Conversations on Love: Lovers, Strangers, Parents, Friends, Endings, Beginnings by Natasha Lunn

Author:Natasha Lunn [Lunn, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Seasons of Friendship

‘The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.’

(Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson)

One month after Dan and I got back from Puglia, I received two WhatsApp messages from friends. The first, a picture of a schoolfriend with the baby she’d just given birth to. The second, a photo of a university friend’s twelve-week baby scan. Both made me wince, the latter particularly. It looked so similar to the picture I had of our own blurry black and white baby scan, which promised a world and never delivered. When I first opened it, I thought I was about to vomit. This sounds dramatic, I know. It seemed silly and unexpected to me at the time too. Because I was truly happy for my friends, and I knew there was no scarcity of babies. Other people conceiving did not affect whether I would, or could. Yet each time I opened a picture of a baby or a pregnancy announcement on my phone, it sucked composure out of me. Not only because friends were conceiving easily when it had already been a year since our first pregnancy, or holding babies who were the age ours would have been. But because I felt guilty that I could not summon up the pure joy for their news that I longed to. In response to the second message I replied, ‘Amazing news!xx’ which looked forced and strained on the screen. To the first, for a few days, I didn’t even reply. And so, my sadness robbed our friendships of authenticity in these moments, which we would never get to do again.

These feelings made me ask uncomfortable questions: could I still find a way to be around pregnant friends or those with babies? And if I could never have children, and my friends’ lives revolved around theirs, would I need to branch out and make new friends too? When I was struggling to answer them, I wrote to Philippa Perry for advice. First she conceded that babies do change friendships, just as not having a baby when you want one changes them too. ‘Sad as it is,’ she replied, ‘it’s inevitable that some people fall away at these times. Sometimes you will reconnect later, sometimes the drifting apart remains. But because you love your friends and want to remain close to them, I think you will find a way through all this with the messiness of misunderstandings and make-ups. You will keep communicating, and it might be painful at times, but if friends know where you are at, and you know they know, you will be able to enjoy their children more.’ She also reminded me that, although when we are younger we often confide everything to one person, as we get older one friend cannot hold all we need to share. So in order to feel understood, we have to tell different things to different friends. She put

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