On Friendship

Posted on January 8, 2017 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts, Highlights, Slider Content • Tagged family, friends, friendship, grief, loss, parenting, Sarah Kilch Gaffney • Leave a comment

By Sarah Kilch Gaffney

They are so much of why you are back on your feet, of how you are able to continue moving through life.

Great friends are thrilled for you when you go from the least likely of the bunch to settle down to all-out smitten and engaged in the span of fifteen months. They wonder a little about this fellow you met in the middle of the woods and how you’re only 22, but then they meet him and no one has any questions, just joy.

They agree to hike four miles round-trip to watch you get married in your favorite hiking pants (with a veil thrown in for good measure) on the mountain closest to both your hearts, and then help to remove the blowdowns from the “altar” before the ceremony starts.

Even when most of them are doing more productive things with their lives, they don’t judge you when you decide to put off graduate school for a while to spend too much time in the woods and hang out by the sea.

They are thus super impressed when you adopt a dog, buy your first house, and decide to actually apply for graduate school.

A week after they find a lemon-sized tumor in your 27-year-old husband’s brain, they approach your car in the parking lot after work and hand you a half-gallon jug of homemade “apple pie” comprised of spices, apple cider, and most importantly, 100-proof-liquor. Also included is an offer to make more.

They ask what you need and they mean it.

They don’t doubt you for a second when you decide to become parents and they offer to babysit after the little one arrives.

They mow your lawn, plow your driveway, and take your trash to the transfer station.

They take your daughter overnight when it’s time for the second brain surgery and then drive her down to the hospital when he’s out of the woods; they pick her up from daycare when the chemo treatments run late or you have to travel out-of-state; they take her for a few hours here and there so you can try and juggle nursing school on top of everything else.

They call and it is like no time has passed at all.

They fly a thousand miles to help you survive school and take care of your family like their own, and then accept it despite their effort when you leave school a few weeks later when your husband can no longer safely stay home alone.

They start a fundraiser for your family to use to take a vacation, then for alternative treatments, then for just anything because sometimes that’s how quickly it goes.

No matter how inopportune the timing, they meet you at the local emergency department every time.

Knowing your daughter needs as much love as humanly possible, they give, give, give.

After the oncologist tells you there is nothing left to be done, they fill the house with visitors and love.

When your husband starts hospice two weeks before your daughter’s 3^rd birthday, they arrange an enormous, spectacular party for her where all you have to do is show up and try not to cry.

When he becomes home-bound, they come visit with incredible spreads of food and booze, to play with your daughter for hours on end, and with enough meals for the freezer so that you won’t have to cook for months.

After the hospice nurse says hours to days, they stand at your side until family arrives; they hold his hand and say goodbye; they put Patty Griffin on in the background, every album repeating; they shake their heads right alongside you in disbelief that this is actually happening.

They meet you at the funeral home to fill out the cremation paperwork and tentatively look at urns. When you find a little slate one with a golden tree and say you’re not going to buy it just yet, but look at this, they completely agree.

When he dies, they shower the world with tributes of his good spirit, love for teaching everyone about the woods, and how much confidence, humor, and knowledge he brought to their lives.

They help plan his celebration of life and spill into your neighbors’ house to fill it with love and laughter and stories.

When you turn 30 just over two months after his death, they take you out to a coastal town for dinner and drinks and the comforting smells of diesel fuel and the sea.

They hike 12 emotionally and physically grueling miles with you up your mountain to spread his ashes where they need to be; at the summit they all dip their hands and join you in setting him free.

When you return to nursing school that fall, they are there to support you through and through; when you find that you are miserable and leave the program six months later, all they want is for you to be happy.

As the horror of that first Christmas approaches, they entertain and distract.

They house/pet/chicken-sit so that you can travel for the first time in half a decade.

As the one-year mark nears, they gather with you at his favorite pub to reminisce and love.

When you start to date again, they want to know EVERY. LAST. DETAIL.

