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CONSTANCE HALL: 'Here's to the friends who arrive in your darkest moments, and refuse to leave.'

 

Three nights ago, I was sitting on the floor in the kitchen crying.

My husband had dropped me off at home to do my work, while he went out to run errands.

The wifi went down so I called Telstra. While on hold, my son got a tummy ache, ran to the toilet and spewed all over the floor. My toddler ran behind him wanting to play in it.

I raced to stop him and slipped on the laundry floor that I had managed to flood.

Telstra couldn’t help, the toddler was hassling for my phone, the sick kid was screaming for help, my house looked like squatters had moved in and started breeding.

I called my husband who literally did not understand.

I find a lot of men have single focus. They see what they need to do, they want to get it done and they struggle to comprehend what it’s like to never be able to focus on one thing, to have five questions or urgent requests hitting you at once and to always be thinking about everything/everyone else.

He came home and we fought, he couldn’t hear me, I couldn’t hear him, he went to his son’s room and l just sat on the floor in protest.

Emails were piling in, tours, photoshoots, rewrites for books, legal shit to sign and my brain shut down. Unable to reply to any of them, I sat on the floor and hid my tears while Snow braided my hair and Rumi begged me for cereal for dinner.

Listen to Constance Hall join Mia Freedman on her podcast, No Filter. Post continues below.

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And then one of my best friends Tash walked in, and of course, I got up and did the whole, “I’m fine, I’m fine, seriously, just having a moment.”

But she didn’t believe me or accept me pushing her away. She made some calls… not the gossip calls, the right calls.

Since that night, two of my husband’s beautiful best friends have not left our house. Cooking, working on the garden, patiently playing with kids and calming us all.

Tash has organised a cleaner to help me and done Snow’s makeup, loved everyone up including me and all this love has rubbed off on my husband and I, who will get through this.

But we wouldn’t have, without the love of these insistent humans, who just come, they just show up, for the people they love and they don’t leave, they stay as part of the family.

And I just realised right now that I am finally getting my real job done. Cuddling my babies.

Here’s to the special people who don’t take no for an answer, the type of people who have been there and done that, seen it all and haven’t got a judgemental bone in their bodies.

This post originally appeared on Facebook and has been republished with full permission.

For more from Constance Hall, you can follow her on FacebookInstagram, or her website. You can buy her book, Still A Queen, here.