Matteo and I play with strange seed pods from some sort of tree.Hello! I’m back again after a wild and crazy yearend.

Lori and I got together this week for the first time in well over a month (since December 6, to be exact). Aside from a few emails, we really didn’t have much contact with each other. She was in Brazil for three weeks over the holidays and I was swamped with orders and attending shows for Hope’s Flame. I approached this time away from Lori as if it were permanent; as if this is what our friendship would be like if I chose to distance myself from her because of her “friends with kids” status (as I have with past FWKs). I started to reflect on the past year and what that experience has been like—for both of us. We’re doing a “year-in-review” next week (yes, Dually Noted is a year old!) so I don’t want to get too much into it, but I can tell you this: Lori is not a typical FWK (of course, Lori is a far cry from anything typical so it shouldn’t come as a surprise). And in spite of that, I still can’t stop the feelings I have about wishing she were still a childfree friend.

Getting back together with her this week really drove home that feeling. It’s a purely selfish feeling; I totally acknowledge that. But it’s still there. So I got to thinking that maybe the things that drive me up wall about FWKs are simply convenient excuses for me. Maybe the truth of the matter is that I can’t handle “sharing” my friend with a kid. Maybe I’m the family dog that gets jealous of the new baby in the house. Maybe I’m the pouty husband that mopes the day away because his wife is spending more time with the baby than with him.

There’s probably an ounce (or quart) of truth in that. But I also hold fast to my belief that friendships between women are permanently altered when a baby comes along because one of the friends changes in such a way that it makes it hard for the two to relate anymore. And while that is not what happened between Lori and me when we got together this week (far from it, in fact…it was almost like old times, if I ignored the smell of Matteo’s stinky diaper), I can see a time in the not-so-distant future when that may cease to be the case. Each day, Matteo is becoming more and more of a person, clearly making choices and not simply reacting, and Lori is, rightfully, responding to that. She is making alterations in and to her life. I can hear them in her thoughts and will soon see them transformed into actions. And just as with any other friend who makes a shift from one leg to the other, there is a subtle, but relevant, change in distance, in perspective, and in direction.

On this past visit, Matteo was the most interesting he’s ever been to me. He really is a cutie, a sweet kid with a killer of a smile and a sense of curiosity that is fun to watch. I can see why moms want to fill their world with nothing more than that, or even a part of their world with that. And I’m not about to tell them, or Lori, they shouldn’t. But it’s not a world I, or the family dog, can relate to.