Your life is what it is in great part because of these friends, these friends who kept you afloat through the best and worst years of your life, through thick and thin, through marriage, birth, death, and life again.

Oftentimes, especially early in the morning with your first cup of coffee, you wonder where you would be without your friends. You breathe deeply, slowly, gratefully for all they have done, all they have sacrificed and loved. They are so much of why you are back on your feet, of how you are able to continue moving through life. You hope they never experience anything even remotely similar, but because of them you’re there: ready, strong as hell, and by their sides to rally, protect, love, and provide anything they might ever need.

Sarah Kilch Gaffney lives in rural Maine with her daughter. Read more from Sarah at: www.sarahkilchgaffney.com.

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Teaching Our Children About the Meaning of Friendship

Posted on December 1, 2015 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts • Tagged children and childhood, family, friends, friendship, Meagan Schultz, miscarriage, motherhood • Leave a comment

By Meagan Schultz

“See, bud, THIS is what friends do.” I tell him, returning to the conversation we started earlier. “Friends do nice things for each other, to make each other feel better.”

“Augie is my friend,” Silas says proudly one morning as we’re eating breakfast at the kitchen table that straddles the french doors to our back deck.

“Lucky you,” I say.

“And Finn, and Shay, and Ivy, and Matilde … ” he goes on, listing every kid he can remember in his nursery school.

“And what do friends do?” I ask him.

“Friends give hugs.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Friends kiss.”

I try to imagine him kissing all of these kids and my mind moves quickly to the email the school sent last week about the case of lice going around. I shudder.

He returns to his granola and berries, staring down at his bowl, determined to get the fruit on his Elmo spoon without using his fingers. He’s a righty, and today he props his left elbow on the table next to the bowl, resting his head on his knuckles. He’s half playing, half eating, and keeps glancing towards the family room where his train set still covers the floor from last night.

The doorbell rings and I leave him at the table to answer it. I return with a delivery from UPS.

“For me, Mama?” He asks, sing-songing the mama, as he does when he is excited. He expects all packages are for him after his birthday last month.

“Nope, this time it’s for me buddy.”

“No, MINE.” He bangs his little fist on the table, nearly knocking his bowl over, and shouts through clenched teeth.

“Oooooh, but look what’s inside,” I say, trying to distract his disappointment.

And it works. Suddenly his face softens into a smile, his dimples return. He lifts his eyebrows and his neck to see over the top of the box I’ve just set on the table next to him. He’s forgotten that it’s not his gift and sweet Silas is back.

“Look Mama, a cardinal,” he says, and points to a speck of red on the telephone wire that runs across the backyard and above the garage. And then he turns his attention back to the box.

I pull out a beautiful flowered gift bag with purple tissue paper hanging over the edge and read the card. His eyes focus first on the bag and then follow my hands as I open the envelope. It’s a care package from one of my best friends, someone I only talk to a few times a year, who lives across the country, but who knew I had been grieving. Two weeks earlier, I’d suffered yet another miscarriage, my sixth. This one came at twelve weeks after a miserable morning in the ER and a D&C that followed.

“Oh my goodness,” I say. “I can’t believe this. This is so NICE,” I say, my voice inflecting and emphasizing the ‘nice.’

He watches me quietly while I open each little tissue-wrapped gift inside the bag.

“See, bud, THIS is what friends do.” I tell him, returning to the conversation we started earlier. “Friends do nice things for each other, to make each other feel better.”

I realize I have a captive audience here; he’s put both elbows on the table now and is holding his head in his hands. So I slow down, unwrapping with wide-eyes and gasps as if—with each gift—I’ve discovered an oyster pearl the size of a golf ball. Socks, a bracelet, a candle, a notebook, a mug. He watches me silently, but opens his mouth slightly with each “oooh” and “ahhh,” mimicking my expressions.

When I’m finished, he slides out of his chair and onto the bench next to me, his little hands reaching for the candle, pulling it to his nose for three quick and shallow sniffs, looking a little like a hamster. I doubt he smelled the ollaliberry and tangerine, but he is satisfied and moves on to fondle the mug, intrigued by the heart shaped handle.

