Babies & The Seams of Friendship

These are the thoughts on my mind this morning, after drumming louder and louder this week. Thoughts related to pregnancy, life as it's been so far affected by our pregnancy, and my attempt at trying to normalize after our normal is changing... just enough that all of life seems like it's turning on its head.

I get it now.

When we first joined our old Sunday School class at the Peoples' Church in '07, the February before we got married, it was overflowing with a variety of newly (and nearly) wed couples in their early twenties to early thirties - navigating through the nuances of a new (and upcoming, in our case) marriage. It was such a wonderful season for us, making friends and learning... even as some of the couples started having their first (or second, in some cases) babies. Because I love babies. And always had. It was like having class mascots that I pined after holding at group get-togethers. 

But with that, lying under the surface of the excitement for these couples we liked so much, was this hidden shift that was taking place somewhere in the behavior of those relationships - tugging at seams that were once held by marital status alone and now had changed so much with children on the way. At parties, the pregnant women would sort of sequester themselves off to each other - chatting about the things us non-pregnant women couldn't quite yet relate to. Not that I would have been unable to enjoy or learn from those conversations, but would have had nothing to add. As much as that sometimes hurt back then, a part of me understands it now. 

Except that I no longer find myself in a steady community in which to do any sequestering. We are no longer in that community, as that shift itself pointed to changes in the seasons of those couples' lives - where newly-marriedness was not so much the issue as parenting - and things devolved from there... we are slightly hanging in the balance as far as community goes. 

So, instead of gravitating towards a subset of people within a group, there is no group in which to live a subset. That lends itself to then moving now towards my individual friendships. And I think it's been easier for some to move along with me in this transition, and I with them, because our ties have never had anything to do with marital status - just similarity of thought and hope and dream, and yet such differences in staging of life that there is grace to be encountering new and altered states of being without feeling the need to either pull away or speed up to that state. So it's not a betrayal of any sort of expectation that one must be as we are - married without the responsibility (or humdrum, as some might see it) of kids.

I've begun to feel, in a way, that instead of being the one to pull away - we are being pushed, just every so slightly, to the edges of relationships where we may not be quite as weightless in the thinking, the changing, the preparing of such a circumstance in life. And while I expected that to happen after the arrival of our little one, I didn't expect it to be so soon before.

Seams of friendship.

And all of that gets me thinking about, again, the difficulty of friendships as an adult. I look at relationships like the ones Cliff's sister Wendy and her husband Brad have with their closest friends - and the reason it works is because their friendship has been so long-standing and was not stitched together by the idealism of marital or parental status but by similarity of heart. It's only when those things get mixed into the same bag that it gets funky and slightly tenuous.

It's why some friendships that moms form with other moms are done out of a feeling of necessity and then at some point years into their kids' friendships, the two... or three... or four... realize they have nothing in common with each other. Or the way it is with couples when we try, for our spouse's sake, to be friends with the spouse of their friend and we may fool ourselves for awhile that it's working... but it doesn't. Or even, when newly-marriedness seems a cause worth rallying together a band of doe-eyed, hopeful husbands and wives that begins to slowly become unraveled as demography changes.

So what does that mean? Do we then look to those people to whom our lives were stitched together out of the desire for company - not of like-livedness but mindedness or hopefulness or spiritedness - and try to reinforce and update them? Are we to hope that somehow any seams laid on the basis of status become over-stitched by one of true and lasting friendship while pulling slowly at that of circumstance?

How do we hold onto the friendships and relationships we have... and love... and are so grateful for, while moving forward into a family of three when the unspoken rule, for just a little while longer, might have been two. Because the fact is, everyone has known this was coming and yet in some ways we feel faulted for being the ones to move forward. We'll have been married just over four and a quarter years when we have our baby... and will have just barely eclipsed seven years of life spent together, just before or after he or she arrives (depending on how early he or she wants to arrive). This is our time.

But we still need friends.

I think that's pretty self-explanatory.