I love Halloween. The decorations, the costumes, the chance for my ever-present-but-usually-latent inner Goth to emerge. But I also love it for another reason. It marks the anniversary of Ben and I meeting two of our now closest friends, Jess and Adam - our friendiversary.
On Halloween of 2009, Ben and I attended a party at our old house - this is the house where we met. A long story in itself, basically I lived in a house with a bunch of twenty somethings who had come together on craigslist. I went away one summer to do fieldwork in Borneo (as you do) and while I was gone two housemates moved out. Through my occasional email contact, I told my housemates not to choose a straight man to move in (the original group included 3 women and 2 gay men), but they did. And he eventually became my husband.
Anyway, every year the funhouse (as it was known) held a Halloween party. Given the large portion of theatrical and artistically-inclined guests, the costumes were often impressive. In 2009 (the year after our wedding), I went as Jennifer from the movie Jennifer's Body, which I was slightly obsessed with at the time. Ben kept it old school and went as Indiana Jones. We entered our old home, which never ceased to feel like home to me, and soon discovered that Ben was not the only Indiana Jones in attendance. The other man, whose costume included a far more accurate jacket, naturally struck up a conversation with us. The abundance of blood in my costume intrigued his wife, who had gone as a toddler in a tiara.
The conversation progressed and honestly I do not remember what we discussed. But I remember finding them both incredibly nice and intelligent and easy to talk to. They had not even planned on coming to this party. They were on their way to another party when they decided to just stop by this party whose hosts they didn't even know - a friend of a friend sort of thing. They came with a friend who ended up spending most of the night intimately engaged on the dance floor with a man dressed as a Spartan whom she had just met. (Crazily enough, despite the natural assumption that this was a Halloween night only affair, this couple stayed together and recently got married! Congratulations to them! I will forever think of the man as "the Spartan").
We left the party together after exchanging phone numbers. I remember feeling sad saying goodnight, unwilling to end our conversation. Sometime in the next week, I nervously asked Ben, "Do you think it's too early to ask them to brunch?" We decided it was not too early and met up at the old Fatty's on Ditmars, a thoroughly enjoyable meal despite the presence of a rather large cockroach near our table!
Our friendship grew close quickly, something not always common with friends acquired in adulthood. We had been friends less than a year when tragedy struck us. Our daughter Sylvie was stillborn at 20 weeks. Almost immediately after I was released from the hospital, we needed to move but I was struggling to function even at a base level. Our relatively new friends rose to the occasion, helping Ben move our furniture and literally packing my entire (and considerable) wardrobe and bringing it to our new apartment. A psychologist with infinite empathy and an understanding of grief, Jess supported me through a long emotional recovery that continued through my next pregnancy which I was convinced would also fail.
Jess and Adam visited us in the hospital after Nate was born. In the weeks that followed, when I was exhausted from nursing on a hourly basis with almost no sleep, Jess would come over. She helped me put together the mind-boggling contraption that is a breast pump and use it for the first time, which allowed someone other than me to feed Nate. She helped me sort out how to put Baby Nate in the carrier, an at first confusing task that soon became second nature, which allowed me to get out of the house. At dinner at our place one night while we held the baby, I made some comment asking if they wanted one of those. Jess said (and I remember distinctly), "Not now. We'll catch you the next time around."
And that's what they did. Several months into my pregnancy with Willa, I learned that they were expecting their first baby. We experienced time pregnant together and their daughter was born only a few months after Willa. Now considering them family and with our daughters so close in age, we decided to ask Jess and Adam to be Willa's godparents.
Unlike with Nate, I attended no Mommy meetups with Willa - I found mothering two exhausting and couldn't see bringing a toddler into a room full of babies. So Jess was really my only mom friend with a baby near Willa's age. That is until she introduced me to some wonderful mothers she had met. We began setting up regular playdates (which at first just involved the babies lying on blankets while we chatted and occasionally fed them). These moms I now count as good friends, friends I would not have if not for Jess. These friends in turn introduced me to other moms with whom I also became friends. All of these people have enriched my life and the lives of my children. They have supported me while I waded through the occasionally murky waters of motherhood. Without them, my life would be very different and almost certainly worse.
So I owe a lot to that Halloween night. Whether it was some kind of mystical force in that house which brought so many people together, a cosmic costume coincidence, or the lucky stroke of bloody make-up, it was a charmed evening. I do not believe things happen for a reason. But I do believe something magical happened that Halloween. And the spark from that magic has brightened my life ever since.
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