B.F.F., page 13
“She made it all about her!”
“Anyone who trespasses on a bride’s big day like this lacks what my country grandma would call ‘home training.’ ”
“It’s my wedding. She shouldn’t have offered to help if she wasn’t going to abide by my wishes.”
“Totally agree. What a whore.” I winked for the first time in my life and tried to hold my face still.
Meredith was about to say something and stopped herself. She smiled. I smiled back, happy to witness her very human moment of fury, to be audience to her rant. To see her struggling in real time with a friendship issue.
“I’m being crazy right now,” she said.
I shook my head. “Not as crazy as someone foisting off weird fudge packets against a bride’s explicit wishes. How about this? You let it go for now. Focus on Gage. Later, you and Bebe can hash it all out. Right now, though, maybe go enjoy the final moments of your wedding reception?”
Meredith nodded. “You’re right. Screw the fudge. I’m going to find my husband.”
She wiggled her hips and kissed me on the cheek.
“Tomorrow, after you catch your breath,” I said, “maybe you can make a list of all the things you love about Bebe.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Very sneaky. Turning my suggestions back on me.”
“Oh, also thank your God for this opportunity to work on this friendship.”
“You’re cruel.”
I didn’t tell her about the pregnancy test because I didn’t want to make her wedding day about my womb. I texted her a few days later with the news.
Hurray for you and your family! Sweet Zara is getting a sibling!
We found out on the morning of your wedding. This kid will always remind me of you and Gage and your special day.
Mystical connection.
* * *
Eighteen months after we welcomed Zara, our son Elias arrived via C-section forty-eight hours before an epic snowstorm, which every news outlet predicted would dump more than twelve feet on Chicago. The hospital, worried we wouldn’t be able to make it home safely, sent us home a day early. Gobs of snow fell and fell and fell, and the drifts grew from eight feet, to ten, to twelve. Zara still wore diapers and expressed deep feelings of curiosity that quickly turned to dissatisfaction when we brought home her brother. On our sixth day home, we ventured out of the house for a late breakfast because we were all losing our grip on reality. The whole city was like an igloo, hushed and cold. Parking was challenging given half the spaces were filled with snowdrifts. We found a spot at Jane’s in Bucktown, but had to wait thirty minutes for a table and another thirty for our food. None of us had slept more than three hours at a time for almost a week, and everything looked, felt, and tasted as surreal and unfamiliar as the cold, white world.
When we pulled into the garage after brunch, Elias started to cry, and I gathered him from his car seat to take him upstairs to nurse.
“Up, Mama,” Zara said, raising her hands so I could pick her up, too. And I wanted to; my arms had plenty of room. But the doctor told me not to lift more than twelve pounds or I would risk tearing the stitches from my C-section.
“Sweet girl, I can’t lift you, but let’s go upstairs together.”
Zara stomped from the garage to the living room and then collapsed to the floor, crying and wailing. “MAMA!” was the only word I recognized among her pained shrieks. I held the baby and looked on helplessly. My scar ached, and I was afraid my body wouldn’t be able to manage holding my newborn son and crouching on the floor with my daughter. She scrambled to her knees and began to bang her little forehead on the hardwood floor. Her curls bobbed wildly up and down. She cried. I cried. The baby cried. John got on the floor with her and held her so she couldn’t hurt herself. She lacked the language to tell us how put out and disappointed she felt about this new baby in my arms. How enraged. How devastated. My rational brain knew she would be okay—John would hold her physically; we would both hold her emotionally; and she would move through her blaze of rage and frustration. We would all make it to the other side. But watching her suffer also reminded me of how I felt about my little sister, she with the perfect name who was a perfect upgrade for faulty, depreciated me.
