially as they grow older, even by a few months, there can be as much variation between babies as there is between the rest of us. This brand new person won’t be just “a child” any more than you’re just “an adult”. They’ll be a particular person who you’ll grow to know and have a relationship with. They may be curious or quiet or rambunctious or witty or take delight in small things or have stern notions about how things should be done. They may love books or socks or cats or stars. You don’t know you’re bad with them yet because you don’t know them yet.

So we don’t actually know that the two things you’re worried about will come true. It’s all unwritten. Just like this kid.

Sometimes the fear of the pattern repeating is exactly what makes the pattern repeat. We shape ourselves against a particular possibility, and by so carefully outlining it in negative space, we leave little choice but for reality to rush in like water and assume exactly the shape we guarded against.

If you’re steeled against the possibility that you’ll feel trespassed on, or that you won’t feel natural with this baby, you may approach this new chapter of your lives from a place that begets what it’s designed to protect against.

You asked how you could be supportive. One way could be to approach what comes next – her kid – with curiosity and openness. Leave the space wide and see what fills it.

Another could be to become your friend’s anchor to the part of her life that came before she was a parent. It’s thrilling for a new parent to share a new baby with their friends. But – as a girlfriend of mine once said to me – everybody’s going to come to see the baby and I want at least one person to come to see me. Your friend may find it really welcome to have at least one relationship that isn’t suddenly revolving around the baby. You could lean into that. If you don’t feel inclined to coochy-coo, you could think of yourself as her ally in finding little tethers to life outside the baby.

Children, and our relationships with them, are full of possibility. You don’t yet know how this one will unfold.