This essay about an unequal and unbalanced friendship between two young women brought to mind a few I have been in and others that I have observed from far. My first roommate in college was a lot like the girl who wore red lipstick in the story. The difference was that she was not entirely happy with who she was though she had a lot going for her. She wanted to absorb a lot of what made me, me. It got exhausting and suffocating to the point that we parted ways for good. But for that year or so, she and I were inseparable and many thought we were best friends. I did like her larger than life presence, the ability to do shocking things and not bat an eye - I was and still am way too risk averse to even consider. Though looking back, what she did was not all that crazy, it only appeared to me because of who I was.
The author by her own example shows that such friendships have a short life-time. My roommate and I got a lot from each other but neither was willing to concede that the other had contributed, it hurt our pride. Today, I have no problem acknowledging that she developed my taste in classic rock and country music. I had passing familiarity with both genres coming into college - her knowledge was encyclopedic in comparison. I taught her about books and writers she had never heard of. She was great with makeup, I was mostly uninterested and still am. But along the way, I observed and learned how to do it right and its a skill that has proven useful over the years. We had some great conversations and held strong opinions, some shared and others not. There were secrets we shared with each other than stayed with us even when we were no longer friends.
I became friends with D a few years ago when we were working on the same team. She was quietly competent and had a lot of empathy for those struggling to get their part done in what was a monstrous undertaking. We got through the last hurdles and many left the company completely spent from the work that had taken up all the space in their lives for close to two years. D had it a lot easier than most given the nature of her work. The company in question has gotten a lot harder to survive in since that time and some of the folks we both knew from the time are still there and are hanging by a thread. The market conditions make a job change much harder now than a few years ago when that large exodus happen. D and I caught up after a long time recently and she is fortunately still shielded from the what most of our peers are going through.
Talking to her left me more than a little outraged. She is completely oblivious to the plight of the others who unlike her have option but to follow the rules from which she has been forever exempt. D's demeanor is that of someone living in a quaint bungalow surrounded by a lovely garden where everything grows in abundance. She has no concept of want or hunger because the garden is so giving. She also never has to be exposed to the elements because her home is perfectly comfortable. Everyone else though lives a few miles away from her, far enough that she never has to see them. Their homes have been mostly destroyed, they have no food and they have no better place to go. They are scavenging around to get what they can and rebuild their lives. Its been a a very long time since they lived in a functional home or had a garden that fed them. The irony is D and all these people in who are in a fight for their lives all work for the same company.
Her lack of understanding of the majority's reality really bothered me. She is still the same person and it is not her fault that she has been isolated from the larger destruction. Those people are likely not sharing much about their lives with her because she is an outsider to their collective struggles. I am not in either side but my sympathies definitely lie with the figuratively dispossessed who are trying to make it work despite monumental struggles because there are no options out there.
D remarked that I looked downcast toward the end of our conversation. She is still a good friend and I did not want to tell her that was me looking disappointed in her. I want to believe time will bring clarity to her and I both so that we see the situation in a different light.
My friend H is in her mid 60s and she had worked for a well-known SaaS company for over a decade. Things had been going great for her the last five years, the team she was on really appreciated the value of her skill and experience. Her manager, a couple of decades younger than her took on a reverse mentoring role with her. H needed no help with doing her job well and scaling so others could become like her, but she did appreciate the mentoring on topics that she found harder to grasp given the generation gap. A few months ago, the company went through a major restructuring and H no longer had the job she had worked on so hard to come to love. The first few weeks were rough and she went through all stages of grief.
Now she's back to being herself, not quite ready to retire but close enough. While she is not excited about not working (or that is what she tells herself and her friends), she looks happier than I have ever seen her in her pictures. She's around the house doing mundane things she likely never had much time for until now. Baking chicken perfectly will get H excited and she'll share pictures of her accomplishment with us. This is a woman who had significant career accomplishments but I can't remember a single time that she shared any of it with friends in a group chat. She'd do the obligatory LinkedIn post and we'd respond but that stayed there.