When we got Zara settled on the couch next to me, she looked wrung out and exhausted, her little cheeks red and hot to the touch. “You did some good feeling work,” I said, affirming her emotions the way Dr. Rosen always praised me when I ranted or tantrummed during sessions. I told her all the things I imagined she might want to hear: You’re safe and beloved always. I will never leave you behind. I know you feel scared and angry. He’s not here to replace you. One day you’ll be so glad to have a sibling to commiserate with you about what it’s like to have me as a mom. I held her and said her name over and over. It felt like a prayer.
By week two of mothering two children, I felt a dull sense of panic about my ability to properly care for these two little beings and give them what they needed. My bar was perfection and my default setting was despair. Bad combination. When it was time to rest, my brain immediately leaped to self-accusation. I’m a shitty mom. I was so selfish to have children. They would be better off with someone else. I left a voice mail for Dr. Rosen describing my dark thoughts. I didn’t have a plan nor did I want to die, but the fatigue and stress had tripped a trigger of anxiety and hopelessness deeper and wider than I’d known before. At my postpartum checkup, my OB was emphatic: “You do not have to suffer.” She insisted I take an antidepressant. Dr. Rosen agreed. We’d already been down this road after Zara’s birth, when I’d taken Zoloft for six months and then tapered off once we were sleeping more than four hours a night.
“I’m going to take it, but I’m nervous, even though I’ve done it before,” I confessed to Callie on the phone. Really, I felt ashamed that I couldn’t control my emotions. I believed I should be managing with greater ease after my second child—I’d done all this before!—but I wasn’t, and it felt like a personal failure.
I stood under the el tracks outside of Dr. Rosen’s office, my breasts heavy with milk, and my skin still hot and swollen along my C-section scar. Getting to therapy so soon after Elias’s birth required a great deal of effort, but I was desperate for the support and comfort of my group.
“Hello?” I said. I pulled my phone away from my ear to see if Callie was still there. “Callie? Are you there?” Callie’s son was now ten months old, and I trusted her to understand my anguish because she’d struggled in her early motherhood, too.
“I’m here,” she said, but I heard something distant in her voice. I assumed the worst, as I always did inside her silences.
“Why are you acting weird? You think I shouldn’t take meds?” In that moment, I couldn’t admit my own fears about taking medication again or own my disappointment that I needed it. I wanted so badly to be the blissed-out mother I thought I was supposed to be, but I was actually a mother who needed a prescription for Zoloft to get through the hard, early days of Elias’s life. It took half a second to project all of my own ambivalence about meds onto Callie. “Wait, maybe you think I should take it? Which is it? What is happening right now?” The panic raised my voice a few octaves. I started walking toward the Blue Line train that would carry me back home. I had thirty minutes to get home before my breasts began to leak. I’d synched my therapy session and my nursing just right, and I didn’t have much extra time to spare on a postsession meltdown on the street.
I heard Callie sigh elaborately.
“What?” I said, shrill as ever. “What is it? You’re judging me!”
“I feel like you just set me up. There’s something you want to hear from me, but I don’t know what it is. This feels,” Callie paused, and I stomped down Washington past the Disney Store, furious and hurt. “I feel like you set a trap. Almost like you want me to judge you.”
“What the fuck, Callie? I don’t want you to judge me. I’m struggling here. I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to take care of my babies and stop hating myself for five minutes. It’s not good for anyone if I drown in darkness and despair.”
“Your medication is between you and your therapist.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
“I don’t know what else—”
“I have to go. My train’s coming. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up on Callie and rode the train home to my babies, seething inside.
20.
“Can you fucking believe her?” I said to Meredith over the phone, trying and failing to speak quietly as Elias slept on my chest. “I wanted her to weigh in, to big-sister me by affirming the positive steps I’m taking to care for myself during these intense postpartum weeks. When her son was born, I didn’t judge her for feeling like she ‘lost her spark.’ Once, when we were on a run a few months after she’d given birth, she spent two miles railing against the pressures we put on mothers to be self-sacrificing and to smile through their suffering. I thought Callie, of all people, would support my mental health.”
“People have all kinds of strong opinions about meds. Maybe in that moment she couldn’t sort through her own stuff and support you.”
