Back when we lived in California, I had a friend named Autumn. She was TG and awesome – fun to be around, friendly, and sweet. She’d been through some crap with her family not accepting her in the past but right before I had my son things in that dept were starting to look up for her. I was so, so happy for her.
Then I had my baby and, for unknown reasons, never spoke to Autumn again.
I tried. God/s/ess/whatever knows that I tried. I sent her emails and phone calls (until her number changed), and posted on her facebook and left messages. No response. It was as if Autumn had dropped off the face of the earth… except that I saw her on AIM every now and then and I’d *poke* her to show I was online and wanted to talk if she had time. Sometimes that little “…” would appear and AIM would inform me that Autumn was typing. But no answer ever came.
This happened over a year ago and I’m still bewildered and confused and hurt. I know that I may have hurt Autumn’s feelings on the day my son was born – I asked her to be with me in the birthing room, but that was back before I knew my son was breech, back before they forced me into a c-section I would have done anything to get out of, back before I knew that the only one allowed in the surgery would be my husband. I learned later, through the very last phone call I had with Autumn, that she’d taken her last day off to be with me and my husband never called her to let her know that I was done with surgery.
Now, in my husband’s defense, he didn’t call ANYONE. Not my mother or sisters waiting anxiously in KS. Not my friends in KS, not my friends in CA. No one. He was too gobsmacked by the stress of the morning, of watching me nearly lose it on the surgery table, and when they almost had to slap an oxygen mask on my face because my almost-pneumonia (which, btw, had kept me out of surgery for a WEEK already) almost drowned me in my own mucus thanks to the angle the table was at while they were sewing me back up.
But I can get why, if that is the reason, why she would be mad. I was too doped up and sick and wrapped up in my new baby and the utter terror of being a new mother to properly apologize and make it up to her. And by time the three-month-hell mark had passed, and I was starting to get more than 30 minutes of sleep at a time, we were preparing to move back to KS. I had next to no time to hunt her down and apologize. Hell, in the time I knew her she’d changed apts three times, so I had NO CLUE where she was or I would’ve gone to her door to bring her flowers and dark chocolate and hugs myself.
Other times I think the reason she quit talking to me was because Melly made me take down the FB page supporting this site. I wasn’t allowed to link it to my REAL facebook account because he didn’t want nosy people to link the two, especially once my books started selling. And I can understand that. It was important to him, so I resigned as admin to the page and signed Autumn up as admin instead. There were maybe 3 “fans” and she never mentioned it so I figured it was okay. But looking back, maybe it wasn’t okay. Maybe she felt like I was passing judgment or something. I wasn’t, obviously, but I never talked about it. I never even thought to explain simply because there was Nothing To Do on the page. No one cared about it, honestly. I mean, hell, who am I? Nobody.
Ultimately, I don’t know what I did to make my friend drop me. Maybe I said the wrong thing. Maybe she felt like I dropped her first because I vanished into baby-haze and didn’t reappear until it was nearly too late. Maybe she was just busy. All I know is that, inexplicably, I lost a person I considered a good friend, and I feel the worse for it.
So, Autumn, if you ever wander back this way… I’m sorry. I’m sorry for whatever I did. I’m sorry that we don’t talk anymore. And if it isn’t something I did, if maybe you feel like it’d just be weird and awkward to call me now, that too much time has passed, but you do sort of want to reconnect, please, please, call/email/msg anyway. Because it’s never too late.
And I miss you.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s very hard on new parents. I mean, I remember our first and I kept thinking – between the lack of sleep and the yelling (some of it his
) – that there would be a knock at the door and someone would say: “Playtime over now. Time to hand the kid back to those who know what they’re doing.”
Friends did fall by the wayside, but then with sleepless nights, a mountain of washing / food prep and a complete turnaround on your old life; something had to give. Some friends stayed with us, some drifted away. So it seems to go with life.
With luck, your friend will be back in touch. Hopefully she’ll understand why communications dropped and that it wasn’t a snub. If I can say this, I think it takes two people to be friends; one person can’t do all the running and the calling.
Honey you are such a sweetheart. I don’t know Autumn, but I’m guessing that she isn’t upset and that there’s another explanation for falling out of touch. Delivery days can be chaotic, especially when things don’t go quite according to plan, and sometimes things get lost in the shuffle; unfortunate, but no one could get too upset about that. And at the point that you have a baby, your world revolves around them almost entirely for quite some time; that’s normal and it’s nothing to apologize about.
I’ll be your friend?
RC
Yay, new friend!