Rocking the Pink by Laura Roppé Page B

British stiff upper lip.
    And then, in one of our email exchanges, I fortuitously addressed
Jane as “My Dearest Jane,” and noted that this was how Miss Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice had always addressed her elder sister, Jane, in letters. Well, that certainly touched a chord with Jane: “Do you like Pride and Prejudice ?!” she wrote, and I could hear her exuberance through cyberspace. “I love P&P! Did you get the BBC’s version of it with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth over there? Being a bit of a romantic at heart, my most favourite part is when, although he gets rebuffed, Mr. Darcy says to Elizabeth: ‘In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.’ Oh, be still my beating heart!”
    I’d found my soul mate! I didn’t know anyone, other than Mom and Sharon, who’d even seen the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, let alone adored it like I did.
    Thanks to my mom, I’d been a period-drama junkie my whole life.
    â€œCome on in,” Mom had said to Sharon and me during those first uncertain months after her divorce from Dad, holding up the corner of her bedspread.
    And Sharon and I had crammed into her warm bed, transfixed by Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind— a life-altering movie that inspired me to randomly shoehorn “fiddle dee dee” into countless conversations for the better part of a year.
    Years later, when Sharon and I were in our twenties, the three of us had crammed into Mom’s bed yet again, this time swooning over all six hours of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, starring the scorching Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. Since that first viewing, I had become
addicted, regularly watching all six hours in one sitting. I knew it was unhealthy, but I just couldn’t stop.
    And now here was another woman afflicted with both triple negative breast cancer and Pride and Prejudice fever, just like me! What were the odds?
    â€œMy Dearest Jane,” I replied, “yes, I am obsessed with Pride and Prejudice . I have seen the BBC version probably twenty full times and I am not exaggerating. People in the U.S. are not obsessed with this; most do not know it exists, so there is no accounting for it. My favorite part is also his first proposal. I would have said ‘Yes!’ I wouldn’t care if he had insulted my family or said his feelings violated his judgment and social situation. I would have said ‘yes’ and then tackled him and had my way with him right then and there.”
    And thus, through a shared belief that Mr. Darcy’s proposal to Miss Bennet was, without a doubt, the single most romantic moment in cinematic history, a friendship born from cancer transcended into an unbreakable sisterhood.

Chapter 17
    Before I had my baby, I envisioned my life as a world map. My marriage was North America; my career was Europe; my family, Asia; and my friends, Australia. When I became pregnant, I assumed my future baby would fit right into my world map, like a thumbtack marking a city. My baby would be . . . Rome, perhaps. Right there— a very precise and contained place. After the baby’s arrival, I was sure, I would continue to be exactly the same person as ever—the same wife, daughter, friend, and, yes, lawyer. My map would simply have one additional thumbtack: baby.
    And then Sophie arrived. She was no longer a hypothetical baby—she was real. Quickly, I realized I’d been a complete idiot. Sophie wasn’t a thumbtack on the world map; Sophie was the map! And everything else—and I do mean everything else—became the thumbtacks. Marriage? San Luis Obispo. Sex? Ha! Des Moines, if I
was lucky. Friends? Barstow. Career? Detroit. Exercise? Ah, luxury: Paris. Sleep? Sorry, we’ve run out of thumbtacks.
    But in those first glorious months of