Happy birthday to my newest friend

Happy birthday, Aidan!

Your kind words to me on my thirty-fifth birthday meant a tremendous amount. I spent that day bobbing around the ocean with my F.O.O. (I love that abbrev for family of origin) and my own nuclear family. As I often am, I was thoughtful and melancholy. As I often do, I felt lost and trapped at the same time. Your words made me cry down below on my parents’ boat, as I tried to coax my terrible eater of a four year old to eat some bites of turkey.

We were just starting to build a friendship in the ether. I can’t recall exactly when we started our email dialog, but I know it has never stopped. Our superficial similarities gave way to more substantial ones. We discovered that beneath our shiny resume exteriors and oddly identical marriage/children paths beat similar, complicated, insecure hearts. Obviously there is much more that we have to learn about each other, and there are many differences between us as well (you want four children, I am not even sure I can handle the two I have; you are an extrovert, I am an introvert; I obsessively write thank you notes, you obsessively write your blog :)).

One thing we’ve shared and discussed already ad nauseum is our strict adherence to the path of greatest accomplishment and external validation. I have enormous respect for you because you took one of the biggest risks of all: you quit your Big Law job. You followed your heart and you wrote your novel and you sold it. I can’t describe to you how this inspires me and terrifies me and motivates me all at the same time. You said over lunch with Danielle that you don’t take risks, but I think you did: you took a risk that makes choosing a midwife over an OB trivial. You risked it all and the world rewarded you for that. I stand in awe of that courage, of that accomplishment, and I look forward to watching the future roll out in front of you. I know it is star-spangled and full of books and babies and, I hope, many, many emails with me.

And since those words I read while sailing, we have actually met in person. For me that was an outright, joyous affirmation of what I had sensed through your emails. That our friendship was real, and that I could with good faith count you among my twelve. That the support I sense from you in the bloggy wilderness is sturdy and that I can lean on it in earnest. You have given me great confidence already in my writing through your determined support, demonstrated through introductions and suggestions and plain old faith.

Meeting like-minded women is one of the unanticipated outcomes of my blogging experiment. And one of the great joys. I hope you celebrate well with your girls and your husband and your family, exulting in, as you say, both the serious and the silly. I am sure that today – like every day – will be crammed with both.

Happy Birthday, Aidan.