I don't think the chicken baked with rosemary from her garden will feature on LinkedIn but the joy that it brings her is unmistakable. I want a bit more time to go by before I ask H if she is not infact happy with the way things have turned out despite the initial panic and the big waves of sadness and disappointment. There is I think a path for H that leads to her happy place and being at home and doing things that brighten her day will lead to it.
Reading this story about the French drinking less wine got me thinking about my former co-worker and friend E, a native Parisian. When we visited him at his home right outside Paris, several years ago, he took us to his wine cellar to pick out a wine for dinner. The tradition in his family had been to travel through wine country during summer break and pick up wines from vineyards they had known and loved for generations and there was always room for new discoveries. E extolled the virtues of the Bordeaux he had picked out dinner and it mattered little that I did not understand most of the finer points. His exuberance made up for it and we knew we would be in for a treat. The dinner was lovely and the wine paired nicely with the entree his wife had prepared. Everything about that evening in the backyard of his home was a thing of perfection. It would have been incomplete without the trip to the cellar and the stories about the wines, including some that his grandfather had passed on him. E's kids were in elementary and middle school at the time but they absorbed the ambience at the dinner table and probably knew more about wines than I did.
I thought it was interesting that the current sentiment is that a person will doubtless die of cancer even of they drink a single glass of wine - so complete abstinence is preferred and recommended. Something feels wrong about this because that does not square with commonsense. If the risks were really that high and indubitable, everyone in France for centuries now would have suffered and died of cancer. Those are not the facts that I am aware of. E and his wife drank is moderation and not a lot more than I did. More importantly, that wine had a story for them, it brought back memories from a summer past when they had visited Beynac et Cazenac where this wine was from, walked around the charming village and the store where E had bought his wife a pretty pendant that she happened to be wearing that evening. The value of the wine was well beyond the temporal joys of imbibition. We spent about three hours at that table and it remains one of the most memorable dinner experiences. I am not sure what would remain of it without the anchoring force of the wine and if it was replaced by a glass of water.
Reading this brought B to mind who has been battling cancer for several years and has been winning so far. She's my childhood friend. When things nose-dive for her, I feel a sense of panic, of time running out, wonder if this will our last chance to meet. Then just like that the scare is over, she is sailing in clear blue sky, her sprit undaunted and undiminished as ever.
She makes me and everyone else who knows her believe that miracles can and will happen - most certainly they will for B because she is such an amazing human being. God must want her to stick around and do more good for others - as she has been doing her entire adult life. I did not feel right about sharing the thread with B - she is so much wiser than me that none of this will be revelation for me. But there was wisdom there for me:
You have opportunity after opportunity to create something lovely for yourself or others. Every moment you choose to sit and think about horrors beyond your control, every time you make the choice to look for more and more details about just HOW bad... you are turning away from those opportunities..
The imagined "horrors" in the lives of regular people like me abound. We can get ourselves worked up about things we don't control, things that cause us much aggravation or disquiet. That is the time-sink to avoid at all costs. I often recall things B has said to me over the years to center me in times of trouble because she walks the talk every single day, leading an exemplary life while battling for life itself.
I met up with a friend from a long time ago over the holidays. She is a few years younger than me and grew up in a similar social and cultural milieu. Sitting in my living room drinking tea and chatting about times left far behind, a home we can no longer recognize felt comforting. Her immediate family has immigrated a long time ago so there is really nothing left to return to except for the desire to help her child understand his roots. We got talking about things that were common in our childhood but don't exist anymore - the things that such roots are made of.
We did not miss these things in our lives but when recalled they seemed to be imbued with special meaning. The shampoo that used to be advertised in every commercial break on national television. The model with her long and lustrous hair that the said shampoo had everything to do with or so we thought. Adjusted for age, M still has beautiful hair of her youth when I first met her, she was definitely shampoo model grade back in the day. For a moment, I wanted to recall that smell of that product I have not used in many decades. It is not possible to find something that is a close enough match to trigger the memory - I have tried. It was its own thing, bright yellow with a metallic sheen and a smell that I really loved. You knew if someone had shampooed because the bathroom would smell of it after.
