By Rebecca Smyth
@rebsmyth

At first, I don’t hear the question. 

I’m sitting in a sticky leather chair, one hand bearing the full weight of the baby at my breast and the other releasing a toddler’s curls from the clutches of two tween girls. The noise level of a group of three-year-old boys playing cars rivals the Belfast traffic outside. It’s my turn to volunteer in the church creche and there’s no other way to describe the scene in front of me except absolutely feral. 

Eventually I realize one of the tween girls has asked me a question.

“How long have you been friends with her brother?” she gestures to the curly-haired toddler again, tugging on a perfect ringlet and watching it coil like a slinky spring.

I pause, confused, because her brother is eight months old and lovely, but I wouldn’t call him a friend just yet. I clarify, “Do you mean her mother, Anna?” 

She mutters something to her friend in what I think is Arabic or Kurdish and her self-conscious giggle fills the room, “Yes, sorry. Wrong English word. How long have you been friends with her mum?” 

I wish I could swallow my correction. There is much to be embarrassed about at twelve, but speaking English as a second language isn’t one. This time, the end of her question rises in pitch with a noticeable Belfast twang. 

I crunch the numbers. “We were eleven and now we’re twenty-eight, so seventeen years.” 

“Oh. My. Gosh!” Her mouth drops open to form a perfect, dramatic little ‘o’ and she nudges her friend.

Together, they fangirl our friendship. 

If Anna and I still lived in our rural hometown area, this revelation would be less impressive. But since we’ve both ended up living on the same side of Belfast and going to the same church, I join them in their delight. Home is forty minutes and a world away—in Northern Ireland, if there’s a motorway separating you, then you might as well be in Timbuktu. 

The girls tell me about their longest friendships, and I wonder if they’re infatuated because of the way moving has marked their lives. I know what it is to crave the anchoring roots of a ride-or-die friend when the landscape of your life is constantly changing. 

“Is she your BFFL?” one asks, and I laugh. Ten years ago, I would have declared, “Yes, three billion percent, yes.” But now, I think, do adults still say best friend? Is it okay to claim her? Would Anna say yes? And, what about the Missing Years?

At this point, I realize they want an actual answer. 

“Yes,” I say, “She’s my BFFL.”

*Squeals*

***

It was 2013. I was about to become a teen mum and everyone’s reactions were as expected—Oh s*** I'm so sorry and What are you going to do? But worse was what they said with their eyes: I’m glad it’s you and not me. 

The morning I planned to meet Anna and break the news to her in an ice cream parlour near our school, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop crying either; huge gushing sobs that felt too big for my body. So I got out of bed, and I wrote in my sequined pregnancy journal by the light of a street lamp. Today I’m going to tell Anna about the baby, but she’s a Christian, and I’m scared she’ll judge me. 

I don’t remember my exact words, but I remember Anna didn’t miss a beat—Congratulations, Reb! 

I did a double-take. Sorry, what?

She was the first person to celebrate the little human inside me and to make me believe this was more than an accident I should have prevented.

Anna was the friend who delivered chicken-tikka-and-stuffing sandwiches to the call of every craving and loved my baby as if he were her own. She made us spaghetti bolognese to fill our bellies and hearts and let me camp out at her house when I couldn’t be alone. After a much needed night out when my son stayed with my mum, Anna held my hungover head and picked glass out of my foot. And then she was the one who held my hand when I decided that maybe I could get on board with the love of Jesus she was so keen on. 

She was, and is, my BFFL.

***

During those formative young-adult years when my girlfriends were getting to know themselves and one another, I was getting to know my little boy. 

I lost out on the era when friendships were planted in the soil of communal living, when boundaries previously upheld at school became blurred by the vulnerability of seeing one another at their best and worst. While I was wiping tomato ketchup off plastic Ikea plates and wondering how to pay my next electric bill, my friends were talking about dating and hopes and dreams, sprawled across one another’s beds. They were swapping dresses for pub crawls and honing their make-up skills on fresh faces, both of which I am still sorely lacking—the skills and the fresh face. I listened hungrily to stories from girls' trips to Donegal, Greece, and Lisbon, living vicariously through them.

