There are a lot of reasons I'd like to be ten years younger. More time to be with my husband, more time to have children, less creaking in the joints. Eh. Those things are smallish and fleeting, and I make the most of what I have now, as much as I can, anyway.
There's a bigger reason I wish I were younger.
I have this friend, this amazing friend. She's a couple of years older than me. We met almost 12 years ago while doing this utterly godawful contract legal work, after the dot-com crash, when the economy was just in hell in a handbasket. It hadn't happened to me in such a long time, that kind of instant kinship with someone. All it took was her mentioning the Happy Fun Ball, and that was it. Jennifer was my friend for life. Then we cried at the same NPR stories, and she knew all the trick words for Washington Post crossword puzzles, and had a perfect memory for movie quotes, and there was laughing, so much laughing.
Jennifer gave me fun and laughter that I think we both needed, so much, during those hard roller-coaster years of unemployment, bad jobs, breakups with boyfriends and fiances, broken arms, new boyfriends, unbelievably horrible roommates, The Man Who Ruined Thanksgiving, moving, brain tumors, cancer, and family members behaving badly. To combat all of those things, we had girls' nights, cosmos, dancing, Sex and the City, fuzzy slippers, parties, tubing, great food, new friends, crazy dogs, wine tasting, and barbecues.
Jennifer is a true southern belle, impeccably beautiful on the outside, and hard forged steel underneath. She would never put dark meat in a chicken salad, lives by The Preppy Handbook, keeps up with her sorority, and worships at the altar of Lilly Pulitzer. She's also ridiculously smart. The girl has a graduate degree in food science as well as a Juris Doctor, and she's sharp and irreverent and witty. Her eyes are true gentian blue. Her hair always looks perfect, even if she stayed up all night to make a cake. Which she does, to astounding and perfect results. On her wending career path, Jennifer had her own cake business for awhile, Blue Iris Bakery. First she made me a birthday cake. And then another. And then she made cakes that looked just like Coach handbags and cakes in the shapes of shoes, and she did a course at the Wilton School.
She made my wedding cake, and it will always be the most delicious cake I have ever eaten. It was French vanilla cake, with buttercream icing, and had strawberry-Chambord filling between the layers. It was rich, moist, perfectly flavored, beautiful, delectable. I don't like cake, but I loved that cake.
And it wasn't even the best cake at the wedding. That honor went to the groom's cake that Jennifer made, a surprise for my husband, in the shape of Napoleon's hat, a fabulous chocolate-bourbon concoction. There wasn't a crumb left. I have three regrets from my wedding, and not getting a piece of that Napoleon hat cake is one.
In one of those ways that life works, Jennifer brought her future husband to my wedding. I'd met Adam a few weeks before, when he was in Washington for another wedding. He walked into my front door, and charmed me instantly. Which doesn't happen - I'm a suspicious, doubting sort. I won't say I knew that he was the one for Jen, but I sure did hope. He'd lived in DC for awhile, and had just moved to Louisville, KY. Which is of course when he and Jennifer finally met and fell in love. They almost missed each other.
Yes, she married the wonderful Adam. Who is still wonderful. And I could not have been happier for Jennifer, even if finding her amazing husband did take her away from Washington, DC and to Louisville. Jennifer went through a lot of crazy and awful things between the time that I met her and the time she met Adam. If she was ever sorry for herself, she did it quietly and privately. The rest of the time, Jennifer was out being her positive self, and doing the things she does best: having fun, making friends, and trying to make the world around her beautiful, perfect, and appropriately attired, preferably in Lilly Pulitzer.
Everyone deserves happiness, of course. But I really felt like no one deserved it more than Jennifer.
Even though Prince Charming Adam took her on a white racehorse to Derby City, and they lived happily ever after with mint juleps and hot browns and a house and furry dogs and incredible cake baking, there was one thing that couldn't be made perfect with love and hard work and optimism and inspiration.
I knew Jennifer and Adam wanted children. Even in her perfect Lilly outfit, Jennifer would never hesitate to hold and exclaim over a drooling baby. She looked so easy and right holding my girl the first time they met. She was always over the moon excited for any friend of hers who was having a baby, whether it was the first or the third.
But there were fibroids and cysts and scoping and swelling and painkillers and surgery and allergic reactions. Hormones and injections and drugs and egg harvesting and sperm counts and probing and insufficiently thick uterine linings. And waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Trying. Waiting. Trying. Waiting.
Jennifer documented the process for a few of us from time to time in her characteristic long and detailed and bubbly e-mails. The e-mails got shorter, and the optimism bled out, and then they stopped altogether, when Jennifer said they were taking a break from trying to get pregnant.
She talked a little about surrogacy, but the laws in Kentucky require that the "parents" have to legally adopt the baby from the surrogate once it is born. So you could go through all of that and end up with nothing but heartbreak. It seemed too much of a risk.
They didn't really talk about adoption, at least, not to me. I don't know why, and it's none of my business. Sometimes, you just want a child of your body. You have to do what your heart tells you is right.
And what my heart wishes is that I were ten years younger, so I could give Jennifer and Adam that child of their bodies, of their souls. I would do it, I would. I would be their surrogate. I'd never have said that before I had my own baby, carried her in my body for the better part of a year. I know what it takes to be pregnant, what you go through, and I know that I could do that for them. I know I could hand over that baby to them in the end, because I would know how much that baby was wanted and loved. I know what it feels like to hold that just-born tiny, sparkling and loud, new life, and I wish so badly that I could give them that feeling. If I could, I would give them my body for a year, to give them that.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If wishes were time, I would be ten years younger. If wishes were babies, Jennifer and Adam would have one.
I wish I could do more than wish.