“I’m telling you, she was judging me. She wants me to grit my teeth and not take the help the doctors are offering me? Why am I friends with her?”
Meredith laughed. “She’s one of your closest friends.”
“She’s a traitor to me and all of womankind.”
“You love her.”
“I’m so angry right now.”
“It sounds like you’re hurt, too. And both of those are part of love.”
“Fuck this kind of love.”
“Okay, maybe when you calm down, you can think of all the things you love about her. Text your list to me.”
I sighed and let my head fall back on the pillow. I didn’t feel grateful for this newest conflict with Callie. I was so tired it felt like my temples would explode, and every time Elias latched on to my left breast, it felt like daggers shooting through my nipple. “Will it help?”
Meredith clucked. “Will gratitude help? Of course it will. I recently wrote everything I loved about Gage, and now I no longer want to divorce him. I did it with Bebe too but I’m still pissed about the fudge.”
“So it doesn’t work for friendship?”
“All the tools for romantic relationships work for friendships.”
I knew, even then, that one day I would owe Callie an amends for how I behaved in this conversation and for projecting onto her all of my shame about being depressed and unable to hack motherhood without pharmaceutical intervention. And I still felt angry at her for judging me.
I texted the list in bits and pieces to Meredith over the next few days:
Callie is my only friend who’s ever been into running.
Callie was a bridesmaid in my wedding.
Callie joined me for the last six miles of the Chicago Marathon in 2006 and helped me finish the race.
Callie took dozens (hundreds?) of phone calls from me when I was upset about guys and dating and shitty relationships.
Callie always reminded me, when I was fried at work, that I could stop, go home, go to bed, and get up early the next morning to complete the task.
Callie works hard, tells the truth, and invests emotionally in all of her relationships.
Meredith sent a smiley face emoji after I texted my gratitude list to her. Good girl, she wrote.
I’m sure I rolled my eyes.
* * *
Callie and I got past the medication conversation because neither one of us ever mentioned it again. I quietly filled my prescription at the Costco pharmacy and hoped the little green pills would cut the darkness as it had after Zara was born.
Very quickly, however, we fell into other conflicts that I never saw coming until I heard her deafening silence on the other end of the phone. The first happened after I told her about a playgroup I joined on Thursday afternoons. I’d invited her to join, but she couldn’t because of her work schedule.
“I feel so isolated,” Callie said.
“I know what you mean,” I said. I felt that loneliness and isolation, too, which was why I had taken steps to connect with other new mothers.
“Yes, but you have a playgroup and I don’t.”
Was I supposed to apologize? I hated the feeling of not knowing how to make it better, even though she wasn’t asking me to fix her. This was a much smaller version of the guilt I felt when I got pregnant before she did.
A second tiff was slightly murkier.
One day, Jolie, a friend from the Saturday breakfast crew who had a son six months younger than Zara, invited me to go thrifting with her in Lincoln Park. We buckled our babies into strollers and looked through the secondhand play mats and cashmere blankets that affluent families in Lincoln Park had discarded. I found a wool cardigan for Zara and a snowsuit for Elias.
The next day, I mentioned this outing to Callie in passing, and she abruptly got off the phone. What was wrong now? Our excursion took place on a day that she worked. I would be happy to go again with her if she wanted, though she wasn’t really the thrifting type. I felt angry that we couldn’t find an easy rhythm and annoyed that she was mad at me. Again.
Callie left me a voice mail a few days later.
“Christie, I felt so hurt—” I can’t remember now if I deleted the message right then or if I listened and have since forgotten, but I remember sitting in my minivan with my kids in their car seats, waiting for me to turn on the ignition and drive us home from the pediatrician’s office. Earlier that day, I’d gone to a recovery meeting and heard people sharing on the topic of “toxic relationships.” Allyson, one of my favorite women there, shared about a friendship that had fallen apart recently. “I just let go. We’d been fighting all the time, and I needed some space. It was a gift I gave to myself.” Her words reached inside and grabbed hold of me, like a lifeline.
