yesterday i emailed one of my oldest friends. we haven’t
been in touch lately. so the first email i sent just said, “hi.” in response
she wrote, “hi to you too. you need a wikipedia page.”
i sent a very silly reply and then she appeared on instant
messenger. “wow. you haven’t been online in years,” she started. of course i
have been, but i've not been using IM. “you’re nutty,” she
quipped. “that email you sent was nutty. like you have come out of
hibernation.”
and then it occurred to me that she was right. since the
girl was born i’ve not really been myself. my spark, my playful side has been
in a long, deep sleep. there are piles of reasons—the book before the baby, the
baby, the book after the baby, the school during the book after the baby, the husband’s
last depressive episode after the baby, the fear of another depressive
episode, financial struggles….each of them makes enough of a case for
hibernation. combine them, and frankly, i think it’s a miracle i get up every
morning to do it all again.
you know what else? and this is going to sound especially
crazy because looking at it all from a birds-eye view it makes no sense, but i
have been bored. bored out of my gourd. until recently there has been nothing
fun and lighthearted happening. nothing remotely bacchanalian or indulgent. no
decadent dinners or tra-la-las through the park. just boring, boring. boring. get up, feed the
troops, dress the troops, yell cajole everyone out the door, drive to school, work,
drive home, clean, cook, do some laundry, work, work, work, work, throw in
eighty million trips to the grocery store, sleep a tiny bit, get up and do it
again. i was dying a little at a time. the little was so tiny that i didn’t
notice until it was a great, huge, heaping pile of dying staring me right in
the face. like a big dog poo on the living room rug on a saturday morning.
and now that i’m thinking about it, that’s not even true,
really.
i honestly didn’t notice until i started coming back to
life. and that bit happened when i found myself feeling a bona fide connection
to some friends. i know, that sounds nutty. but think about it. when do we, as
parents, as married people, get the time to bond with other people the way we
might have when we were younger and single. almost never, that’s when. either
the husbands don’t like each other or the wives want to claw each other’s eyes
out or the husband of one couple can’t stand to be in the same room with the
wife of the other. it just rarely gels in a way that satisfies everyone. i
mean, don’t get me wrong, i’ve had acquaintances who have filled the social
need, but for the most part (with the exception of my friend S), it just falls
flat. there’s nothing of substance there. everyone seems so preoccupied with
impressing everyone else, which is not the way i have ever lived my life. (just
ask my parents.) and frankly, it bores the crap out of me.
so now we have these great friends, who were friends before,
but suddenly became better friends, and we hang out every friday night (although
this week’s been switched to saturday, which is today! yay!) have some dinner and
drink some smoking loon or some bitch and laugh our heads off. B and i work on
jigsaw puzzles (this part sounds really stupid, but it was spontaneous—one day
we had a puzzle out on the kitchen table that i was working on with the boy and
B started doing it, then i sat down with him and worked on it too. now it’s a *thing.*
we’re on our second 1000 piece puzzle. puzzling whilst drunk is slow-going!). His
wife and J make cracks about how crazy we are. he and i challenge each other
and engage in name-calling and the kind of banter that is only comfortable with
a good friend, because otherwise? it would just be scary. some other peeps came
by one night and actually thought B and i were related. that should tell you
everything you need to know. by nine o’clock all the kids have passed out on the couch or the floor.
i look forward to friday night. it’s not more of the same
old same old, it’s real and safe. sometimes, during the week, N will stop here and have lunch with me because she works less than a
mile away. the other day i was driving the girl around for a nap and called N
who said B had asked her to bring him coffee but she couldn’t because her lunch
break was just ending, so i dropped one off for him. sometimes B will bring the
boy home from school or i’ll bring their boy home with us. they get angry on
our behalf and vice versa. we take care of each other and it’s easy. at this
point, i have a hard time remembering how we even managed to survive before
they came along. i really hope they stick around.
