I tried to ignore the steam rising.

“Honestly, im just trying to work out how our relationship works now that you’re a mum and married”

That’s what my best friend of more than a decade said to me the day that our friendship ended. She said it, finally, but it had gone unsaid for a long time before that. It was there, simmering under the surface of our friendship when she called me to talk about the guys she was seeing and my daughter cooed in the background. It was there when I told her I was pregnant, and I felt so afraid of her reaction and what it would mean for us.

As much as I tried to ignore the steam rising, it was there when I married my great love, which was her dream and not mine. I hadn’t noticed the heat until hindsight showed me it was already there when I fell in love with him and my days were full of laughter and light whether she was visiting or not.

While this statement alone wasn’t what caused our collapse, it’s what stuck with me the longest and stung the most.

The pandemic highlighted a vastly differing world view. Where I had trust in science and scientists, she blindly revoked them with gusto. Where I had optimism she was a cynic. I masked up gladly to keep people safe and she wore it to avoid a fine. Sure, this was the first time we had really disagreed on something but it was less a reflection of her as it was one of the media she consumed.

The crux really was when my dad died. She didn’t call me.

I’ve since talked to different people and gotten different opinions, but for me it felt like a massive deal at the time. I had other good friends who checked in but didn’t call, but for some reason that hadn’t bothered me. Maybe because my best friend and I called each other for everything. “I need to tell you the size of the spider I just saw”. “I’m struggling with the outside contact, any ideas?” “Rubin is colicking again”. Sometimes we would call each other multiple times a day. Sometimes we would talk for hours and hours about anything and everything. But when I was going through the hardest thing of my life, nothing. The absence of her voice on the end of the line at that time felt huge at the time. Less so, now.

For some reason though, that comment about how our relationship works now that I’m a wife and mother plays in my head often still.

I try to place what really changed for her.

She never came to meet my daughter, so never actually had to negotiate the logistics of her in real life. She spent plenty of time with my husband and I, laughing, playing games, sharing meals, even sleeping on a blowup mattress on our floor for a while when she needed somewhere to stay. I got busier, I put on weight, I went to bed earlier, but I maintained the same sense of humour, still kept my horses and walked my dogs. Really, the only fundamental change I can see since becoming a mum and married, is that I’m happier.

I can’t help but wonder if that was the problem she needed to solve.

And, it’s not that a wedding or a baby makes you happier than someone without those things, but sharing my life so completely with another person, and then growing a whole new one entirely, made me reflect and grow and learn. In loving my husband entirely and him loving me back, I felt a security and contentment I never had before. Navigating life together challenged me to work on myself and become more open and communicative.

When I found out I was pregnant, I grieved my life I had up until that moment, but I needn’t have. Of course, it would never be the same, but it has been a fantastic kind of different. I have an immense new respect for my body. It is so powerful and so capable. I’ve been amazed too at what my mind can do. I once thought my brain was irreparably broken but it is so brilliant. It finds solutions, organises chaos, and it copes and it perseveres. With my daughter I have become creative again. We play pretend where I’m the lion and she is the zebra. We paint and draw and cook. She melts down and I find a way to turn it around.

I feel the most ‘me’ I ever have. By deeply loving my partner and my children I’ve delved deeper into who I actually am, with them and outside of them. They aren’t the reason I am who I am, but they are the reason I finally took the time to find her.

I’m happier.

I am grateful for those easy years of laughter and companionship and part of me hopes she will slip back into my life one day.

How our friendship should have worked, now that I’m a mum and married, is that she took me as I was through every season, stayed present in my pain and found joy in my joy.

___________________

Written by Freya Campbell-Dunnett

Mum of the Manning Valley

Shared originally on her page Chestnut Chapters