I wanted that space. I was tired of being tense around Callie. Maybe I should do what Allyson did and let go. Give myself some space.
“How do you do that, ‘get space’ in a friendship?” Meredith asked a few days later over tea when I told her about it. “If you’re in a romantic relationship, you say, ‘I need space,’ and you stop you stop sleeping together or you start sleeping with other people and slowly drift apart. What does this space look like in friendship?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I guess it means, Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”
Callie didn’t like anything I did these days. And the tension between us twisted inside me, making me feel monstrous. If I didn’t get space soon, I was going to make a big mess of this friendship. I was ready to run.
Meredith leaned across the table. “You sound clear about your anger, but I’m wondering about fear. What’s scary about your relationship with Callie?”
What did she mean?
“I smell fear. Your dynamic with Callie reminds me of my relationship with Lily, a friend I was afraid would devour me—her personality was so big. I felt totally dominated and lost around her loud clothes, bright jewelry, grand hand gestures, booming voice. So much bigness. When I realized how afraid I felt that I might disappear around her, I learned to set boundaries. A lot of them. But before I was able to do that, I had to know what I was afraid of.”
I stared at the wet tea bag in my almost-empty cup. I was definitely afraid of Callie being mad at me. I was afraid of having to walk on eggshells every time I had a plan with another friend that didn’t include her. I was afraid of that sigh of disappointment I sensed on the other end of the line every time I did something she didn’t like. I felt responsible for her unhappiness, even though I understood intellectually that she was struggling in several areas of her life. But Meredith was right about fear: now I was really frightened of what I would do or say if I didn’t get some space soon. I was afraid that it was time to break up, but I didn’t have the courage or skill to extricate myself.
“I’m afraid we will never get out of this bad pattern. I’ll go on hurting her, and she’ll be disappointed. But if I pull back, she’ll notice and feel hurt, which will make me want to fix it. She’ll think I’m deserting her, and I promised I wouldn’t.”
There was no way out. I didn’t want to wait until the accumulated bitterness and hurt feelings extinguished all the joy between us. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed with Callie. Maybe on a run when I told her I wasn’t sure how much maternity leave to take, and she cracked a joke about the glass ceiling. Maybe. The levity between us had hardened into something sharp and ugly. We’d just had three tense conversations in as many weeks.
But you don’t just walk out of a friendship. She’d been a bridesmaid in my wedding. She had that prized spot on my speed dial. She was my big sister. Who would I run a 10K with next summer?
I hung on because I didn’t want to be an almost-forty-year-old woman who couldn’t figure out friendship. Broken bonds and irreparable rifts belonged in middle school, not motherhood. In my most hopeful moments, I imagined we were one tearful heart-to-heart conversation away from a deeper intimacy, and one day we’d look back and laugh on these dark days when we were both figuring out how to juggle motherhood, marriage, careers, and friendship. In those shiny fantasies, the solution was simple: I had to stop feeling responsible for her happiness, and she had to stop shutting down every time she feared abandonment.
The catch, of course, was that I was ready for Callie to change, but unprepared for the emotional work—boundary setting and tolerating her moods without making them all about me—I had yet to do myself.
21.
John dressed the kids, while I finished pumping so Elias wouldn’t starve while we were at the church.
“Do you have the directions?” he asked.
“On the counter.”
The baptism ceremony for Callie’s son started at ten, and it was our first dress-up event as a family of four. Zara wore a flowered dress with a sash, and Elias wore his best blue-and-white-striped romper. I wore a dress with a lot of stretch to accommodate my distended belly and swollen breasts. Though I’d slept little the night before, the blue-sky morning perked me up as we cruised down the highway to the church in the suburbs where Callie’s husband, Grant, grew up. After the thrift shop tiff, Callie and I reached a détente, and now my family and I were showing up for her son’s baptism. I felt like my best self, not the prickly, small-hearted version that got me into trouble with her.
