The Right Words

The other night, I could not sleep. When exhaustion drives you to bed by 9:30 but you're awake again by 11, you know it's going to be a bad night. And it was. Apparently it was a bad night for my husband too...maybe because I was tossing and turning relentlessly? He got up before me, around 3, I think. I stayed in bed until 4 and surrendered to the inevitable. That's how we found ourselves huddled by the woodstove around 4:15 in the morning talking about how to negotiate our lives, juggle the labor, help our family and each other survive this upcoming transition.

In the midst of this conversation, he started playing with one of our cats, Smudgie, enticing him with a string. It was one of those surreal moments, being awake so early, trying to figure out life, while the cat rolled and batted and acted goofy. Cats. Lovely creatures without a care in the world, and always good for a little levity and distraction. That morning, the levity brought back a memory.

The summer I was seven years old, I met my epic friend. Our families were at a barbecue, and our brothers introduced us. She was the only other little girl at the party, perhaps the only other child my age. I don't remember. Most of the families there had children my brothers' age -- in other words, not children at all, but teens and young adults. Like me, this girl was the surprise in her family. Her brothers were eight and ten years older than her; mine, ten and twelve years older than me. One of my brothers was friends with one of hers, and they thought we should meet.

The trouble was that both of us were shy, painfully so. So our brothers stood there, telling us about each other, and we stood there, giggling like goofballs, unable to say a word. It looked like this meeting might go nowhere, until I finally piped up and said, "Want to play with the cats?" And that was it.

We've been friends for more than three decades. Through dolls and silly sleepovers, painful adolescent moments, first boyfriends, choir trips and youth retreats, college, life in the city (complete with giant roaches!), first real jobs, marriage, babies, businesses, and more, we have seen each other through. We have oddly parallel lives, and somehow we reflect and interpret reality for each other. She has three girls, essentially the same ages as my boys. Her first, born a month to the day after mine; her last, born six weeks before mine. Well, before this very last one, of course. These days, when she calls, my husband says to her: "So, are you pregnant yet?" Because really, this pregnancy of mine brings us to the greatest divergence of our realities.

I am certain that I have all the greatest friends on this earth, that no one is as fortunate as me in the friends department. Beautiful, wonderful women. Interesting, unique, and true. I don't know what I would do without them. But this friendship is altogether one-of-a-kind, perhaps because neither of us has sisters and we have known each other for so long. For most of our childhoods, she was the bolder of the two of us, and she overcame her shyness long before I overcame mine. But I like to remember that our friendship got its start because I found the words to get it on its way. I would not be me without her, and that our friendship hinges on a cat and her kittens at a summer backyard barbecue somehow makes it all the sweeter.