It Happened To Me | Stephanie Boucher

New Baby, Old Friends

New parents are rarely able to predict how their lives will be changed by the arrival of their first child. Yet as Alex and I awaited the birth of our daughter Nathalie, we were sure of one thing. Our friendship with a Dutch couple who had chosen to remain childless was likely to change forever.

Our intimacy with Frieda and Joep (pronounced Yoop) was as old as our own relationship and almost as precious. Travels to their home town, the mediaeval university city of Utrecht, belonged to the romance of our early life together. We had even taken time out of our own careers to live there for six months, sharing long cycle trips with our friends in the spare time from our jobs as postman and cleaner. For us, Dutch cakes, canals and bikes remain forever associated with youth and freedom.

Our decision to have children was as deliberate as theirs not to. Four years into our marriage my belly began to swell, nausea set in and we prepared for the baby's arrival in November. With some trepidation, we arranged our traditional new-year get-together with Frieda and Joep to take place at our house that year.

The year wore on; the hot London summer was followed by a sultry autumn. I began to fear that the cold, and the baby, would never come and that I would be gripped forever by heat. But then it happened – the weather finally broke just as I began to endure a long labour with forceps birth, in a dreary hospital from which I escaped as fast as I could.

Then began the task of nurturing the tiny girl who made us ache with love. I did not recover well from the labour. My body could not make enough milk and Nathalie cried piteously from hunger. I sank into a spiral of exhaustion while Alex, already under pressure from a difficult boss, succumbed to flu. By the time our friends arrived at new year we were unable to muster our usual welcome.

But we had reckoned without Nathalie herself. At two months she was cheerful and bonny, delighted to engage with anyone who would play, and Frieda and Joep were immediately entranced. Alex and I left her for long periods in their care while we caught up on sleep. They, meanwhile, shopped, cooked, cleaned and generally looked after all of us. Slowly, thanks to them, we began to recover.

After this it was not hard to choose godparents for Nathalie. Frieda and Joep proudly attended the baptism and she, far from being the agent of our division, bonded us more closely together.

Only when Nathalie turned 12 did I fully realise what this had meant to Frieda especially. On a visit to them, she warned us of a special birthday present she had been preparing for the occasion. As we sat mystified, Frieda unveiled six large photo albums charting Nathalie's life from her and Joep's point of view. There were pictures taken by them or sent by us, enhanced by fragments of letters in which we described Nathalie's progress over the years. Frieda's mother had painstakingly assembled such albums for each of her daughters and handed them over as the girls turned 12. Frieda had done the same for Nathalie.

With the albums came a small diary produced by the magazine for which Frieda works as a journalist. These are made each year with members of staff contributing short articles on a theme. That year the theme was friendship, and Frieda's piece described how her fears about the way Nathalie's birth might affect our relationship had turned into hope and love. There, in a Dutch I could just read with the help of a dictionary, was the mirror image of our own anxieties transformed into joy.