“Anyone who trespasses on a bride’s big day like this lacks what my country grandma would call ‘home training.’ ”
“It’s my wedding. She shouldn’t have offered to help if she wasn’t going to abide by my wishes.”
“Totally agree. What a whore.” I winked for the first time in my life and tried to hold my face still.
Meredith was about to say something and stopped herself. She smiled. I smiled back, happy to witness her very human moment of fury, to be audience to her rant. To see her struggling in real time with a friendship issue.
“I’m being crazy right now,” she said.
I shook my head. “Not as crazy as someone foisting off weird fudge packets against a bride’s explicit wishes. How about this? You let it go for now. Focus on Gage. Later, you and Bebe can hash it all out. Right now, though, maybe go enjoy the final moments of your wedding reception?”
Meredith nodded. “You’re right. Screw the fudge. I’m going to find my husband.”
She wiggled her hips and kissed me on the cheek.
“Tomorrow, after you catch your breath,” I said, “maybe you can make a list of all the things you love about Bebe.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Very sneaky. Turning my suggestions back on me.”
“Oh, also thank your God for this opportunity to work on this friendship.”
“You’re cruel.”
I didn’t tell her about the pregnancy test because I didn’t want to make her wedding day about my womb. I texted her a few days later with the news.
Hurray for you and your family! Sweet Zara is getting a sibling!
We found out on the morning of your wedding. This kid will always remind me of you and Gage and your special day.
Mystical connection.
* * *
Eighteen months after we welcomed Zara, our son Elias arrived via C-section forty-eight hours before an epic snowstorm, which every news outlet predicted would dump more than twelve feet on Chicago. The hospital, worried we wouldn’t be able to make it home safely, sent us home a day early. Gobs of snow fell and fell and fell, and the drifts grew from eight feet, to ten, to twelve. Zara still wore diapers and expressed deep feelings of curiosity that quickly turned to dissatisfaction when we brought home her brother. On our sixth day home, we ventured out of the house for a late breakfast because we were all losing our grip on reality. The whole city was like an igloo, hushed and cold. Parking was challenging given half the spaces were filled with snowdrifts. We found a spot at Jane’s in Bucktown, but had to wait thirty minutes for a table and another thirty for our food. None of us had slept more than three hours at a time for almost a week, and everything looked, felt, and tasted as surreal and unfamiliar as the cold, white world.
When we pulled into the garage after brunch, Elias started to cry, and I gathered him from his car seat to take him upstairs to nurse.
“Up, Mama,” Zara said, raising her hands so I could pick her up, too. And I wanted to; my arms had plenty of room. But the doctor told me not to lift more than twelve pounds or I would risk tearing the stitches from my C-section.
“Sweet girl, I can’t lift you, but let’s go upstairs together.”
Zara stomped from the garage to the living room and then collapsed to the floor, crying and wailing. “MAMA!” was the only word I recognized among her pained shrieks. I held the baby and looked on helplessly. My scar ached, and I was afraid my body wouldn’t be able to manage holding my newborn son and crouching on the floor with my daughter. She scrambled to her knees and began to bang her little forehead on the hardwood floor. Her curls bobbed wildly up and down. She cried. I cried. The baby cried. John got on the floor with her and held her so she couldn’t hurt herself. She lacked the language to tell us how put out and disappointed she felt about this new baby in my arms. How enraged. How devastated. My rational brain knew she would be okay—John would hold her physically; we would both hold her emotionally; and she would move through her blaze of rage and frustration. We would all make it to the other side. But watching her suffer also reminded me of how I felt about my little sister, she with the perfect name who was a perfect upgrade for faulty, depreciated me.
When we got Zara settled on the couch next to me, she looked wrung out and exhausted, her little cheeks red and hot to the touch. “You did some good feeling work,” I said, affirming her emotions the way Dr. Rosen always praised me when I ranted or tantrummed during sessions. I told her all the things I imagined she might want to hear: You’re safe and beloved always. I will never leave you behind. I know you feel scared and angry. He’s not here to replace you. One day you’ll be so glad to have a sibling to commiserate with you about what it’s like to have me as a mom. I held her and said her name over and over. It felt like a prayer.
