I told Alice about it, of course, but she said it was just Bette being Bette. I agreed, but I thought it was senseless that everyone always seemed to let her get away with her outbursts. Alice agreed with me, but it wasn’t until Kallie was a little older that she finally saw my side completely.

We’d been invited to Bette and Tina’s for family night, and had been asked to bring Kallie with. Angelica liked to play with her, so we agreed because we were trying to socialize her with other children a little without enrolling her in some sort of daycare program. So we were sitting in their living room with the others while the kids played, and Bette happened to say something to Alice. Alice had been upset enough that she’d gone to get Kallie and told me that we were leaving.

I never got the story on what was said, but I do know that they went for almost two weeks without a solitary word to each other. I’d never seen them fight like this, but Shane said that it had happened a couple times before I came along, and that it would blow over on its own. I tried to have faith in that, but Alice was usually so quick to forgive that I was perplexed when she wouldn’t even speak to Bette more than a week after their falling out. I was getting a tad worried, because Kallie and Angelica had been getting along very well and I didn’t want that to end just because Alice and Bette were fighting.

Finally, Tina and I decided that we needed to take action. Tina went to work on Alice while I tried to handle Bette, which basically meant that I listened to her bitch about Alice for awhile without hearing her take any responsibility for what she’d said that had caused the whole thing. She finally stopped after about half an hour, and I tried to get her to agree to call Alice and apologize, but of course it wasn’t that easy. Bette had to be persuaded that Alice was just going through some form of postpartum thing, which she totally wasn’t. Still, I didn’t want this thing to drag out any longer than it had to and possibly deprive both our children of the opportunity to make a friend, so I did it anyway.

Bette finally relented, and called Alice. Tina’s job had been to convince Alice to at least listen and not hang up immediately, and she was pretty successful. They managed to call a truce, and we went back to having family night once a week or so. Tina started to bring Angelica by our house every now and then, too, which was nice.

Little by little, Alice and I were starting to get used to our new lives as parents. I’d thought we might miss going out to social events with the gang, but we really didn’t. We were having way too much fun caring for Kallie, and the group didn’t go out that much anymore anyway, as a general rule. Bette and Tina were homebound because of the kid, Helena didn’t really party and neither did Jenny, which seemed to suit Shane just fine as she started to spend more and more time at home with her or hanging out with us or Helena or even Kit. “How many club openings can you really go to in one lifetime?” she asked me one night, and I smiled because it was pretty true. I’d thought I was going to miss it, but I didn’t at all. Neither did Alice or any of the others.

As I got more used to my daughter and the new life we were living, the more I loved it. I couldn’t ever imagine living another way. I felt like the luckiest person alive.