You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Friends' category.
I love that I have a best friend who helps women write their stories – stories of abuse, stories of ridicule, stories of physical strength, stories that heal – every year and produces them on V-Day.
I love being able to call a friend and say, “Help me find a place to stay in SF!” and she finds me not one but 8 places to stay! And when I ask coyly, “Now how about a date…” she comes up with that, too.
I love having a Roller Derby queen for a friend who went with me to get my tattoo and talked to the woman tattoo artist the entire time while I concentrated on my breathing. And I love that I can call this same woman and ask her for a bikini waxing reference.
I love having a friend in Ohio who I’ve never met who writes me long emails about her and me and our kids and our exes and our spiritual paths and our heart longing. She reminds me of the scene in “Julie and Julia” when Julia and Simone are at the train station in Boston awaiting pick up from Julia’s best friend and Julia admits they’ve never met – just been long, fast pen pals. And that’s all that really matters.
I love knowing B. out in LA who meets with Major Media Moguls but does so with complete humble goodness and a vision for how we can use media to make the lives of women and girls better.
I love having a friend just down the block who is more than willing to come over with a mirror and speculum to check me out if need be. And that I could call this same Kick Ass Gyrl when another friend was having domestic violence issues.
I love having another friend down my block who can lend me frocks and lace and lipstick and pour through Anthropolgie catalogues with me and tread in the world of all things lovely. And it somehow pleases me all the more that her partner is a she and that gender politics work in such deliriously unexpected, sweet ways.
I love my friend K. and her Q. and her amulet of Love and her Faith.
I love my friend C. and our Power Circle of Divorcing Mamadom — you take my kids today; I’ll take yours tomorrow. You cry on my shoulder today; I’ll cry on yours tomorrow. So looking forward to the burn…
I love knowing that capes WILL be made – thanks to the enthusiasm of S. and M. and others who will be coming into our circle – I feel your movement and the swish swish of yards of red material!
I love that I have therapist friends – so many of them – who are helping women live their dreams every day and dig down deep into themselves for strength.
I love the opportunity to be part of dreams and planning via a group of international women, starting today!
I love that my dear old friend in Brooklyn is nursing her baby this morning and still getting the hang of the baby thing, and that when I told her that if she “just got through the first 8 weeks,” she’d be fine, she moaned in utter exasperation: EIGHT WEEKS?!
I love that my new friend J. in LA is seeing auras and becoming curious about the world beyond.
I love my friend E. who is traveling with her dear dear partner, husband, and lover S. as he sips in these last beautiful fall days of his life. (I do, however, completely, utterly loathe cancer for taking him.)
I love my daughter, who at eight, is discovering personhood and womanhood in her tiny, yet ever-expanding orbit.
I love my friends who are midwives and doulas, who crouch and instruct and massage and breathe and catch the babies and believe in the mamas and bring LIFE forth!
I love the yogis in my life who practice with me and open their bodies and spirits again and again to the joyful play that has helped me become a grown up like few other practices in my life. Thank you for Tuesday heart opening with R. and E. and the talk that extends afterward, talks that started back in junior high when we first met.
I love me and my goddess self and her fearless depths, even in the face of financial stipulations and tax returns and lost library books. She who is limitless in love. She who has been here all along and will see me through.
If you have twenty minutes and need to dive more deeply into the goddess power, watch Eve Ensler’s TED talk. I’ve watched it so many times and am still riveted.
I made a list of my fears this morning. It started with the fear that I’d never meet anyone as wonderful as the person I met in SF two weeks ago, but then the list traversed to points closer to home, closer to the truth. Namely, the fear that I’ll be alone in the Big Kahuna sense forever. My very wise friend K., who is my witness to this journey, wrote back:
It is not about being with someone else . .
I think the thing you need to relax into is this . . .if you are not with yourself . . you will regret it.
I think it is worse to be in a relationship with someone when you are not fully “with yourself” than to be “alone.”
