Three peas in a pod

6.29.2013

It was like jumping in a time machine: Last night I was at my mother's house - the home I grew up in - sitting on the floor, arms around my knees, deep in conversation with my sister and old college roommate. The three of us, filling in the spaces between everything that's happened since our last reunion, easily picked right up from where we left off. Ours is the kind of friendship that has endured many forms of cataclysm. It's a friendship that, even with breaks and silence, has kept up with one life event to the next and never lost a step. So when we're endlessly chatting away, reverting back to the silly 20-year-old versions of ourselves, it's as if time never passed.

We were best friends in school - my sister, Renee, and I - which says a lot about her since twins can be quite intimidating. To most "outsiders" the relationship between twins seems so complete that there's no room for another personality. But, she wasn't fazed by it which was lucky because, as it turned out, there were unoccupied spaces in our characters that she filled and vice versa.

Over the course of life, friends fall away, sometimes because of differences in circumstance or proximity of location (the later was true in our case). But some friendships are worth fighting for and it's not even so much a battle as it is a concession. We acknowledge that our real friends, our closest friends, know us and love us - despite what they know about us. So if we're bad at communicating and go months without so much as a text message, there's no judgement. And in the end we wind up with friends who really stick.


We spent the afternoon piecing together conversation between the demands of toddlers and the needs of babies. Just when we'd get into something good, her daughter would start yelling "Mommy, Mommy, Mommyyyyyy!" or my sister's son would be on all fours roaring like a lion and terrorizing his little sister - who has recently learned to crawl but, can't entirely rely on her own her devices to escape him. The scene's chaos was only enhanced by the toys that were strewn all over my mom's basement and a neglected Pixar movie playing in the background. 

With my little guy nursing every 2-3 hours, I was caught by surprise, pulling my shirt up for the fourth time. Has it really been eight hours? Soon after, the children were each put to bed and we finally had a quiet moment to ourselves. At one point, conversation broke and we sat in relative silence taking it all in. When we met 10 years ago, we were so far from being mothers and yet here we were, each of us so natural and comfortable in our new role.

My mother came in moments later and asked, "Why are you sitting in the dark?" Sometime during the previous half hour the summer sun had already set, but just like when we were kids, we were too wrapped up in conversation to have noticed.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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