be loved

The first five months after giving birth were like the worst time of my life.

The worst time of my life began in the spring of my senior year of high school after a dear friend of mine was killed in a car crash.

At the time of her death my friend and I did not live near each other. She was not a fixture in my daily life and was not acquainted with those I saw on a daily basis. The last time my friend and I spoke I called her up and we chatted through the second half of a Saturday afternoon movie. That was ten hours before the car she was riding in slid underneath a semi.

     we spend a long time on the telephone line
     talking bout things to come
     sweet dreams and fine machines
     in pieces on the ground

Of all the things I felt when my friend died, I clung to and holed up in my sense of being alone. No one I knew had known my friend like I had, no one I knew could in real time relate to my loss. I knew that I wasn’t the first person in the world to suffer a profound loss; I knew other who had suffered through profound losses of their own. But no one in my life was suffering profoundly at the same time I was. I had no one to commune with during my experience so I sat at that lunch table alone.

With my friend gone I found myself looking for someone to fill the space made in me when she left. I wasn’t looking for someone to replace her, but for someone who could relate to my experience of isolation, someone with whom I swap stories about understanding that type of loneliness. Time past and I kept an eye out for this type of companionship. And then, when the number of years since m friend’s death were equal to the number of years I’d lived before I lost her, I had a baby.

Of all the things I felt after giving birth, I was holed up and alone. I had lots of help and support but I also had to feed my baby. I don’t know that I had ever devoted my self to anything in life in the way that breastfeeding my baby demanded. There were no days off. There were no hours off. This clearly became a metaphor for what it meant to be a parent and it wasn’t a fun realization to come to.

As I came to terms with how having a child was changing my life I felt as though I was experiencing deja voux. I realized that the dramatic no going back journey I was on was similar to the way my life was changed when my friend died. But I found that I was having the exact opposite reaction than I had before.

After I had my baby, though I spent a lot of time literally alone, I felt deeply connected to humanity. I understood that I was going through something every other mother goes through and I drew strength from that. I also understood that in every life there are moments after which nothing will be the same. Those are moments you don’t get over, but ones that having lived through will elevate you to a new level, even if it takes you a lifetime.