Slight Blogging Hiatus While I Ponder The Mysteries of the Universe

(As a side note, this entry is an exercise in writing a blog entry without mentioning personal names. Tricky.)

A old school-friend of mine is having her first child. Now.

She will have gone in to hospital half an hour ago.

I find this both marvellous and frightening: not frightening for the child—who will have two brilliant, devoted, creative, and fascinating parents—but a shock from my childless, still-sixteen-in-my-head perspective.

My best friend has two children, and I find that strange enough. Again, it’s not a bad kind of strange; I adore my friend and my two nephews, especially (solipsistically) now that the elder of the two is starting to realise how cool his Auntie Treena is, and brightened my last Christmas by insisting “Auntie Treena, come outside! Auntie Treena, sit here! Auntie Treena, touch that—I think it’s hot.”

But when you’ve known someone for twenty-six years and yet live 1000 kilometres away from them, their motherhood is something that comes as a surprise. Perhaps if I’d lived round the corner from her, I wouldn’t have felt that she’s suddenly leveled up while I wasn’t looking.

It’s not so much of a shock with this friend. We were part of a very close group of girlfriends at school—a group I cherished, who made high-school life—in a fascistic, agricultural high school where we were expected to pregnancy-test cows (honestly, do you know what that entails?) and dissect sheep—more than bearable. In fact, they created a joy in life and in the life of the imagination on which I’m still drawing now.

But then I lost touch, when I moved to Brisbane for graduate work.

My fault entirely.

And when things went a little wonky up here, I became more and more uncertain about reinitiating contact—something that stemmed from my own feelings of failure, not from any awareness of how they would react.

Enter Facebook, where one of these friends found me—and it all fell into place again.

I met up with many of them over Christmas for the first time in years. And most people who heard this asked, “Wasn’t it a bit strange?” But, it wasn’t. Because there’d been no falling out or hurt feelings. We’d been close and we’d drifted apart, so the re-meeting was just good fun (and that includes a separate meeting with another friend and her gorgeous children—hearing a friend you still think of as eighteen say to her six-year-old child “Catriona was Mummy’s friend at big school” is a shock and half, especially when said child was a foot long last time you saw him.)

And now one of these friends is having her first child.

She’ll be a wonderful mother—she always had a unique outlook on life.

And her husband will be a besotted father.

Their child is lucky, and I wish all good speed for its arrival.

Best of good luck, friend: best of good luck.