In the summertime of 2006, Helen Pidd met her fellow Guardian journalist Alexandra Topping. It was “a little bit bit like falling in love”, says Lexy, because the pair bonded over their jobs, via chaotic nights out and on holidays collectively. Their similarities drew them collectively, explains Helen: “The 2 blonde infants of the Guardian newsroom, each from the north-west of England, each a bit gobby.” They advised one another the whole lot.
It was a friendship they each cherished, and it was solely strengthened as their lives modified. They each fell in love, and Helen left the nation and returned. They prided themselves on their potential to talk arduous truths, protected within the data that “the opposite individual isn’t going to, you recognize, strop off into the gap and by no means communicate to you once more”.
When it got here to having kids, Helen was at all times certain she needed to, Lexy was much less certain. However then Lexy had two and Helen struggled via IVF. Slowly, below Lexy’s pressures of latest motherhood and Helen’s wrestle with fertility, their unbreakable bond stretched and stretched. “There was a degree at which I believed: ‘This isn’t how I need this friendship to be’,” says Lexy. They clarify the way it felt to be susceptible to dropping such an vital relationship and the way they discovered their means via.
Hearken to our Embracing a childfree life episode, from April 2023, on Helen’s expertise of IVF remedy and assembly different childfree folks, and skim Helen and Lexy’s account of their friendship right here.
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