He spends the next half hour in the family room focused on rebuilding his train tracks. I know he is working hard because I can hear him breathing. I sit at the kitchen table with my coffee, finishing the morning paper. He talks to himself while he plays, in the high-pitched voices he uses for the stuffed friends he takes to bed each night. Every so often, I look up to find him staring at the bag on the table. I quickly look away.

“That’s SO nice,” he squeals, delighted with himself.

“OHMYGOODNESS, that was so NICE of you.”

“Thank you so MUCH.”

He’s trying out patterns, giving weight and prominence to the different syllables of gratitude.

He’s copying the melodramatic exaggerations he heard earlier.

He’s practicing for when it’s his turn to be a friend.
Originally from California, Meagan Schultz lives in Milwaukee Wisconsin with her husband and two young boys. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming on Write On, Mamas, Literary Mama, and Mamalode.

Photo: Getty Images

Not Pregnant

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Aubrey Hirsch • Posted in Blog, General • Tagged Aubrey Hirsch, friends, friendship, motherhood, pregnancy • 3 Comments

When I got married, I was shocked at how quickly people started asking me when I was going to have a baby. And when I did have a baby a few years later, I expected a fairly lengthy reprieve from all the pregnancy speculation. But I soon discovered that the window between giving birth to a baby and when people expect you to start on another is vanishingly short.

Almost worse than the embarrassingly direct, “When are you having another baby?” are the little nods and nudges. “Is that water you’re drinking [WINK WINK]?” If I had a dollar for every time someone has accused me of being pregnant in the year since my son was born, I could buy a lot of negative pregnancy tests—and not just the cheap ones, the really nice digital kind.

The thing is, though, I’ve still got nearly a decade of fertility ahead of me and I’m already sick of telling people when I’m not pregnant. And I’m guessing I’m not alone. So, for you budding fertility detectives out there, here’s a handy list of things that non-pregnant women of child-bearing age also do:

1. Throw up. I blame the media for this one. While it’s true that every time a woman on television or in the movies vomits it’s because she’s pregnant, in real life, this is not quite the reliable pregnancy indicator it’s cracked up to be. Just like men, children and post-menopausal women, non-pregnant women of child-bearing age sometimes get the stomach flu. This is especially true for those of us who already have a kid or two. When I take my son to the library for story time, I have to weigh the amount of fun we’ll have against the possibility that he’ll bring home some infectious disease that I thought had been eradicated in developed nations. In any case, the appropriate response to your friend saying, “I was up all night puking my guts out,” is “That sucks,” not “ZOMG! Are you pregnant????”

2. Drink water. Let’s say you’re out to dinner with a group of girlfriends. The drink menu makes the rounds and your waiter comes to take orders. Instead of a grapefruiterita or a cosmotonic, your pal says she’ll just have water. Before you jump to the conclusion that she’s gestating, consider these possible alternatives. Perhaps she’s driving home later and doesn’t want to risk being mildly tipsy. Maybe she hit the hooch a little too hard the previous weekend and is still in recovery. It’s possible that she wants a fruity drink later, but doesn’t think orange juice will mix well with the beef bourguignon she ordered. Or maybe she just feels like having a glass of water. In any case, this is probably not good evidence that your pal is pregnant. Sorry.

3. Pass on the sushi. Although this may seem like airtight evidence that your friend is knocked up, it’s probably best to keep that speculation to yourself for now. Some people just don’t like the taste, texture, or even the idea of raw fish. I was once the subject of a pregnancy investigation because I passed up a tray of warm tuna tartar that had been sitting around for more than an hour. Spoiler: I wasn’t pregnant, I just didn’t want to end up with Anisakiasis. Trust me, you don’t either.

