I felt like a burden, a weird holdover from a life she’d decided she didn't want anymore. Years ago, when another close friend told me she was pregnant over brunch, immediately ruining mimosas and inducing paranoia about the safety of the nail polish at our pedicure place, I couldn’t believe how quickly I felt like I no longer had a solid place in her life. So perhaps not only do I get it, maybe I deserve it. Not to this exact extreme, but before I had a baby and especially before I wanted one, I’ve 100% pulled back from friends when they’ve had kids.
How do I know she doesn’t mean it? Because I’ve done it too. I’m positive she doesn’t mean it to feel this way, but her sudden absence during the most difficult (read: holy shit why did no one tell me having a newborn was this hard? Oh yeah, because then no one would do it and someone needs to pay taxes) time in my life is still hard to brush off. My middle finger now feels perpetually pointed right back at myself. My baby is about to turn 18 months old and Jane has never once reached out to meet her. For more than a decade, we continued to make room for each other in our increasingly busy lives once or twice a month right up until my baby shower, which unbeknownst to me, was apparently also our funeral. Floating her own boat and seemingly unbothered by societal expectations when it comes to concepts like money, marriage, and children. She’s not a loud ‘fuck you’ person, but a quiet one. I can count my close female friends on one hand, with Jane as my middle finger. We stayed friends after our degrees finished too – for over 15 years, both cobbling together careers in the arts and seeing each other through breakups, affairs, family issues, and grief. Throughout the rest of our university years, we went on to collaborate on many projects together and hung out all the time. It was during my second year of university, in a silly anti-pop culture sociology class, that I first encountered this funny weirdo known as Jane – and we became fast friends.
Jane* and I met in 2004: the year of that Janet Jackson Super Bowl performance, the Friends finale, and that (my legitimate pick for Best Picture at the Oscars) Napoleon Dynamite was released.
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