Oh, Baby

When I'm not complaining about the PhD and part-time work, I also sometimes manage to see my friends. "Yay!" I hear you cry. "Quit whining, woman, and tell us the other stuff!" Well, this month, I got to see my two very best friends. The ones that live in different continents - one in America, and one in Australia. These are the friends that changed my life; the women that made me who I am. They inspire, challenge, support and love me.  They've seen me through my very lowest points and celebrate with me during the best of times. They're also intelligent, hilarious, witty, generous and kind, and they're all mine. No, you can't have them. They are all mine. All...for....me.

We're at the stage now where we don't always get to stay in contact with each other as much as we would like, but we always pick up from exactly where we left off. Thank the gods for facebook and skype, but nothing beats being in the same room with them. When I knew that they were coming home, nothing but death was going to keep me at home. I would have shot the laptop and set fire to my place of work if I'd had to. Not only were my two favourite women coming home, but one of them was bringing her twin baby girls with her for their christening. I say "christening", but it was more like a gathering, and it was the reason for a mini-exodus to my friend's family house. She's from a big family, and after a shared friendship with her siblings (and more recently, her parents) for many years, they feel like my family, too. I also jumped at the chance to visit them all at home for the first time, and get a picture of me on the tractor before I left. Mission accomplished.

Meeting the twins was like meeting celebrities. I've known about them since...let's call her Fransisca....first became pregnant and discovered it was twins. I watched her get bigger on skype and facebook and sympathised with her as her pregnancy was not easy in the least. But the excitement...oh, the excitement of knowing that Fransisca and her husband had actually made human beings, and they were going to be born, was electric. For the first time, I regretted my choice of taking on the PhD because I really, really wanted to go and help. She lives in Oz, after all, and while she lives with her lovely husband...erm....Lazarou, there's only two of them. I wished I could help the adults outnumber the babies. Six hands is better than four, and all that. Moving to Oz not being an option, I had to wait for the christening to meet them and help them and hug them and kiss them.

I'm not articulate enough to communicate effectively the tidal wave of emotion that I experienced when I first saw them. It was in the early hours of a Friday morning when they were brought out from their room, in the arms of their parents, and the second I clapped eyes on Beautiful One, and then Beautiful Two, I was hooked. They were instantly the most interesting people I had ever met, and the most fun, and the most endearing. Your best friend's babies are more addictive than crack - fact. I would have foregone a week of passion with Benedict Cumberbatch for them. A week in Rome, with an Aston Martin DB9, in a five-star hotel, on sheets made from gold and silk and money in a room filled with the British Museum, while the Prima Porta statue of Augustus looked on. No thanks, Cumberbatch, I've twins to meet. Everything the babies did fascinated me. They have so much personality already; no surprises there, really. I spent the next few days watching them, trying to make them laugh, playing with them, being completely enamoured by them. I loved it. And it was during this time that I came to realise something; this is probably never going to happen for me.

There was no wailing or gnashing of teeth with this realisation; I'm vocal about not wanting to have children, and now, I feel like the places I had on reserve for children have been taken up by Beautiful One and Beautiful Two. And when my other friend who lives in America....I'm going to call her Barbara Bel Geddes...has babies, it will be the same. I'm not in a relationship. I'm not looking for one. I'm 37, and the window of time for viable fertility is getting smaller and smaller - and I can feel it. My body is changing, and it really doesn't cost me any thought (apart from being damn annoying and inconvenient) or make me despair for The Life Not Lived. It's not my style. I'm just glad to be here. Everything else is a bonus. I don't have a plan for procreation, and it's not something I ever wanted to pursue for its own sake. Now, I imagine that this blog entry could be quite different if I, like Fransisca, were married to a long-term boyfriend, but I'm not. And even then, to be honest, it would be a difficult decision to make, and there's a heavy chance that the answer would still be no.

But my word, do I love being Cool Aunt Fall Girl. I love it so much, it's been hard to think about other stuff since I came back home. It's a strange sensation, to have your primal drive for reproduction totally taken care of by your friend's babies, but that's the closest I can come to describing the experience. I am so grateful to Fransisca and Lazarou (bloody hell) for making the mammoth trip to come home and let me have time with those two little incredi-babies, and to Barbara Bel Geddes for being here too. Even if I did cry all over her. Oh wait - I cried all over a few people. Sorry guys. I will pray for more time with you, if you guys pray for me to get some decent cash together so I can come and see you. Just when I thought I couldn't love either of you more, this happens. Who's the luckiest Fall Girl in the world? I am.