By week two of mothering two children, I felt a dull sense of panic about my ability to properly care for these two little beings and give them what they needed. My bar was perfection and my default setting was despair. Bad combination. When it was time to rest, my brain immediately leaped to self-accusation. I’m a shitty mom. I was so selfish to have children. They would be better off with someone else. I left a voice mail for Dr. Rosen describing my dark thoughts. I didn’t have a plan nor did I want to die, but the fatigue and stress had tripped a trigger of anxiety and hopelessness deeper and wider than I’d known before. At my postpartum checkup, my OB was emphatic: “You do not have to suffer.” She insisted I take an antidepressant. Dr. Rosen agreed. We’d already been down this road after Zara’s birth, when I’d taken Zoloft for six months and then tapered off once we were sleeping more than four hours a night.
“I’m going to take it, but I’m nervous, even though I’ve done it before,” I confessed to Callie on the phone. Really, I felt ashamed that I couldn’t control my emotions. I believed I should be managing with greater ease after my second child—I’d done all this before!—but I wasn’t, and it felt like a personal failure.
I stood under the el tracks outside of Dr. Rosen’s office, my breasts heavy with milk, and my skin still hot and swollen along my C-section scar. Getting to therapy so soon after Elias’s birth required a great deal of effort, but I was desperate for the support and comfort of my group.
“Hello?” I said. I pulled my phone away from my ear to see if Callie was still there. “Callie? Are you there?” Callie’s son was now ten months old, and I trusted her to understand my anguish because she’d struggled in her early motherhood, too.
“I’m here,” she said, but I heard something distant in her voice. I assumed the worst, as I always did inside her silences.
“Why are you acting weird? You think I shouldn’t take meds?” In that moment, I couldn’t admit my own fears about taking medication again or own my disappointment that I needed it. I wanted so badly to be the blissed-out mother I thought I was supposed to be, but I was actually a mother who needed a prescription for Zoloft to get through the hard, early days of Elias’s life. It took half a second to project all of my own ambivalence about meds onto Callie. “Wait, maybe you think I should take it? Which is it? What is happening right now?” The panic raised my voice a few octaves. I started walking toward the Blue Line train that would carry me back home. I had thirty minutes to get home before my breasts began to leak. I’d synched my therapy session and my nursing just right, and I didn’t have much extra time to spare on a postsession meltdown on the street.
I heard Callie sigh elaborately.
“What?” I said, shrill as ever. “What is it? You’re judging me!”
“I feel like you just set me up. There’s something you want to hear from me, but I don’t know what it is. This feels,” Callie paused, and I stomped down Washington past the Disney Store, furious and hurt. “I feel like you set a trap. Almost like you want me to judge you.”
“What the fuck, Callie? I don’t want you to judge me. I’m struggling here. I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to take care of my babies and stop hating myself for five minutes. It’s not good for anyone if I drown in darkness and despair.”
“Your medication is between you and your therapist.”
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
“I don’t know what else—”
“I have to go. My train’s coming. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up on Callie and rode the train home to my babies, seething inside.
20.
“Can you fucking believe her?” I said to Meredith over the phone, trying and failing to speak quietly as Elias slept on my chest. “I wanted her to weigh in, to big-sister me by affirming the positive steps I’m taking to care for myself during these intense postpartum weeks. When her son was born, I didn’t judge her for feeling like she ‘lost her spark.’ Once, when we were on a run a few months after she’d given birth, she spent two miles railing against the pressures we put on mothers to be self-sacrificing and to smile through their suffering. I thought Callie, of all people, would support my mental health.”
“People have all kinds of strong opinions about meds. Maybe in that moment she couldn’t sort through her own stuff and support you.”
