The other loves

The friends that get you through

I remember a conversation I had with a co-worker vividly, even though I can’t remember her name or even where we were working. We were both salespeople, and we were at an event, staffing a table somewhere. It was slow, so we were talking. She was in her twenties, a few years younger than I was, and I liked her. She was personable, kind, intelligent.

But she told me that she didn’t have any women friends. She confided it with the same focused sadness with which a person might talk about infertility or a string of broken relationships; a real grief and regret that she wasn’t able to participate in something that seemed to come so easily to others. She was married, she had a good career. She just had no women friends. At all.

I was not married, in that harried joyful period when I had two kids in grade school, big ambitions, too much work, and never enough time. I envied women like this one talking to me at the sales booth; she had a husband, no children, financial security. Until she told me she had no women friends. At all. I tried to imagine what that was like, and I just couldn’t. I felt such sadness for her.

I am blessed in the friendship department. Mary Virginia and I have been friends since we were 12, which is half a century now. We have talked almost every day in that time, starting with long conversations in middle school when I walked the phone – attached to the wall as they were then – to the limit of the phone cord to get some privacy. I remember my father, often bemused by his two daughters, asking me what we could possibly find to talk about every night when we had been at school together all day. I scoffed, with the superior knowledge of a 13-year-old.

Recently, Mary Virginia was telling her son, my godson, “I was talking to Stephanie today…” and he stopped her and said “Mom, you’ve talked to Stephanie every day of my life,” and we laughed about it. He’s a grown man, and he’s right, there were hundreds of times when he answered the phone and called out Mom, it’s Stephanie, as my kids did on this end.

I met Juliette in 2001 when she moved to Seattle from New York after 9/11 and we started working together. We’ve been best friends ever since. She and her family are chosen family, we talk about everything, extensively.

There are more friends, women I’ve known for years who I don’t see often but when we do talk we pick up the conversation and connection effortlessly, as if it had been hours and not months or years since we talked.

My daughter has the talent for friendship as well. She has a close network of women friends, and I love that my grandchildren are growing up with community around them as my children did, the women who are aunts in spirit, offering perspective, company, advice. We show up for them and they show up for us, and my grandkids are going to see that as the way it works, it won’t be a surprise or exception. Bad things happen, the women show up. Joyful celebrations, the women show up.

Throughout those long years between my son’s car accident and TBI, his death and the acute grief, I would worry obsessively that something would happen to my daughter. To counteract that doom loop in my head I would imagine myself dancing at her wedding. Not because I was particularly attached to her getting married, but because it was a cultural celebration that came easily to my mind. Here’s another loop you can view, I told myself, you dancing at her wedding.

And I did. She had a great wedding, and they were all there, my friends. Mary Virginia and Juliette, Maria who I still consider to be my sister-in-law although I’ve been divorced from her brother for thirty years, Kathryn from college. And we danced together. And I had this deep sense of gratitude, that this group of women were really what held me together through it all.

I’m thinking about it today because I talked with most of them in the past week or so, to exchange holiday greetings for Passover and Easter, to visit. Maria was here from the East Coast and we had dinner together and she was telling me what we ate for dinner the night before I went into labor with my son, and how I wanted to repeat the meal to speed up the birth of my daughter a couple years later after the due date came and went and the days passed. I don’t remember that, but she does. We do that for each other, stewards of our shared history.

Some people are lucky in love, or work, or art, some people get rude good health or a contented spirit. But the gift of women friends, friendships that cover every period of your life, the connections and bonds that can carry us through anything, that is a gift. If you have it, be joyful in it. Call up your friends and tell them that. And show up for each other. Because in the end, that may be what gets you through.

Help an author out! My book The Saint and the Drunk A Guide to Making the Big Decisions In Your Life comes out in May and is now available for pre-order in the U.S. Or pre-order here for the UK. Pre-orders really help.

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