As a young person, you believed that was the smell you wanted to linger behind you to signal clean, healthy, wholesome and someone with magnificent hair. The reality was the product was just a regular shampoo, it did no better or worse for a person's hair than any other product out there but the woman in the ad for this one was who made all the difference - she signaled something to the kids and youth of the day, something aspirational and a bit out of reach. That product disappeared from the market likely around the time I left India. By then, there were plenty of competitors with bold claims and comparably lush ads. All of this had faded out of memory until we shared stories from childhood in my living room.
B has a very intense travel schedule and an active social life. Between the two, it is about impossible to meet her for coffee or lunch. Years may pass between meetings, but I have always been flexible to make these episodic meetings happen. A few days ago, I got a text from her that appeared to be a mass outreach to all folks like me in her life that she had ignored for a year or more. Almost a marketing campaign to signal that we were on her mind and were missed. I decided to respond with sure, sounds great. As expected there was no response back. This is more a brand awareness message I guess than something more transactional, were the touch is made in hope of some conversion event.
Maybe there is a lesson for me to learn from B even though there is very little common between our lives. There are folks that I could do a better job of staying in touch with and perhaps this style of outreach maybe the way to go about it. Seems very low effort all around. I know of a few other folks you have this mass outreach style of staying in touch with people and keeping up with the news. I am about to get a call from one of them in the next couple of weeks because its been about three months since last check and R is great about keeping cadence. As I get older, I have to wonder if my social ineptitude grows as well. It is sad that there was a time over a decade ago when B and I were friends in the way I would know and understand that term. We met for lunch at the sushi place near my house and got dinner at a place she loved in the shopping mall halfway between her place and mine.
A few days after the initial contact, B wrote that she wanted me to meet the new man in her life. Based on the description I have met this man last time I saw her when he was officially new but given the number of people in her world and the sparse meetings, she had forgotten that the new was old news to me. If we do infact meet this year, chances are we will re-hash updates from the last couple of years until we part ways for that amount of time. Comes a time in our lives when that time interval is enough for one of the parties to have passed away.
A kid I know was telling me recently that he is running out of time to make friends in his life. In his opinion beyond mid-20s people do not make friendships that are real and last a lifetime. You could have any number of social connections and friendly acquaintances but not that kind of friend. This kid's friends go back to his elementary school but college and beyond they are all dispersing. He has not been able to find his people outside this group that is becoming increasingly disconnected from his life.
The mid-20s part rung true for me but I had been through multiple upheavals in my life since that point - which is what I attributed my inability to make new friends. But maybe the kid was onto something here - maybe that is the magic number when your friendship luck runs out. If you are wise, you will find your friends before that happens. Reading about rentable friends in Tokyo brought to mind the sparsity of friends in my life - maybe there is a world-wide market for rentable friends, Tokyo is as always leading the trend.
The ones I am closest too live too far away for any ongoing social interaction but they go back to my teens. That is not much different from being best buddies with the kids you went to kindergarten with. S, a guy I work with is one of those. He stays in touch with that group that is now scattered around the world. That is their friend-group for life and they first met in kindergarten. This is a group of seven grown men that have magically remained connected into their early 40s.
They are in very different professions and getting together takes several months of planning. When they get together, the families do not join. They understand that families have not much to contribute to their relationship and would feel out of place given lack of history. Their week together has an element of time-travel. They never quite return to the swing-set of the kindergarten schoolyard. But they do return to the beginning of manhood, coming into their own and realizing that this group of friends still made sense. That is when time starts for them. They are also incredibly fortunate and know it.
My friend T shared a short video of her performing Bharat Natyam on stage for some big celebration at her work. The last time I have seen her dressed for dance and on stage was in college. Other than being physically a bit slower than she was then, it was all the same - like time had not moved at all. T had a decade of training before college and continued to learn once she started working for maybe another decade. A very large part of her life has been about dance and other things came to exist around it.
