Rainy day, gloomy subject

I don't know if it's the weather or the long awake stretches at night or just working through the long to-do list around the house, but I have been spending a lot of time over the past few weeks thinking about friendship.

Maybe my expectations are too high, maybe the couples we know who are truly attached at the hip and couldn't imagine needing anyone else have it right (long-time readers are probably well aware that JD and I despite being quite happily married are the anti-thesis of this, and both very much enjoy our independence), maybe I'm really doing something wrong, but it has just struck me recently how much it sucks to be quite this pregnant with a toddler in tow and no best friend in the country. I know that I am exceedingly lucky to have several very close friends who I am sure I will be in touch with in 10 years ... who just all happen to live outside the U.S. and thus are not particularly easy to reach. But when I am having a bad day, there's no one I can call at night except my husband who is usually busy at work.

There is certainly no one who is going to call and just check how I am doing. And I guess that's what has been bothering me recently. My close friends are too busy with their own families and living abroad and time differences, etc. get in the way and my local friends are mostly just acquaintances who will certainly ask "how are you?" when we run into each other on the street, but they're not going to go out of their way to check in on me. And mostly, I'm fine. But there are those occasional days when I am tired or overwhelmed or like last night when I snap at the fusspot (and it retrospect I was entirely in the wrong. She kept telling me that she'd peed and I kept telling her to go to bed and stop trying to stall, never thinking that she had managed to scrunch her diaper enough that I sent a rather damp child to bed on a cold night ... oh, the dumb things we do when we're tired) that I really wish I had a friend who I talked to every day. Or who at least might pick up the phone and genuinely ask how things are going sometime. But maybe I am just fantasizing a type of relationship that doesn't really exist anymore, especially not in a super-busy city. And maybe it's also that we were the first of our really close friends to have kids and things will be different in 5 or 10 years.


Or maybe, it could just be that I finally e-mailed my 'best friend,' the one who was with me through every step of middle and high school, the one who I almost didn't graduate on time from college because I dropped everything to be with her when she got cancer (a cancer which needless to say has almost certainly made her infertile), the one who was my maid of honor ... and she didn't write back. Nada. In 2 weeks. I know she's read her e-mail, so ... beats me. I am sure the news is hard for her, both because she probably won't be having bio-kids and because she's still single. But I guess I figured that in 2 weeks she'd get it together to write a superficial line or two back. And I certainly don't feel that I contact her at this point. If she's so upset that she can't write back, I'm guessing the last thing she wants is to talk to me.