Her instagram post announcement lands in my stomach like a bowling ball.
One of my childhood best friends is pregnant.
I’m frozen, I can’t bring myself to scroll past it. All I can do is stare and blink and stare and blink. My insides turn completely fuzzy with confusion and something adjacent to mourning.
She isn’t old enough to be a mother! Our childhood only just happened, didn’t it? Is that it, is her life over now? In 6 short years the baby will be the same age we were when we met….
I had similar feelings when I saw that she got married. (She has a new last name now, but I forget what it is). It’s a weird thing, watching her live the life we wondered about as children. Time feels particularly malleable in moments like this, like I can reach out and touch it. My childhood exists in me like a beautiful island that I can’t ever go back to.
As kids, we speculated about our grown up selves like they were celebrities to us.
Our adult life was completely foreign, it only existed as a game for us to figure out. I never really considered that I would actually grow up one day, I was so lost in the here and now of childhood. There’s a presence of mind that you can only have as a child. The world is huge with the mystery and magic of everything you don’t know yet. With no history to look back on, all you can do is exist and feel and wonder where you’ll end up. Our futures stretched out long and endless before us. It never occurred to me that our lives would eventually seperate. I thought we would be each others bridesmaids. I also thought we would be in a girlband together. Really, I thought our lives would be much more than they are.
She used to always make me feel like I should grow up. Cooler, faster and prettier than me - I wanted very badly to be like her. During one of the last summers between being a child and teen, she invited me to her house. I asked if I should bring my Baby Born (Suzie) with me. We had spent years together being mothers to our plastic babies, I didn’t know that something had changed. Nobody told me when childhood was supposed to end.
My question got a thick silence in response. Then she said
“If you want…”
I could hear her reluctance, her judgement.
When I arrived without my doll, she was obviously relieved. We played the sims instead, making them woohoo over and over for our secret excitement.
And now she’s going to be a mother.
I have no doubt in my mind that she’ll make a good one - I just can’t believe we’re in the future already. It happened so quickly. Sometimes I feel like I’ve barely sprouted out of the ground while everyone around me grows and grows. When do you feel old enough for your age?
Perhaps like then, this is my sign to stop playing around with my life and grow up. Maybe things would be better if I followed the expected stepping stones of heterosexual love, marriage and babies. I might enjoy losing my identity to the role of mother and wife. But instead I am all me, all of the time. Is that selfish?
(should I feel embarrassed for not being grown by now?)
We haven’t spoken in well over a decade. I used to know her landline number off by heart, now I see her milestones on social media and I don’t comment on them.
This isn’t the future we pictured, but it’s the one we chose.