I remember being in awe of her ability to express herself so wonderfully. She was one of those that innately loved dance, had a lot of natural talent which the training helped perfect. It was not hard for her find time to practice for an hour each day - she looked forward to it. It was T's time to escape into her zone. I love dance but have absolutely no talent for it. For people like T, they have that gift and can create a world with it they can escape to. For me, that has to be pieced together painstakingly with different things that I enjoy and am somewhat decent at. In her pictures and that video, T is beaming, She has escaped into her perfect world.
This is not the same T you would see off-stage going about the mundane business or her life, working, running errands, doing domestic chores like the rest of us. She too can be tired, irritated, aggravated, sad and upset. Once she had her dancing bells on and the music comes on, she had achieves escape velocity. It was so wonderful and inspiring to see that it is all still there, that perfect unblemished world.
My friend T gave me a piece of wisdom that I have turned over in my head several times since I received it. When a person offers their partner support in a difficult time so they can get back up on their feet and thrive, they must do it unconditionally. Upon successful recovery, the supportive partner should not look at the outcomes they helped achieve and feel betrayed saying - this is not the goals I wanted you to fulfill when I supported you. What about the goals that matter to me and you could not fulfill then but can now. When will it be my turn.
The answer to that can be your turn will never come because your goals are not my goals or at least not in the priority that you have in mind. You supported me in a difficult time and wanted me to thrive - I did. That alone should be the reward. If the person is feeling betrayed chances are they over-rotated on the support in terms of their emotional investment and subconsciously (at least) imagined what would lie on the other side after the struggles were over. That vision of the future when it is at complete odds with reality, they are unable to see the situation as anything but deep betrayal.
It could be to the point of invalidating the whole relationship and experiencing loss of identity. T is no professional therapist but she is one of those quiet, observant types that has brilliant insights that the rest of us missed because we were talking and not taking notes as we lived our lives. All of what T had described I have experienced a couple of times in my life and yes, I did feel like I did know who I was anymore and if any of what I was doing was right.
I have known L for years but visited her for the first time a few weeks ago. It was a short but memorable stay. Her place sits on hillside and is next to a state park. The view from the back porch is fantastic - you see mountain ranges on one side, a forest and lake on the other. She has numerous fruit trees in the yard and a magnificent Jacaranda in full bloom. We sat there taking in the scenery. The distant whooshing of cars was the only interruption to the sound of the many chirping birds. L gave me her binoculars so I could see them flitting in the trees. Every day could feel like a vacation sitting on L's porch. It is no surprise that they are both reluctant coffee badgers but are willing to do what it takes since the end is so close. They are willing to put with the pointless commute to earn their credits for the week.
She and her husband are a few years away from retirement and very much looking forward to it. There was a time when they both enjoyed what they did for a living. Despite busy jobs and having to raise four kids, they found time for hobbies that took a lot of time and effort. This was a couple that seemed to be able to get a lot out of their day and were inspiring to others. Over the many conversations during our stay, I was able to piece together how the tide turned. It is a story of death by a thousand cuts - small disappointments, things not working out quite as expected in many fronts and ennui from lack of meaningful change. Considered alone, none of the events are quite cataclysmic but they add up and create this desire to leave it all behind and never look back.
L reminded me of my father in the years leading up to his retirement. He was so ready and counting down the days - like a prisoner waiting for freedom. He stopped trying to bring about change in his life when in fact he was completely free of responsibility at the time and could make big, bold moves if he wanted to. Instead, like L, he chose to shrink the boundaries of his universe very drastically. It became his dream to go out to the market every morning to get fresh fish and vegetables for the day. He had no further plans for how he would spend his retirement years. For someone who worked a very complex job for thirty some years, traveled extensively and made decisions impacting many every day, this was the epitome of an uncomplicated life. My father is eighty now and continues to live his simple life as he had wanted. He has the satisfaction of doing it his way and he has built upon his desire to simplify by limiting his engagement with the world outside home.
