The Cure for Sleep: Friends
Season 2, 004: how did they begin - our great friendships? What words or gestures were risked - and rewarded?
my thoughts on this month’s theme
How humble I’ve felt in these last six months since the publication of The Cure for Sleep: good friends from my years as a young mother who I’ve been hiding from since the mistakes in love and life I describe in the book - they’ve read my story now and every single one has welcomed me back into their homes. No shame, no blame. Just love and understanding.
And so this is the theme from the book most on my mind, as I begin now to spend less time alone with words, and more hours outdoors back in the company of others: even meeting some of you in this story-sharing community for the first time in real time/place.
If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that in the minutes of my near-death I apprehend fully the shames and regrets of my fearful first life. And what I suffered from most was not a lack of worldly status, but a sorrow that at 33 my last real friendships (husband and work colleagues aside) were already decades in the past.
So the first work of my second life - alongside becoming a reliable caregiver to my new son - was to find a way to meet and make friends with other parents. And even though my story builds from that obscurity in a small town to being photographed and filmed in public… I still believe the time (& chapter) of my greatest courage was the one where I (shy and friendless so long) take my son to the local playgroup for new parents and their babies: an episode which is this issue’s extract.
your invitation to write
This month’s invitation to write for the project is as follows: Tell me about a great or surprising friendship in your life: how it began - or was repaired after a rift or long silence. Or tell me about an ideal form of friendship you still hope to find…
[Please read the guidelines for contributors if this is your first submission to the project.]
And a suggestion for more work around this: Think about the great friendships from your favourite novels or biographies - how much of those qualities do you bring to your relationships, or get from them? How might you get more of that in your life?
You can read the stories already contributed by readers over on The Cure For Sleep website.
the cure for sleep: extract
My father’s closed door, the unrest of my childhood home, all the house moves, the nerve-fray: this had made me an outcast. But like so many who feel tender and unsure, I’d pretended arrogance until it became me: scales on my eyes and a hard shell around self made from layer after layer of refused opportunities.
Graduations, birthdays, christenings, weddings: these official threshold events have photographs that help us celebrate and remember. Our small, private steps from fear into courage are rarely recorded this way, so it is easy to forget their importance. How life can be transformed by taking a breath and walking through a door on an ordinary day.
There is no photo that shows me pushing through the stiff entrance to a converted church one spring morning, come with my son to its playgroup. Finding a space among the toys spread out. Laying my baby on one of the mats, heart hammering, before making shy upward glances at others who had come alone.
A few familiar faces. Women I’d seen in clinics? At the supermarket? And over there – stranger with a cloud of dark hair who spoke to her boy in a calm, quiet voice I admired.
If she was on the radio, I’d listen all day.
I thought this and smiled.
She smiled back.
These simple exchanges that change everything.
Shadrick, Tanya. The Cure for Sleep (pp. 127-128). Orion. Kindle Edition.
I have always been a lonely person. I think it comes from a childhood of being parented by 2 people who were there in a practical day to day sense but not in any emotional sense at all. I don’t ever remember being asked how or who I was. That has left a space in my life and heart that has always been there and that has become more noticeable the older I have got. I have always had lots of friends- school friends, Uni friends, work friends, mum friends, lifelong friends and even best friends. I even count an ex boyfriend as a lifelong soul mate friend. And my lovely children also feel like friends too. But even with a lifetime filled with lovely friendship, nothing has ever filled the loneliness in my heart that my childhood left. I still feel like I am searching for one person to fill that gap. Not in the sense of a partner either as I share my life with a solid, dependable man. But as I reach mid life and all of these things seem to come up to be healed and faced, I realise that the friend that I have been searching for really is my whole life is really, in a cliched sense, actually myself and that is where my search for belonging needs to be. I need to be my own best friend.
Last night I had a strange image of putting my head down onto Christy’s kitchen table and all of my body parts became segmented and fell off. Shattering, but orderly, like all of a puppet’s strings untied, let loose, no longer a cohesive whole, a crash test dummy with no seat belt, no car, no blood. My parts were wooden and worn smooth, light like maple, a faint fiddleback grain, kiln dried, now just bits and bobs on the floor, at rest, no energy to roll away, kinetic defeat.
Christy’s mom told her that as a baby she would stare at her hands, perhaps wondering when they would start to create all that was held within her tiny soul. She is a potter, making good things from mud spinning in circles. A chunk of clay reimagined.
A friend offering her table as a good place to fall apart and return, reimagined.