By Charlotte Fox Weber
At a moment of loud desperation, I wrote an email to Leslie Bennetts, a journalist I’d never met. From what I could see, Leslie was a 70 year old salty feminist New Yorker. I was living in a small cottage in West Cork at the time, with my loving family. It was 2am, and rain pounded on the tinny roof. My new-born stirred beside me. I stroked him with affection, and felt a creeping loneliness crowd me. Full of love, I still wanted more. Something different. It was the ordinary identity crisis of matrescence, plus a disturbing and complicated grief, and my devoted family couldn’t grasp this hinterland within me. I felt secretly alienated from my surroundings, as though I couldn’t fully participate in my life. I turned to my sleeping baby and told him in a whisper how much I loved him, and how I needed to do this, so please, could he stay asleep and let me.
Without full awareness, I’d narrowed my viewpoint. I craved expansion. Reaching out to this stranger propelled me forward with a madcap sense of motion and possibility. There was a big world out there, and reminding myself of this began to resuscitate something within. My voice hopped as I typed, and I was emphatic. It felt irrational and probably inconsequential, but writing to her mattered to me.
Emailing this woman was a strange thing to do in the middle of the night. But the risk of embarrassment, of Leslie judging me or blanking my message, was less than the potential value of connecting. Leslie wrote back a warm and uplifting message. Her bold voice made me feel like an instant insider. You get it; I get it; we both understand these struggles that are hard to explain to others. She made it possible for me to begin to tell my story, for me to even know my story and make sense of my experiences. She held space for me.
Let this matter, I told myself when I questioned taking time out to let this new relationship in. A year and a half later, she’s officially my fairy godmother. We banter over texts, phone calls, and we joyfully met in New York over the summer. ‘Our story is nuts,’ Leslie said. Her speaking manner is fabulous and heartening, and her crisp and surprising descriptions crackle with energy. ‘We got intensely close simply because we wanted to. If we’d been chicken shits, we’d never have gotten to know each other.’
Loneliness, chance, and scrappy determination opened us to an unlikely and wonderful love. The verge of despair was the scenic route to expanding life.