J and I find it very difficult to communicate with him because there is nothing to talk about. This was not the person he always was. This is who he turned into by choosing to live the way he does. Part of me wanted to tell L that the retirement she was dreaming of could have unintended consequences. She already struggles to find common ground with her kids who are in their thirties. I chose to hold my peace fearing it was not my place to tell a woman close to retirement age how she should live the rest of her life. With my father back in the day, I felt I was within my rights and shared my concerns many times to no avail. His mind was completely made up and there was nothing to rethink or revisit.
N is a few years older than me but has the spirit of a much younger person. She is still up for a lot of adventure and exploration, excited about things many of our peers stopped caring about long ago. Spending any amount of chatting with her is rejuvenating for me. It forces me tap back into my twenty year old soul and believe in miracles again. While life does not unfold in a series of miracles, just being able to get into that state seems to have benefits. Most recently, after we went over the shenanigans in her current relationship combined with her son getting serious about a woman she thinks is entirely unsuitable for him, I felt like a reset button went off for me somewhere inside.
This conversation forced me to take stock of what I can at the moment change and not change in my life. There is a good bit of undesirable stuff in the cannot change pile. Borrowing a leaf from N's book, I decided to separate myself mentally from that pile in entirety and allow time to resolve things organically. By not participating, I don't have to feel drained and defeated. The pile is already looking smaller and has receded to some distance in my mind. The things I can change are looking so much more interesting in contrast and I want to stay focused on those. I will never become one like N but it is a great blessing to have a force of nature like that in one's life.
I read a short story written by a friend from college recently. It was a proud moment to see one of our own getting published in a reputable literary magazine. B was a geek who dreamed of being literary without the education in early life or the time to work on her craft later. We were kindred spirits in that sense. I was glad to see her make it somewhere even if decades too late. But the topic of her story put me in a pensive mood. Only those who knew her well from her college das would be able to see that it was autobiographical. She was pushed into an arranged marriage by her parents. It was considered a high-status match for their family - having scored the best deal ever, they made haste to close. In her story, B mentions meeting her ex-boyfriend from college a decade after marriage. The event is described with the degree of precision that is hard to mistake. That was S clear as day. In her story S is married and so is the protagonist but both are unhappy in their own ways. S is estranged from his wife.
The heroine of the story is married to a physically abusive husband she cannot leave because she has two kids. In real life all facts add up to B. Separating fact from fiction can be hard even when you think you know someone reasonably well. Last I saw B she was in her early 20s so I imagine I don't know her at all. But as two women who are of the same age and some shared life experiences, I believe her story is part reality and part fiction. Her marriage is not what she wanted it to be maybe because she could not invest in the husband fully being mentally away with S and imagining what might have been. No marriage can compete with that kind of perfection - where every blemish can be wished away at whim. It is also likely that whatever it was with S ended with such an ostensible finality that such a story became possible to write - there simply cannot be any truth to it. B was always a woman full of mysteries and I am not surprised to see that she retained what was most unique about her - the ability to surprise. For her sake, I want to believe she has never been physically abused.
I met a former co-worker after a few years recently when I was in her hometown for work. R looked much the same but a lot had changed since I saw her last. She had suffered a miscarriage right around that time and suddenly it made sense how she always looked sad. It did not feel appropriate to ask her about it because these conversations are awkward unless in person. I felt contrite that I had not reached out, been more present in the life of a colleague I really liked. She spoke of feeling trapped and in a rut in her job, not seeing any prospects for moving forward and not being able to decide if she wanted a baby. I hope I was able to give her some guidance based on my own life lessons given I am much older than her. Removing the problem that was most draining on her and impacting her personal life should be the first priority I said.
If she is staying out of loyalty she should know that she and everyone else is no better than commodity that will be dumped out whenever required. Loyalty should be a two-way street and in her workplace it absolutely was not. She laughed about how such loyalty is like her first serious relationship that lasted a decade and turned completely toxic half way through. R stayed on because she had invested time and effort and was trying to recoup something. In hindsight that was a bad idea and also a lesson that transfers well to her situation at work -she is being that girlfriend again, wasting the years on her life where nothing can be recouped. I hope I will see R in a much better place all around next time I see her - hopefully a mother as she clearly wants to be and is just afraid to wish for what is so dearly desired.
