Amy Giampetroni is a happily married woman, a full-time stay-at-home mom to a preschool boy and a part-time stepmom to an adolescent girl, living in Wisconsin. You can read more about Amy here and at her blog, Average Everyday Super Woman. Click here to check out Amy’s other posts on This Mommy Gig.
This weekend marks an interesting event, one that strangely hasn’t arisen for several years: I will be going to spend a few days with a girlfriend of mine whom I’ve known since I was 10. And I find myself wondering how that will all play out with her husband and four kids present and my son along for the ride, because - in the old days - it was just the two of us, knocking around together and being silly without any other distractions. The last time we spent anywhere near this length of time continuously together was probably a decade ago (God, can it really be that long? How old are we??), and no doubt we’ve both changed considerably in that time. I’ll admit, I’m a little nervous!
“G” and I first met in 5th grade, but weren’t really friends until we got into middle school and cheerleading. Before long, we became best friends, practically sisters, and we did pretty much everything together until we each went to our respective colleges. For me, that was UW-Madison; for her, it was a college up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Whenever G came home for breaks, we’d get together and she’d stay at my campus apartment for at least a day or two during her visits. In many ways, it was like we were hardly that far apart, and we fell easily into our old routines. Then everything changed.
When G was still in her final year of grad school up in Duluth, MN, and I was graduated and working my first post-college job in Milwaukee, she came for a visit and said she was worried about a lump she found in her neck. She showed it to me, and my blood ran cold with fear for her. After much prodding, I got her to see a doctor. It was cancer. Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stage IIa - the mass in her neck and a tumor behind her sternum. She was terrified, I was terrified, but we were in it together. I was with her when the doctor told her the bad news, I drove her up to school in Duluth after she had a bone marrow biopsy so she could take a leave of absence to pursue her course of treatment down in Madison & Milwaukee, and I spent pretty much all of my free time with her in between chemo and radiation to help keep her spirits up and her body strong and active. Thank God she was a decent athlete at the time because her 22-year-old body weathered the ravages of chemo and radiation remarkably well due in large part to the shape she was in going into the whole thing.
While her illness brought us closer together in some respects, however, it also created a quiet divide in the sense that she was fighting and surviving something I couldn’t even begin to fathom. She was facing questions and fears that I could understand in theory, but certainly not in practice. And there was more: she had met a guy a few months prior to her diagnosis while doing an internship in California, and she liked him. A lot. As she marched through the months of treatment, this guy visited from time to time, and I knew she felt differently towards him than any of the guys she had dated before. For crying out loud, this guy actually shaved her head for her when her hair started falling out in clumps, and still told her how beautiful she was. That was what she needed.
Shortly after she finished her treatment, I got engaged to Dan, whom I had started dating just a few months before G’s diagnosis. Shortly after that, G discovered she was pregnant with her first child, and got engaged and married within a matter of months. This was all very happy news, especially since there had been a 50/50 chance that the chemo portion of her treatment would render her infertile - except that G’s doctors had warned her repeatedly during and after her treatment that she should not get pregnant for at least two years in case her cancer didn’t stay in remission. She knew that - and so did her boyfriend. I was angry - at him - for not putting her best interests, her LIFE, before his own interests. And thus the divide grew.
Thankfully, G had an excellent, healthy pregnancy and gave birth to a beautiful, healthy baby boy early the following year. Though her oncologist had to skip one set of scans due to G’s pregnancy, when they were able to do the scans after she gave birth, all looked well and all indications were that her cancer was in remission. Still, I knew she was scared. It was no longer a matter of simply worrying about her own life or death, but she had a baby to worry about then, too.
About a year and a half later, we had a major falling out. It’s a long story and the details don’t need to be shared, but suffice it to say that secrets and lies are not among my favorite things. We didn’t speak for nearly a year.
I was hurt, angry, determined. I missed my best friend terribly. But I wanted nothing to do with her. And I moved on.
When at last we spoke again, it was tentative, charged with unspoken words and emotions that ran very deep. We tried to talk about what had happened, but it was clear that it needed to be left in the past. We managed to repair our friendship somewhat in the months that followed, but it wasn’t the same. Truth be told, it still isn’t the same now, six years later.
Is she still my best friend? Sadly, no. Is she someone I still want in my life? Yes. We share so much history, such intense history. That does not a friendship make, nor is it justification to stay in a friendship that’s no longer healthy. But I think we’ve both made peace with where things stand between us, we’ve learned to accept the choices we’ve each made without comment, and what’s left is still the two of us, knocking along together whenever we can, even if there’s now a gaggle of little ones and pesky husbands in the mix, too.
By the way, G will mark her 10th anniversary of being cancer-free next spring. And in the past ten years, she’s given birth to not just one but FOUR healthy, beautiful children - two boys, two girls. She’s still an athlete, incredibly healthy, and happy. And all of that makes me very happy.
But I’ve never stayed with her family before. We’ve visited them for a few hours when we’ve been in Michigan for Dan’s family things, but never stayed there, much less for three days. And since she got married and had her children, she’s never stayed with my family. I don’t really know why other than perhaps the demands of our extended families have certainly cut short the little time we have together when she’s in Wisconsin or I’m in Michigan, not to mention the demands of having little children.
So, yes, I’m nervous. But I’m also excited. Excited to get back to the old “us” again, to have three days of uninterrupted time together to talk, dream, gossip, laugh, play, and just enjoy passing time together again. I love the many girlfriends I’ve made in the years since G and I drifted apart, but there’s still something very special about the friends who have known us since we were little, the ones who have seen us bumble and stumble our way through childhood, adolescence, early adulthood. Who’ve made stupid mistakes and had great laughs and adventures with us.
I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
