Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
I remember the day that I first understood the difference between “forever” decisions and ones that could be undone. You grow up with a bunch of adults telling you that you can do anything, and then that you can do anything but you have to decide what now, and then that you should probably stop fucking up your life, and none of it means anything, because you’re young and invincible and full of potential and you’re never going to die.
I was 23, and had just fallen in love with a married man. I spent a Sunday afternoon crying to my mother because I realised that I couldn’t be with a married guy, and that that fact meant we would never be together. I had never faced never before.
Of course, I was 23 and in love and so when I broke up with him, it didn’t stick. 8 years, a divorce, step-parenting, a baby of our own, an unsaleable house, and a two year affair later, I tried again and it did.
After that, I had to find a new way to build a life: a new one that would never bear any resemblance to the one I thought I was building. I made lists of people who would look after me and see me as worthwhile when I couldn’t. One in particular.
Molly told me that I could move in with her for as long as I needed. And I did. And she was my family, and her people were my people, and I survived. Just. Until I could figure out how a grieving woman and a 4 year old could try to be a family.
But this isn’t the story of how I put myself back together. It’s the story of Molly and me and babies and circus and the death-defying preciousness of real friendship.
We met when I was 27 and she was 26 and we were brand new at the parenting thing. We bonded over wine and a mutual contempt-slash-envy of the “real” mums. We forged the kind of friendship which requires open-doored toilet visits in the middle of wine-soaked evenings so that the conversation doesn’t pause. And we bitched about our men, and our families, and what the hell we were going to do with our lives, and we stressed about completely different things to do with babies which all turned out not to matter.
Gradually things moved on. The geography changed, which meant that visits became sleepovers. Work changed. One of us went back to university. One of us started a career, and then took another leap within it. One of us had another baby. Our relationships grew and shifted and shriveled and faltered and hers got stronger and mine ended. There were other pregnancies too, ended and mourned in different ways. And at every stage, we had to find new ways to relate, new ways to support each other, develop – or if desperate, fake – an interest in each others’ lives and obsessions and dilemmas.
The thing is that we did. And we still do. Her newest little boy was born a couple of weeks ago. I was there (well, except for the bits to do with her bits). And it completely tore me apart. It’s unlikely that I will have any more children, which I desperately want. But I don’t think that there are many times I have been torn apart which I’m so very grateful for. I think, or at least she says, that it was something that she wanted and that was helpful to her. While I would have done it, anytime, gladly, for that reason, on reflection it was so precious to me to have an acknowledgement that we are family, that trivia like broken hearts, or inventing whole new people, or being pointed in completely different directions pale in the face of deciding to love my friend.
I said that this was also the story of circus, and there was of course the blip that was the Irish street performers, and circus school, and our plans for world domination through acrobalance and absurd humour, and the fact that for me that formed the basis of my new community and identity and for her it was an experiment that didn’t go where it was supposed to. I don’t know that that had a profound effect on her, but nor do I know that it didn’t: I know that it was another thing that we absorbed and rebuilt around and that didn’t make any of it feel too hard or not worth doing.
This started about “forever” decisions. Perhaps I’ve strayed too far from that, but I don’t think so. The lesson for me has been that other people can also make forever decisions for me, and while the letting go is real and hard, the re-assessing and re-affirming the connection that underlies that grief is liberating and strengthening and exhilarating. This is my real life, the one that I never thought would begin, the one that I waited for. It is happening, and it is beautiful and searing and filled with hope and despair and the knowledge that death is around the corner, tomorrow or the next day or in fifty years and the only things that matter are love and authenticity. So I will continue to honour this connection to another human being who makes room in her own busy life for my mundane and profound anxieties and keeps trusting me with hers. One day we will sit, white-haired and saggy, on a porch somewhere, drowning in obscene quantities of wine, smoking the cigarettes we both will have given up, again, watching another generation of kids squabble and hug and play, and I will drunkenly tell her again that I love her, and it will be unnecessary, because she knows.