what to expect when you’re expecting pt.2

Laurel. That’s not her real name, but it’s one I’ve given her. However, she is real, indeed exists as a mother of two small children, a devoted wife, an attorney (accountant in the book), a resident of a very conservative Connecticut town, a Christian, and a ardent Republican - a believer of George W. Bush. However, she once tended bar, went shot for shot with me, and held me close during my final conversation with my mother. She’s stronger than me, and during that conversation, when I told my mother that she made it impossible for me to love her, Laurel wouldn’t let go, even when I tried desperately to wiggle free. In those days, she was a wonderful friend and I chose to ignore the homophobic comments, the social conservatism. Although today I’m not always so quiet.

In college, she served as my guide to all things WASPy, proper, affluent and ideal. She knew what kind of suits to wear, what hose to buy, how to properly set a table. She was audaciously New England, while I was urbane Brooklyn. Not knowing cashmere from cashmink. And so I clung to her, became somewhat of a hermit crab because I wanted to be the complete opposite of who I was - the daughter of a cocaine addict, denizen to welfare-living and a community where women sipped Bacardi on stoops. I wanted New England. I wanted clean streets and fresh-cut lawns. I wanted Brooks Brothers and Coach purses. So I became the image of Laurel - a card-carrying Christian Republican who shopped at the shops that she shopped, dated boys she approved of, and turned up my nose at certain kinds of wine.

However, that all changed when the weight of the life I portrayed outwardly and the frightened child underneath was becoming too much to bear. I suddenly viewed Laurel with disdain - I loathed her blond hair and her life lived fearlessly - and in 2001, we stopped speaking after a night of heavy drinking, when I pulled out a gram of cocaine and started doing lines on the dresser. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so scared. That evening was a photograph I wanted to shred. We lived our lives separately for four years. No letters. No postcards. No phone calls. Nothing. We had been friends for nearly a decade.

In 2005, while I was tucked away in Easton, Connecticut writing my book, we somehow fell into contact. Now I was clean, done with cocaine for almost three years, and she was the mother of a small son. Our conversation was all nervous ticks and disturbed laughter and we agreed to meet for lunch in the sleepy town of Monroe. During daylight hours, safe. After than short lunch (were her eyes that blue? I seemed to have remembered them green), we held one another close, promised to email and chat, but I went back into the house grateful that we were two very different women. And I was okay with that, with people different. For not being a photocopy of her.

When I wrote my book, I warned Laurel that I’d be unkind to her in spots. And she nodded, expecting that. That was the same day we got into a fight about the environment (she didn’t believe in global warming) and we tacitly agreed that perhaps there were certain conversations safe not to go. She will always be conservative (although I was thrilled that she recently confessed to feeding her children organic fare) and I will always be not so much, and I think we’re both okay with that. I wasn’t going to lose her to politics. But when she read my book, and emailed me yesterday, I was nervous. She could say that she remembered things differently, that I hadn’t disguised her enough, so I was surprised to see that not only did she love the book, she said I was fair to her. She always knew that I would be.

And I went to sleep last night relieved, relieved, relieved.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 7:39 am and is filed under daily murmurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.