I am definitely the person that does all the outreach to my friends and acquaintances with a very small minority who also do their part. There would be any number of reasons for one-sided friendship and they are unique to the person and their circle of friends. In my case, I would attribute it to the fact that most of the folks I am talking about are acquaintances who I picked up at certain life stages.
That context is very important because it brought these people into my life and led to us becoming "friends" at the time. Most if not all of them had settled into what would be their life going forward. If they were married at the time, they still are. The house they lived in then is still where they live. Their lives were steady state and mine was in flux. Most continue to work for the same company - a few have moved around for work but all other parameters have remained exactly the same.
In contrast everything about me has changed several times - they had to reset their relationship with me each time a big change event occurred. Comes a point when the other person can no longer count on me being anyone or anything they know, like or recognize.
To them this is the equivalent of being friends with someone who transitioned from middle school to college to working adult life while they remained the established suburban white picket fence existence the whole time. If they happened to like the middle school version of me that is no guarantee they will like what they see today - that is not nearly the same person. Middle school friends rarely become you lifetime best friends.
What I am dealing with is not a one-sided friendship but a bizarre situation of me trying to convert someone who hung out with me (on occasion) in middle school into a meaningful friend in belated adult life. They on their part have long moved on to a normal functional adult life complete with a circle of like-minded friends and peers. They have no idea what to do with me when I pop-up to say hello - I bet they have no idea why I am still in touch after all this time. It may feel quite weird infact.
Every few months, M gives me an obligatory call to check on me and mine. She is a friend of my parents and I did not know her until rather recently. All our phone conversations follow the exact same pattern - she starts by complaining about her life - how she is severely overworked and can't wait to retire, followed by her upcoming travel plans and then checking on the health of every single person on my side - one at a time.
Once she is done with her wellness checks she is ready to hang up. I have to assume this pattern of engagement is not unique to me - she must do this with the anyone who is somewhat remotely connected to her, where there is not much to say and yet some time needs to be invested to keep the contact warm. The fact that we are in touch at all is to M's credit. The mechanics of the contact may be unsatisfactory but it gets the job done and does not take any effort at all. My own record of staying in touch with people I know from various phases of life is quite lackluster so I have something to learn from M.
Maybe there is something to be said for sporadic, meaningless contact just to keep the connection from entirely dying out. My concern about meaningful conversation, memorable meetings keep me from doing what M does so effortlessly and efficiently. It takes her less than fifteen minutes every three months - that is time anyone can find without it being an encumbrance.
For contrast, I am trying to get together with my friend L for dinner all last year without success because she travels for work most days of the month and has an intense social calendar on the rare occasion she is at home. Timing my outreach to exactly coincide with her free evening is close to impossible and so we are where we are. I will see L eventually at some point and we will enjoy the few hours together and promise we will be better friends to each other going forward. We have a decade long record of doing all those things with no outcomes to show for it.
I love houseplants but have very few of them given how the work involved in keeping them all alive grows exponentially with how much life and beauty they bring into the space. There is certain divine fairness to that equation but one that does not serve me well specially when I am away for several weeks a at time. My friend M gifted me an orchid plant several months ago and I had managed to keep just about all the flowers alive for the whole time feeding it ice-cubes weekly. When I returned from vacation there was not a single flower left though the leaves remained healthy and green. The idea of plant straws is great and logically it might even work. I need to experiment with a home-made version of the thing to see it deliver in practice. A bit of thin PVC tubing should in theory serve the same purpose as the brass straw.
Thinking of houseplants and my somewhat theoretical love of them always brings T to mind. I worked with her some years ago. She lived in a condo in Chicago at the time and when you walked through the front door it was as if you had stepped into a tropical rain-forest. The place was teeming with houseplants of all shapes and sizes. T traveled a fair bit and had elaborate mechanisms to keep her plants thriving while she was out. Some of those plants were over a decade old - they were acquired when T first moved to America from Spain. Keeping them alive and well had symbolic importance to her. That was a love of plants manifested in a tangible way. T was that kind of person - she did not just imagine the life she would like or love, she took steps to make it happen.
