A Design So Vast

This year on Labor Day I remembered fondly a Labor Day past, a night when a dear friend and I ran shrieking with laughter, naked, into the ocean at night. A dear friend who is still an important part of my life. I’ve been thinking about you lately.

Ours is a strong bond, a formidable alloy forged in the crucible of bewilderment, fear, and wonder known as postpartum depression. We met shortly after our first children (pictured above) were born (5 weeks apart, and we improved that with 2nd children born only 4 weeks apart). We instantly recognized in each other both a spirit struggling in the dark woods of despair and a glimmer of our similar, joyful former selves. We knew that not only did we have a lot in common right this second, but we had had a lot in common in the past and would again in the future.

And we were right. It was such a relief to have a friend like you, a friend who was so unabashedly fun, in a time of my life that was sorely lacking for fun. You made me laugh, long and loud, every day. We experienced together for the first time the pleasures and trials of working part time, of growing babies and pureeing vegetables and nursing bras and drool-soaked shirts. I remember sending you post-it notes with hand-drawn pictures and funny messages on them, and that we both found “If you aren’t living on the edge, you are taking up too much room” to be the height of hilarity.

Underneath the fun, there was also deep connection and identification. I’ve never had a friend with whom I connected so quickly; it felt very much like you were the person I’d been looking for for so many years. We had so many points of connection, so rapidly, and the ease with which we fell into each others’ lives is something I still find notable.

I wrote you a letter on your son’s first birthday and you gave me a photo album with pictures of us and our children when Grace turned one. We learned, together, to be mothers, and we fought, more desperately than our playful and tipsy exteriors let on, to maintain some sense of ourselves as individuals as we made this most essential passage.

We strolled for hours, we wore matching tank tops, we went to yoga, we sang along loudly to Bruce Springsteen at Fenway, we drove golf carts drunk and in the dark, and we skinny-dipped in the ocean, clothing and inhibitions shed together on the beach. It was tangible, the gradual sense of lightness that came over each of us as we climbed out of the dark place and towards the light. Our journeys were independent but I at least drew great strength from knowing you were next to me.

We shared wine and diapers and clothing and birthdays and tears and emails and phone calls and pedicures and friends and stories and pregnancies and a celebratory lunch for our #2s. I buckled your son into your mother’s car for his first night away from you, and brought you dinner and a bottle of wine the day you brought your daughter home from the hospital. You lent me the bed that my life-saving baby nurse slept on in Whit’s room and brought me to floods of tears with your thoughtful message after his nut allergy diagnosis.

Our roots are deeply intertwined. I am hopeful that we are coming out of a long fallow period and am looking forward to a fall of more wine-bottle lunches and Arlington coffees. I really am.

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