I just wanted to share her wisdom with you on this overcast, drizzly morning, as I go into mediation and try to continue to sit with my scrambled egg heart. Also, if you’re so inclined to listen to a Buddhist podcast about fear by a very modern practitioner (e.g., there’s plenty of references to sex, drugs and rock-n-roll), I highly recommend the Interdependence Project’s podcast on Fear No Fear.
1. Look after friend’s kid while she’s at therapy preparing herself to “file.”
2. Buy wine.
3. Chill wine.
4. Open before it’s really chilled and make do with ice cubes.
5. Cover self in bug spray; go out to plant flowers.
6. Let kids run wild – school’s almost over, who cares! – and, when your friend arrives, drink, collaborate, corroborate, console, laugh!
7. Stay up until all hours preparing for daughter’s birthday knowing that her dad’s gift ordered via amazon is going to be the thing that steals the day. One credit card entry and he’s King. Three days of work and you’re the backup band.
8. Note to self: Teach daughter (and son, for that matter) to understand the value of a backup band.
I’ve been interviewing women for a project about single mothers. I started the project because I feel like I’ve joined a totally unheralded and misunderstood group of women who moonlight as superheroes. Seriously, almost every single mama I know kicks ass. I am proud to be in this new fold, but I’m also sick sick sick of how the media uses “single mom” as an expletive, i.e., an US magazine cover recently announced “Anniston to become SINGLE MOM.” It could have said Anniston to become Polish or retarded or to lose a limb … or fill in the blank with any other harangued and poorly labeled group.
In doing the project, I’ve heard so many stories of people staying in relationships out of fear of what others would think. Families, mainly. But also kids and even friends. When Alex and I separated several years ago, many of our friends sided with him. That’s not what they said they were doing, but it was pretty evident. Invitations stopped coming my way and run-ins at the grocery store that would have been a 5-10 minute talk in the past became the briefest waves. I pained over what these people thought. Recently, I re-met a woman I’d seen a few times at parties with this particular group of friends, and she told me they’d unfriended her in just the same way, “like toxic waste,” she said.
People react to divorce from a deep, semi-conscious place. It brings out their own anxieties about their relationships. Any squeaky board they’ve been trying to ignore in their marriage sounds squeakier after talking to you, and chances are they’ll take it out on you. One friend currently going through a divorce who thought that earlier separation from Alex was a bad idea and had a sort of “just suck it up” attitude (my words, not hers) at the time, now admits that my separation made her uneasy; “There was so much in my own marriage that I just wasn’t ready to look at yet.”
Another friend, who I haven’t talked to much in years, gave a totally gut response when she learned that Alex and I were splitting: ”I envy you.”
The essayist Perri Klass admits to this range of emotions regarding others’ divorces: “Oh, I clucked over the divorcing couples, shook my head about the effects on their children, participated in the generally pleasurable buzz of rising gossip–but there were moments too, I think, when I looked at those parents with fascination and fear, wondering whether I was watching just the bravest pioneers, the first to march bravely down a perilous path which would ultimately beckon many of those self-satisfied uxorious cluckers.”
What I’ve learned in a pretty hard way is that others opinions about the most intimate details of your life sting but, ultimately, are fleeting and don’t matter. Not at all. Because the people who are making their opinions known are either too scared or too lacking in empathy to understand the complexities of your life which is yours alone to live.
I dip in and out of hope these days. I think we’re all doing that with the state of the world – as they say (“the state of the world” – it sounds like something out of a 1930s sci fi comic). I drove into Chicago last Friday to see a friend and then go to Ikea to buy new kitchen counters that my neighbor is helping me to install. The whole trip was an interesting balancing act in hope and lack thereof. What’s the opposite of hope? Despair? I hope for a job; I despair there will be none…
Hope is such a slippery thing. A friend is doing a photo project on hope, and every time I look at her promo, I’m less sure than the time before what it’s about because I’m less sure than before what hope is. But I know that I bumped into it several times over the weekend.
Having dinner with a friend who I’ve known since I was eighteen, who I still adore and who made me laugh to the point of peeing my pants while standing in front of the iMac store on Michigan Avenue was the hope born of friendship. Going into the Hotel Intercontinental, with its bygone-era Hollywood golden ceilings, and seeing the pool where Johnny Weismuller once swam gave me a funny hope for the way things live in.
