Adorable Little Detonators

Our friendship survived bad dates, illness, marriage, fights. Why can't it survive your baby?

- By Allison P. Davis. Photograph by Bobby Doherty

Over the past three years, all but two of Sasha's core group of high-school friends have had children, and of her core group of college friends, half of them have had children and others are in various stages of family planning. In that time, Sasha has been trying to start a family too, struggling through failed IVF cycles. Sometimes, admittedly, she found it difficult to stay close to her friends who were successfully starting families while she suffered through infertility. But the distance also grew as her day-to-day life and theirs became too much and the time they had to give each other became too little. Sometimes it felt like all anybody would talk about was their children and their adorable developmental milestones, and she couldn't relate. She would text, craving idle chitchat, and her friend would respond with a photo of her child at the playground-annoying at best, but it could also fill Sasha with a specific grief that threatened to overwhelm her.

Eventually, Sasha moved back to Los Angeles, and on a recent visit to New York, she was smacked in the face by how different her friends' lives had become. All we did was go to playgrounds, she says. My whole photo reel is just pictures of me with different kids of my friends at the playground. She and her husband decided the next time they go to New York, they'll cough up the money for a hotel. We're going to make our plans, and if people would like to get sitters and meet us out, great. Otherwise, sorry.