“I’m telling you, she was judging me. She wants me to grit my teeth and not take the help the doctors are offering me? Why am I friends with her?”
Meredith laughed. “She’s one of your closest friends.”
“She’s a traitor to me and all of womankind.”
“You love her.”
“I’m so angry right now.”
“It sounds like you’re hurt, too. And both of those are part of love.”
“Fuck this kind of love.”
“Okay, maybe when you calm down, you can think of all the things you love about her. Text your list to me.”
I sighed and let my head fall back on the pillow. I didn’t feel grateful for this newest conflict with Callie. I was so tired it felt like my temples would explode, and every time Elias latched on to my left breast, it felt like daggers shooting through my nipple. “Will it help?”
Meredith clucked. “Will gratitude help? Of course it will. I recently wrote everything I loved about Gage, and now I no longer want to divorce him. I did it with Bebe too but I’m still pissed about the fudge.”
“So it doesn’t work for friendship?”
“All the tools for romantic relationships work for friendships.”
I knew, even then, that one day I would owe Callie an amends for how I behaved in this conversation and for projecting onto her all of my shame about being depressed and unable to hack motherhood without pharmaceutical intervention. And I still felt angry at her for judging me.
I texted the list in bits and pieces to Meredith over the next few days:
Callie is my only friend who’s ever been into running.
Callie was a bridesmaid in my wedding.
Callie joined me for the last six miles of the Chicago Marathon in 2006 and helped me finish the race.
Callie took dozens (hundreds?) of phone calls from me when I was upset about guys and dating and shitty relationships.
Callie always reminded me, when I was fried at work, that I could stop, go home, go to bed, and get up early the next morning to complete the task.
Callie works hard, tells the truth, and invests emotionally in all of her relationships.
Meredith sent a smiley face emoji after I texted my gratitude list to her. Good girl, she wrote.
I’m sure I rolled my eyes.
* * *
Callie and I got past the medication conversation because neither one of us ever mentioned it again. I quietly filled my prescription at the Costco pharmacy and hoped the little green pills would cut the darkness as it had after Zara was born.
Very quickly, however, we fell into other conflicts that I never saw coming until I heard her deafening silence on the other end of the phone. The first happened after I told her about a playgroup I joined on Thursday afternoons. I’d invited her to join, but she couldn’t because of her work schedule.
“I feel so isolated,” Callie said.
“I know what you mean,” I said. I felt that loneliness and isolation, too, which was why I had taken steps to connect with other new mothers.
“Yes, but you have a playgroup and I don’t.”
Was I supposed to apologize? I hated the feeling of not knowing how to make it better, even though she wasn’t asking me to fix her. This was a much smaller version of the guilt I felt when I got pregnant before she did.
A second tiff was slightly murkier.
One day, Jolie, a friend from the Saturday breakfast crew who had a son six months younger than Zara, invited me to go thrifting with her in Lincoln Park. We buckled our babies into strollers and looked through the secondhand play mats and cashmere blankets that affluent families in Lincoln Park had discarded. I found a wool cardigan for Zara and a snowsuit for Elias.
The next day, I mentioned this outing to Callie in passing, and she abruptly got off the phone. What was wrong now? Our excursion took place on a day that she worked. I would be happy to go again with her if she wanted, though she wasn’t really the thrifting type. I felt angry that we couldn’t find an easy rhythm and annoyed that she was mad at me. Again.
Callie left me a voice mail a few days later.
“Christie, I felt so hurt—” I can’t remember now if I deleted the message right then or if I listened and have since forgotten, but I remember sitting in my minivan with my kids in their car seats, waiting for me to turn on the ignition and drive us home from the pediatrician’s office. Earlier that day, I’d gone to a recovery meeting and heard people sharing on the topic of “toxic relationships.” Allyson, one of my favorite women there, shared about a friendship that had fallen apart recently. “I just let go. We’d been fighting all the time, and I needed some space. It was a gift I gave to myself.” Her words reached inside and grabbed hold of me, like a lifeline.