Weismuller – I’m reading now on Wikipedia – was born in Romania but grew up in Chicago. He had five wives and was buried in Acapulco, and they played a recording of his Tarzan yell at his funeral.
Being out on Michigan Avenue reminded me of my dad – specifically of an early December morning when that great avenue was nearly deserted and we’d gone out to look for breakfast, my mom still asleep back in the hotel. I was in my 20s, and had flown in from Seattle to meet them before heading back to Iowa for Christmas. The night before, we’d had dinner at a restaurant and our waitress had quietly encouraged us to look over the banister at a small seating area below: there sat Michael Jordan and his Bulls teammates right in the midst of their “three-peat” years. Another memory of my dad from years before: going out in the evening for a tuna sandwich and a Coke at the Woolworth’s counter on Michigan for my dinner before my parents went out for the night, and I stayed in the hotel with my homework and the remote control. My dad loved the Woolworth’s counter as much, I sensed, as the nicer restaurant he’d be going to later. I loved sitting there, pretending that we lived in a high-rise apartment, overlooking the Lake, and this was our Saturday night ritual – a sandwich at the luncheonette counter.
These memories hold hope and despair. The hope of my connection to my dad even when he’s gone; the despair of never seeing him again and the finality that still seems impossible to me.
Hope. Despair. What tips the balance? Hearing of couples who have been married for years and have sex every night – this reported to me by an excellent source – gives me hope. Learning from the same source that she has friends in equally long marriages who actually do it several times a night every night, shifts me to despair.
But then HOPE comes back in the oddest ways. I listened on the drive in and out to Adam Gopnik reading Through the Children’s Gate and the precision of his prose and the gentle humor of his voice gave me hope for writers and writing. Seeing the preview for Where the Wild Things Are — seeing that they’ve done something creative and different with such a beloved book, and that the filmmakers were emphasizing its very important kernels — inside all of is hope; inside all of us fear – gave me, well, hope.
Hearing my friend’s adoring stories of her well-adjusted teenaged daughter gives me hope for my kids and a world that’s not too far off. Standing in line at Ikea and looking into carts filled with items that declared a specific moment in life — a crib, diaper pail, and night light in one, or mixing bowls, cutting boards, and a tool set in another — made me smile. One must be saturated with hope to have a baby or to move in with a lover for the first time.
Even getting on to this blog and reading your generous comments gives me hope. In fact, awhile back, someone who lives in town who reads this blog said, “What nice friends you have,” alluding to all of the folks leaving comments here. She thought I knew everyone, as in face-to-face, in-the-flesh know.
“I’ve never met most of them,” I said, which pleased me greatly. That people reach out to someone they’ve never met, is the epitome of hope.
“Your team is here,” my mom said, when I got to the bank this morning. She was with her banker (my mom is of an income and a generation that she has “her banker”), who also happens to live up the street from me. We were meeting the mortgage specialist at the same bank where I opened a passbook savings account when I was ten. I remember that little book and the typed in numbers that went up with every birthday and Christmas. It was supposed to teach me about money, but I’m not sure that it succeeded given my current situation. It certainly didn’t teach me how to say NO to a man in love with credit.
As we met, everyone was so helpful and even funny, despite the very heavy thing on the table – the fate of my house and its mortgage, which is mired in all of the gunk of both divorce and the current mortgage crisis. We told the mortgage woman, who was irreverent and also divorced, that we were forming Team Jennifer. “I want to be on the team, too!” she declared. “We need t-shirts.”
The team is growing. There’s my neighbor who turns out to work for Legal Aid who gave me great advice over coffee the other day. Another neighbor who is helping me put in new parts to my kitchen and comes over at a moment’s notice when anything breaks or doesn’t turn on. The violin teacher who gives me an extra long hug each week, and the teachers and counselors at my kids’ school who are keeping an extra eye on them. The friend who is organizing a yard clean-up day with me after I expressed how overwhelmed I was by the prospect of doing it alone. The friends from afar who send periodic cards and even care packages.
