Chapter Change

the friends who knew you way back when

I have a memory of living with my friend Sarah back in 2011. We had just graduated college and I was waitressing at a restaurant in Philly. It was one of those all-day restaurants that had a robust boozy brunch option, which meant I could make a couple hundred bucks before lunchtime on a good weekend. This was more than enough money to pay for the tiny apartment we shared, a space so narrow that it could only fit half of an L-shaped couch in it. We had a tv, but no channels—just all 10 seasons of Friends on dvd, which we watched on loop.

Sarah and I socialized a lot—responsibly of course. We smoked hookah in the small backyard that we shared with our neighbors. We went to Phillies games in the afternoons and pre-gamed with what bars called the “city-wide special”—a shot of whiskey and a beer. We ate nachos and drank margaritas during happy hour. And we stayed up late, cracking ourselves up with inside jokes that we often added to a quote board we kept hanging in our hallway. It was a free and fun time in our lives. The most free: that blessed time post-college and pre-career living with your best friend.

I cut our chapter short though, when I decided to move back to Boston halfway through our lease. That decision wasn’t for a boy but a boy definitely expedited it, since I’d found a reason to be excited to return to my hometown. I knew Philly was never going to be my long-term place and I already knew the career I wanted to pursue and what that would require of me. When the opportunity came to make a move, I took it. As much as I loved the freedom of that time in my life, I craved my aspirations more.

Life would never be that carefree again, and looking back I ask myself the age-old question of if I enjoyed it enough while I had it. I was an adult without much perspective or fear. And I was an adult without much responsibility. As I write in We Share The Same Sky describing life a few years later, “It was that time in life when we were all making bold decisions for ourselves, but not the kind that had to do with kids and marriage. We were all just figuring it out. Barack Obama was president and change was happening. Life was moving and love was flowing.”

It’s easy to track the upward tilt of responsibility since then. Year by year, as if mimicking the divisiveness in politics, my millennial adulthood has become higher in stakes. 

Sarah is still one of my best friends. We’ve never lived in the same state again and probably never will, but we’ve been by each other’s side through it all. She’s the person I can text to say “Remember when…” and somehow that works even when she wasn’t physically there. She’s seen me party at my worst and grieve at my best. She’s the person I can talk to everyday and have that feel as natural as when we slip and let a few months pass us by without a check-in.

Like all good longtime friendships, we’ve navigated moving through different life stages at different times which is not for the faint of heart. Another friend once made the astute observation that you don’t really know who your good friends are until you’ve changed some chapters with them. Nearly 20 years into my adult life, I really know what that means.

Sarah and I certainly have had phases when we were closer. The most significant was when we both had relationships end when we were 27. Her ending was a painful breakup and mine was widowhood. It didn’t matter that our journeys through the pain and recovery were different; we were both thrust back into the dating world after being in relationships that we thought would last longer. It was those years that followed, when we began sharing our lives through voice notes, that really accelerated our long-distance closeness. We called it our free therapy, sending each other 20-minute monologues examining the repetitive disasters we were having trying to meet a good man. That closeness became even deeper when the pandemic hit and we each found ourselves living alone, without any human contact for months on end. That’s when we picked up the routine of daily happy hours again just like when we were back in those post-college years. In a weird way, that truly lonely time was when I talked to my friends the most.

Since the pandemic, Sarah has changed jobs and moved through the death of one beloved dog and the adoption of another. She also found herself in a serious relationship a few years before I did, disrupting our many years of moving through the world in the same chapter of life. In that time I moved states, adopted my own canine companion, and then found myself a husband who came with a cat (Sarah is the friend referenced in my previous piece who would say I’ve changed since a cat moved into my home). And in the backdrop, the world has become an increasingly dramatic and terrifying dumpster fire. No longer does life have the feeling of lightness our early adult years afforded us. It’s quite the opposite.

It’s been 18 years since Sarah and I met as college freshmen. That’s literally half of our lives. But recently I did the ultimate chapter change and one that Sarah won’t join me in. I got myself pregnant. It feels strange just to write that here. As I type these words, there is a baby growing inside of me that has fingernails and toes and a functional kidney. It can hear my voice, see light and feel when I touch my widening belly. It’s a wild feeling and something that I’ve barely started adjusting to identity-wise. 

I was hesitant to tell Sarah the news when I found out. I was hesitant to tell many of my friends. In a weird way I was embarrassed. I felt ashamed that I was moving into a new chapter of life without them. I worried, and still worry, what this new responsibility, the ultimate responsibility, will do to my friendships. How will this change everything? 

I began writing this essay as a stream of consciousness scribbled on a piece of paper. It began with a stark memory of Sarah and I as those 22-year-olds in Philly on our half couch sorting through the mail. A magazine had been delivered that neither of us subscribed to that was for new mothers. We were aghast and threw it in the trash, commenting that neither of us would probably ever have kids. We both had some things to do in life and not her, nor I, had motherhood on our bucket list.

But here I am. Surprising myself (but probably not her) in a pretty wonderful way. 

Sarah and I have been hard on ourselves over the past couple years for not talking enough. We’ve been missing the daily details we used to get from one another as our pattern of catching up shifted to only every-few-months. But I sent her a voice note the other day letting her know I started working on this essay. I said something along the lines of “I just want to tell you up front that I’m being creepy and spending a lot of time thinking about you these days.” Then I let her know I wanted to practice writing about being pregnant through the lens of our friendship. She poked fun of me, as she should, for the way I framed it and then we proceeded to get into a day-long conversation about friendship and changing chapters.

Although Sarah doesn’t plan to have kids, she has more experience with them than I do; she’s had close friends with kids for many years. She shared with me the meaningful ways that she’s been invited into the kids’ lives for quality time and how she’s been impressed by her friends for also carving out their own adult time. All in all, she wasn’t as concerned about my changing chapter as I was.

And she imparted some wisdom. She shared that her fear for long-distance friendships is that the relationship begins to fracture when we stop sharing with one another. Me having a child is not a challenge, but me suddenly not sharing the details of my life with her would be. I already have examples of this from my friendship with her and others. It’s when we go inwards, assuming that our friends don’t want to hear what we think they can’t relate to, that the distance in closeness begins to mimic the distance in miles.

I needed to hear this from her. I’ve been both guilty of this and I’ve also been really hurt by this. I think most of us who nurture meaningful friendships can’t deny that we’ve been on both sides of this equation. We’ve hurt our closest peers by not sharing our lives and we’ve felt left out by having them not share with us. Sometimes it becomes a standoff. And sometimes that changes everything.

So, my vow to Sarah was that she will hear all the details, well at least many of them. I’ll keep her posted on my changing body, the number of times at night I have to get up to pee these days (too many), and my confusing swirl of thoughts about becoming a woman that I wasn’t sure I would grow up to be. And hopefully when the kid arrives, Sarah will get to be the raddest aunt who regales them with stories about our younger years, hopefully both embarrassing me and desperately trying to make me seem cool. We will grow old together in cliché form, devouring fancy cheese and drinking wine, while she turns to my kid to say “Let me tell you about the time when…”

Sarah and myself as college freshman at Temple University, circa 2007