Friends in different Stages, Friends in different Spaces

I’m struggling with friendships lately. As you may know, my husband currently works for a tugboat company. And unfortunately it’s not the kind of company that just tows boats and barges around the local harbor. It is the kind that tows barges to Alaska and Hawaii, meaning there are month long periods of time in which I don’t get to see my husband at all.

Now, I’m not Someone who has ever really struggled with depression in the past. However, during my husband’s absences this year I have started to fall into little bouts of feeling extremely emotional and somewhat depressed. Now, what I try to do during these times is make sure I have plans to hang out with friends so that I don’t spend all my time alone on the couch wallowing and watching Gilmore Girls. But that has been hard lately because of the friend situations I find myself in.

My closest friends are the ones with whom I write this blog. I feel incredibly blessed to have them in my life, but they don’t live in the same place I do. They lend me immeasurable comfort and perspective, but in the situation I’m in, physical presence is what is most helpful to keep depression at bay. I have another close girlfriend who doesn’t live too far and who understands. She is always willing to come spend time with me, but her schedule and mine are wildly different. So though it does help a lot when she comes over, we’re only able to match her our schedules probably 2 to 3 times per month.

Ironically, I have 5 friends who live within a 10 minute radius of my house, but hanging out with them presents a few problems. All of them are either pregnant or have young kids. Now, I love kids, and I desperately want to be starting a family myself, but it’s kind of hard to get pregnant when your husband is constantly 1000 miles away. Because of the stage of life these friends are in, the times they are most available is in the middle of the day when I am at work. Or even if I’m not at work and able to go, I end up feeling like the 3rd wheel because it’s a bunch of moms and their kids doing kid things and talking pretty exclusively about pregnancy and child rearing. Now, the thing is, I’m not complaining because I want them to stop this behavior. I don’t want them to stop being who they are or getting support from others.  I totally get it. It’s the stage of life they’re in. But as someone not in that stage of life, I feel like I don’t have anything to relate to them about.

The last time I hung out with this group ended pretty badly. We had a dinner party and it was great to be around a bunch of people I love. I even got to hold an adorable baby. But it got harder and harder for me to be ok as the night wore on. The girls talked on and on about pregnancy and their kids and the best products for teething babies, etc. Not only did I have nothing to add to this conversation, I struggled to not feel an intense sadness because I want so badly to be pregnant and I can’t try to get pregnant because my husband isn’t here. Baby talk just brings that feeling to the forefront, which absolutely sucks. And that feeling became coupled with intense sadness about missing my husband because what do you think every single person at the party asked me about? So where’s your husband now? How long has he been gone? When does he get back? Any attempt to forget about the fact that I’d been alone for a month was impossible. And the thing is, I know that they asked because they ultimately care about my life but it was just unbelievably hard to cope that night. As soon as I got to my car, I started crying, and I bawled the whole drive home.

So this is my predicament. The friends who could best comfort me are far away, and the ones who are near me are incapable of truly comforting me through no fault of their own. I’d love to have a dog or a cat because I think it would help to have another living thing to be at home with me, but we can’t afford the ridiculous price of having a pet in our apartment complex. I know this is all temporary too, which helps some. My husband only has to work for this company for about 6 more months, and then he can be home all the time. But the in between is tough. Really, really tough.