It takes a village to get divorced with your sanity intact, that’s for sure. What I’m finding is that people know divorce sucks, and if the mere mention of it doesn’t send them running for the hills – as it does with many, just like the word “cancer” – then they’re probably willing to be on your team. They may only show up for outfield duty a few times a season, but that’s plenty. Don’t be too proud or passive or shy to ask. I’m finding that if you ask, they will come.
1. I’m glad I didn’t marry a lawyer who talks on his cell all the way from DC to NYC about winning a settlement against Cargill. How tiresome.
2. Sleeping with one of your oldest friends can seem like a good idea in the first flush of travel.
3. The same thing can feel like not the best thing 24-hours later. Am I too vulnerable to be naked with a man again?
4. I really miss kissing.
5. It’s fun to flirt with smart men during quasi-meetings.
6. I like seeing couples who adore each other and who both seem sane. They give me hope more than they make me feel left out of the club, and this seems like a good thing.
7. When the kids aren’t around, I hardly think about Alex. He is years and miles away. And when I did think about him, it was to realize with full force that I’m really pissed at him and want a divorce NOW, not in August when he returns from Africa.
8. The fact that I’m too easy on Alex and too hard on myself is totally transparent to some of my oldest friends – including ones with whom I’ve been naked.
9. Nothing beats a quiet tea with a girlfriend, or even a quick walk from a restaurant to a bar with another woman, loitering behind the men in order to get in a few confidential words. (Okay, this wasn’t learned on the trip, but does seem worth repeating.)
10. I can wear skinny jeans, even if they are a size bigger than I’d like.
Over dinner tonight, my friends R and L, who are high school sweethearts with three kids, tried to talk me into making it clear to my kids that I need my time at night. I had complained that I keep falling asleep while putting them to sleep, in large part because Bea and Thomas have gotten into the habit of having me present for every last song, every last back rub, every murmur and toss and certainly every turn. And then if they wake up two hours later, they expect me to be there, too.
“I feel like I have to be there for them,” I tried to explain, knowing that at earlier points of my life I too would have found this situation bird-brained (though R and L are much too nice to call me that). “I feel like they’ve been sort of abandoned by their dad, and I’m not going to let them down in any way.”
“You’re not letting them down,” said L, a social worker and someone who prizes his sleep greatly.
“You need your own time,” said R, who I know goes nearly nuts taking care of her three full-time and is officially off duty as soon as L gets home.
“You’re both right. I know. But part of it is for me, too. No one has touched me since …”
I paused remembering that last, dishonest series of hugs and kisses Other Guy had given me last July after he’d already decided to reconcile with his wife but hadn’t had the moxie to tell me. I cringed thinking that I was in any way collapsing or confusing that physical contact with the experience I have of laying next to my kids while they sleep. They are so sweet, so simple and direct. That was…that had all of the hallmarks of adult complexity with its dark needs and unspoken manipulation.
“I know that sounds weird. I don’t mean it too,” I tried to explain to R and L. “I think a lot of single mothers are in the same boat. You just need to be near someone.”
R and L nodded. I could tell that they got it, that they weren’t going to condemn me from their perch of Happily Married. Which is a relief to me now as I sit here in the dark next to my daughter, who is sweetly snoring.
I opened my door yesterday to discover a lovely fluted vase holding two dozen deep pink tulips! I couldn’t fathom who they were from. Alex came to mind but the last time he gave me a present it was a hunk of cheese (very tasty cheese, but cheese nonetheless). A secret admirer? The card read: ”Something pink to chase away the blues. Elizabeth”
I know only one Elizabeth at the moment – a good friend of a dear friend who I’ve only met via Facebook. Her husband is terminally ill and I’ve been trying to buoy her with little messages and some cross-country friendship. But, golly – tulips! I emailed her immediately – thankyou-why-me-gosh-lovely-thankyouthankyouthankyou! And the reply came: It seems someone needs to pamper you. Why not me?
Can I just AGAIN say how thankful I am for my lovely circle of friends, near and afar? I hope your day is filled with little rays of sunshine like this.
