LESSONS IN ADULTHOOD
Every friendship is marked by points where you realise that no matter how often you finish each other’s sentences, you are still two individual people living separate lives. First love is one of these occasions, when friendship comes second to teenage hormones and the thrill of snogging in the back row at the cinema. Later, you might find that work gets in the way of spending hours analysing each other’s lives.
But as you get older, there is one event that pulls apart your lives and forces you to redesign that cosy attachment: becoming a parent. For women, especially, there is still a gap between those who do have children and those who don’t. I remember finding out that my closest girlfriend had created a ‘baby questions’ Whatsapp group and I wasn’t in it. Entirely correctly, she’d assumed I had no interest in the minutiae of breastfeeding, but it marked the di.erence in our lives which, until that point, had been so entwined.