On Thanksgiving Day this year, I reached out to thank the many friends who had welcomed J and I to their family dinner tables on this day for the many years that I was a single-mom. We became an extension of their families - aunts, uncles and cousins knew of us and expected us to be there. One person I really wanted to reach out to and could not find her phone number. A few days later, after much searching I was able to find an old email address for her which likely she no longer uses. But I had to take my chances and write to her. She used to be my boss back when I knew her.
L was working hard to save her own marriage at the time. Her husband worked five states away and they met only few times a year other than for the holidays. L relied on the support of her family to help raise her kids while he worked full-time, so it was not feasible for her to relocate to the husband's town. He had some specialized skills that made it hard for him to find work in ours. I met L's husband once at Thanksgiving dinner and the dynamic between L and him reminded me of my marriage when it was on it's last legs.
Unlike them, I did not have two school age kids and a mortgage at the time, but all decaying marriages smell about the same I think. I did not imagine their marriage would last beyond a year or two. Sadly, I was proven right. L has a different last name now, she's changed jobs a couple of times but that was the last time we met. She replied to my note almost immediately - happy to see my note and the picture of J as a child that was taken in her living room when she was about five years old.
The act of reconnecting with L helped me hold on to the good and positive from that time - which was overall hard for both of us. I got to choose the memory to connect with - it was a picture I knew she would love. It had been taken by her mother. The kids had been playing all afternoon and her kids has dressed up J and asked grandma to take the picture. J was loving all the attention. It was the culmination of a nice day with our kids having a good time together. Thanks to grandma, we could relax and not need to be in charge. It was a day I felt glad L was in our lives and we could spend such an afternoon together.
My friend B and her husband have become empty nesters recently. Last time we met, it was right after the youngest had left to college. Now it has been a year and they have both had time to process the feeling. B's husband is very ready to move on to the next phase of their lives. He looks relaxed and happy - major responsibilities were executed well and it is time for well-deserved rest. This is the most cheerful I have seen him in the decade that I have known this couple. B is a different story entirely. She looks bereft - there is no other way to describe her affect. She is going through the motions of entertaining friends, socializing and the rest, but her heart is not in it. She is simply not able to join her husband in his desire to move on to the next phase, have their grand adventures together.
That is the not what the rest of her life is about. She is seeking the community of women of her age and life stage she can commiserate with. The life experiences of B as a mother are the only ones that she wants to center on. It is as if the husband is waiting for her on a different track in the railway station, hoping to board a train at goes to a place she has never been or even wants to go. But they are each waiting for the other, hoping that after enough time passes, they will fall back in sync to meet at a common place, continue moving in the same direction. It was interesting to observe how remarkably they have both changed as the result of the same event but not at all in the same way.
B and I go back to college days and I would could her among my closest friends. Midlife crisis has come to our lives at different times and ironically, it has not helped us to support each other any better. When it was my turn a few years ago, I did what I always do in times of stress and trouble - I made several radical changes to my already complicated life almost to see at what point I would burst. It is only by providence that I managed to get out of all that mess mostly intact. That was my way, or if one believes there is no such thing as free will, then it was what was destined for me. In the case of B, she made hard choices much earlier in life - a few years after graduating from college, that set the tone for how the rest of her life would shape up to be.
Unlike most young people who march fearlessly in the direction of their dreams and don't let minor obstacles bother them until age and disappointment take their toll, B was an old soul who saw things differently. Most dreams were culled as soon as they came to be - B did not want to pursue anything that she was not fully confident about. In your early twenties, such things tend to be few and far between. But that is how she chose and today she is experiencing an existential crisis. All at once, she has regressed to the time before dream-slaying began. The things that could have been had they moved by an hour or an inch, the things that should have never been also for those reasons. There is no time for a do-over anymore. B has chosen to keep to herself and try and make sense of whatever she is feeling. She is unwilling or unable to share. This is her way to doing everything she can to see when she will burst.