***

Of all the history classes I sat through during my undergraduate degree, there is one piece of information that still lives rent-free in my mind. The Phantom Time Hypothesis—a brainchild of amateur historian, Herbert Illig, who made himself known in 1991 by claiming the years 611 A.D. to 911 A.D. never actually happened. 

These years, dubbed as the missing years by Illig, have very little going on in the European history books, so according to him, they were a sham devised by the rulers who wanted to make sure they would be on the throne during the much-anticipated year 1000 A.D.

According to historians, the theory is medieval fake news—more conspiracy than scholarship.

But the idea that we could rewrite the records—if we don’t like how they went down in history—is captivating.

***

My memories of our Missing Years cause grief to bloom in my chest. 

I was a weary single parent, wondering if I should drop out of university, struggling to make it through each day. Anna was bravely battling a mental health condition, tired of hanging on to life by a thread, and wondering if she should just let go. Both of us felt misheard and misunderstood and abandoned. Neither of us was unjustified. We made many stabs at clearing the air and clambering for clarity, only to end up going around in circles, never making it out of the rabbit hole. In the end, there was no end. No ghosting or final bust-up. The light in our friendship wasn’t snuffed out in one fatal blow but rather faded slowly to an ember. We kept in touch, but no longer every day. We were just friends, no longer sisters. It was distant and different. Over the span of three-ish years, I watched from the sidelines as she met and married the love of her life. And she watched from the sidelines as others made spaghetti bolognese for my little boy.

We didn’t give up, but sometimes it felt like we’d missed too much. Would our friendship ever rise from the ashes?

***

Anna and I sit curled up, shoulder to shoulder, on my teal velvet sofa while our Lockdown Babies shuffle around on the playmat. Today they co-exist peacefully, and we’re only needed when they get tangled up, their legs pretzeled together. We guzzle coffee and conversation like we’re gasping for air, and we’re already several wrong turns too far when we realize where our chat is going. We’re too curious to do a U-turn now.

At first, we tip-toe. Usually, we don’t—can’t—go here. The Missing Years are not up for discussion. 

But we fought for this. When it would have been easier to run for the hills, we plodded through the valley. Healing was slow and steady, like a seed sprouting. But when your heart has been truly broken, you learn of the deepest reserves it can carry. 

So, on this day, we don’t brush over the loss. We sit in the ache. We share a tight squeeze. We acknowledge how young we were, how co-dependent our friendships were—how we fell hard and fast like all teenage girls when they find a fairytale friend. We imprinted on one another like the Twilight wolves of our youth. But ultimately, we didn’t have the maturity to work through real, genuine, earth-shattering circumstances—despite our best efforts. 

With a pit in my stomach, I share my biggest regret—that I wasn’t there for her when she needed me most. In return, she confesses she didn’t, couldn’t, fully understand everything I was carrying as a mother. Perhaps we are here now, side by side, because we are older and wiser. Because she moved near me or I asked her to be my bridesmaid. Because she is no longer sick, and I am no longer a single parent. Because our husbands play pickleball or because we got pregnant at the same time. 

But I think it’s more. 

In motherhood, the sweetness of a fought-for friendship buoys us. In the swell of shifting routines and needs, it holds us up—every version of us that has come and gone before. Motherhood has taken from me, yes, but it has returned a missing friendship. And thank goodness, because it’s not possible to do this blood-and-guts, beautiful and broken calling without it. Without her. 

Later, Anna texts, I feel icky for bringing up the missing years—don’t let it take up precious space in your brain.

My thumbs move quickly to assure her, You were missing and very much missed. 

We’re back together and better than ever, she replies. 

We know we can’t rewrite the history of our friendship or delete the missing years, but let the records show we can redeem them—one sofa squeeze at a time. 

Better than ever, I repeat.

Guest essay written by Rebecca Smyth. Reb is a Northern Irish storyteller, wife and unlikely mum of three sons. After becoming a mother at eighteen, and at a time of feeling totally lost, she found her words. She says writing is her way of seeing God in her life and she hopes that maybe, through her stories, you might see him in yours too. In this season she is happiest on a slow Saturday morning with her boys or writing alone in her car with a drive-thru coffee—where most of this essay was written. You can connect with Reb on her website or on Instagram.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.