I wanted that space. I was tired of being tense around Callie. Maybe I should do what Allyson did and let go. Give myself some space.
“How do you do that, ‘get space’ in a friendship?” Meredith asked a few days later over tea when I told her about it. “If you’re in a romantic relationship, you say, ‘I need space,’ and you stop you stop sleeping together or you start sleeping with other people and slowly drift apart. What does this space look like in friendship?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I guess it means, Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”
Callie didn’t like anything I did these days. And the tension between us twisted inside me, making me feel monstrous. If I didn’t get space soon, I was going to make a big mess of this friendship. I was ready to run.
Meredith leaned across the table. “You sound clear about your anger, but I’m wondering about fear. What’s scary about your relationship with Callie?”
What did she mean?
“I smell fear. Your dynamic with Callie reminds me of my relationship with Lily, a friend I was afraid would devour me—her personality was so big. I felt totally dominated and lost around her loud clothes, bright jewelry, grand hand gestures, booming voice. So much bigness. When I realized how afraid I felt that I might disappear around her, I learned to set boundaries. A lot of them. But before I was able to do that, I had to know what I was afraid of.”
I stared at the wet tea bag in my almost-empty cup. I was definitely afraid of Callie being mad at me. I was afraid of having to walk on eggshells every time I had a plan with another friend that didn’t include her. I was afraid of that sigh of disappointment I sensed on the other end of the line every time I did something she didn’t like. I felt responsible for her unhappiness, even though I understood intellectually that she was struggling in several areas of her life. But Meredith was right about fear: now I was really frightened of what I would do or say if I didn’t get some space soon. I was afraid that it was time to break up, but I didn’t have the courage or skill to extricate myself.
“I’m afraid we will never get out of this bad pattern. I’ll go on hurting her, and she’ll be disappointed. But if I pull back, she’ll notice and feel hurt, which will make me want to fix it. She’ll think I’m deserting her, and I promised I wouldn’t.”
There was no way out. I didn’t want to wait until the accumulated bitterness and hurt feelings extinguished all the joy between us. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed with Callie. Maybe on a run when I told her I wasn’t sure how much maternity leave to take, and she cracked a joke about the glass ceiling. Maybe. The levity between us had hardened into something sharp and ugly. We’d just had three tense conversations in as many weeks.
But you don’t just walk out of a friendship. She’d been a bridesmaid in my wedding. She had that prized spot on my speed dial. She was my big sister. Who would I run a 10K with next summer?
I hung on because I didn’t want to be an almost-forty-year-old woman who couldn’t figure out friendship. Broken bonds and irreparable rifts belonged in middle school, not motherhood. In my most hopeful moments, I imagined we were one tearful heart-to-heart conversation away from a deeper intimacy, and one day we’d look back and laugh on these dark days when we were both figuring out how to juggle motherhood, marriage, careers, and friendship. In those shiny fantasies, the solution was simple: I had to stop feeling responsible for her happiness, and she had to stop shutting down every time she feared abandonment.
The catch, of course, was that I was ready for Callie to change, but unprepared for the emotional work—boundary setting and tolerating her moods without making them all about me—I had yet to do myself.
21.
John dressed the kids, while I finished pumping so Elias wouldn’t starve while we were at the church.
“Do you have the directions?” he asked.
“On the counter.”
The baptism ceremony for Callie’s son started at ten, and it was our first dress-up event as a family of four. Zara wore a flowered dress with a sash, and Elias wore his best blue-and-white-striped romper. I wore a dress with a lot of stretch to accommodate my distended belly and swollen breasts. Though I’d slept little the night before, the blue-sky morning perked me up as we cruised down the highway to the church in the suburbs where Callie’s husband, Grant, grew up. After the thrift shop tiff, Callie and I reached a détente, and now my family and I were showing up for her son’s baptism. I felt like my best self, not the prickly, small-hearted version that got me into trouble with her.
