What do you do when someone else's happiness feels like it's shattering you?

We sat at the end of the bar, my hands wrapped around a glass of house white, him drinking a beer so hoppy my lips puckered when I sneaked a taste. He was telling me his good news, how everything sounded perfect, had worked out perfectly. I smiled and nodded and said "that sounds so perfect" because it did. It was perfect for my friend and felt terrible for me.

He knew this of course, the way friends of a certain kind do. He stopped talking and made a twisting motion into my arm. "I don't want you to feel like I'm just driving the knife in."

With most other people, I would have lied. I would have brushed off the concern and turned the attention back to his good news. But you can't lie to people who can see right through you, so I acknowledged that his gain felt like my loss. We spoke of the tension - how happy I was that he was happy and how sad he was that I was sad. And then we sat - him sipping that horrible IPA, me staring into my pinot grigio, the weight of our happiness and sadness around us.

What do you do when someone else's happiness feels like it's shattering you?

Infertility offers lots of opportunities to practice your response to this question. Almost every time another friend announces her pregnancy, there it is: jumping up-and-down, squealing and hugging joy and hot, angry tears choking me as I hold them back.

I'm afraid people think that because I feel joy and sadness, I feel less joy. As if my heart is a zero sum game, capable of only so much emotion, so because it is split among happiness and grief, it must mean there is less happiness. I don't think this is true. I think the I-can't-breathe feeling that accompanies pregnancy announcements is just my heart's struggle to hold all of the emotion. All of the happiness alongside all of the grief.

My best friend has received nearly a dozen text messages in the last year from me: so-and-so's pregnant. And every time, she responds by telling me that she'll be the one to get angry. She'll throw things, she'll stomp around her house, railing at the ceiling about how unfair it is, so I can just be happy. She temporarily holds the pain for me so that I can offer my pregnant friend only the joy I feel. And as weird as it sounds, it helps every time. Somehow knowing that someone else is marking the injustice frees me from it. She takes the grief for a minute and I can breathe again and get back to the hugging and squealing.

The truth my friend and I found while sitting at the bar is this: I am both happy for his gain and sad for my loss. He is both sad for my loss and happy for his gain. One emotion does not negate the other. My sadness for me does not cancel out my happiness for him. We can rejoice, fully and freely, for one another while grieving, deeply and profoundly, with each other. This is magic-and-pixie dust friendship, capable of embracing the awkwardness and tenderness of this dance.

A favorite blogger issued a challenge to thank someone this week, so here are my thanks:

Thank you, BFF, for letting me catch my breath and exhale joy.

Thank you, IPA-loving friend, for looking past the tears that leak out when we're celebrating for you, for letting me be happy when you know that I'm also sad, and for being brokenhearted with me.

Thank you, dear sweet pregnant friends, for sharing your joy with me and for allowing that my grief does not take anything away from it. I cannot wait to squeeze your babies.