4. Choose decaf. I know that steam coming off her decaf latte makes it seem like a smoking gun, but non-pregnant women of child-bearing age do sometimes choose decaf for reasons that don’t involve her uterus. She may be worried about getting to sleep later, or already be wired up from the three cups she had before you met. In any case, treating her decaf latte like it’s an ultrasound photo on Facebook is likely to leave you swallowing your words.

5. Gain weight. Science has proven that you don’t have to be pregnant in order to put on a few pounds. In fact, the burrito I had for lunch weighs more than a fetus at 22 weeks. Just because your friend’s jeans are fitting a little tighter than the last time you saw her doesn’t mean there’s a bundle of joy on the way. And here’s a pro tip from one lady to another: most people don’t like to have their little weight fluctuations pointed out to them. If you can stand the suspense, keep your pregnancy conjecture to yourself.

Of course, this doesn’t even touch on the reality that we can’t always know what’s going on in the lives of our friends. Maybe the woman in question actually is pregnant, but worries about spreading the news too soon. She might even have a very valid reason to worry that her pregnancy might not be viable. Or she could be experiencing infertility or have suffered a recent miscarriage. For many women, constant reminders that they aren’t pregnant aren’t just annoying—they can be downright cruel.

These family-building years are fun and exciting and I know that the inferences and guesses most often come from a good place. But that doesn’t mean they are a good idea. The next time your friend passes on the beer and has a soda instead, try to ignore it. Just enjoy your time together and feel confident that if she ever does have news of a pregnancy to share with you, when she’s ready to talk about it, she will!

Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar. Her work has appeared widely in print and online You can learn more about her at www.aubreyhirsch.com or follow her on Twitter: @aubreyhirsch

Illustration by Christine Juneau

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Here Comes Trouble

Posted on June 26, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Blog, Featured Blog Posts, General • Tagged bullying, children and childhood, emotions, Francie Arenson Dickman, friends, Junior High, Middle School, motherhood, parenting • 4 Comments

By Francie Arenson Dickman

I read my twelve-year-old daughters’ texts. I admit it. I take a peek whenever I get the chance, which isn’t that often because my kids are on to me and take their phones wherever they go, which includes the shower. I found this out a few weeks ago at the “Genius Bar”in the Apple Store where we went after one of the phones mysteriously stopped functioning. When Jeremy, our trouble shooter, asked if the phone had gotten wet recently, my daughter answered, “Not like soaked, but maybe like misted from steam in the bathtub.” Her face went red and she gave a small smile, as if to acknowledge the idiocy of her actions. I, however, stayed silent, unable to admit that I’d had a hand in it, that in a court of law, under but-for rules of causation, my own nosiness could be blamed for the broken phone.

I’ve heard the arguments against reading your child’s texts. Texts are private. It’s the way children communicate nowadays. They need to feel like they can freely express themselves. Obviously, these are the views of the more well-adjusted parents. I would like to be one of them. I would like to stop reading the texts, but honestly, I can’t. In this area of parenting, the realm of preteen relations, I am, like my daughter’s iPhone, damaged goods. I don’t need to apply any fancy rules of causation to tell you why. I was bullied in sixth grade.

When I say bullied, I don’t mean your garden variety name calling or not including, but the real deal, the stuff that makes up a parent’s worst fears and messes up a grown woman’s psyche. Girls throwing rocks at my mother as she shopped in town. A chain of arms linking across the hall so I couldn’t make my way. Walking home in the cold, after my winter coat had been buried in a snow drift while I’d sat in class.

As for why it happened, I can’t tell you. Although over the years I’ve developed a few theories which center around the fact that I was clueless and so was my mother. She sent me off in blind faith and Wranglers to sixth grade where I learned about Queen Bees and Wanna Be’s through on-the-job training.

But, like any survivor does, I gradually moved on and eventually, I moved away. I made friends. I got a degree. I found a career. I found a therapist, then a husband. I had kids. I was healed. And then, first physically and now it seems, emotionally, I moved back. I never intended to. I’d vowed to never return to my hometown after I graduated high school. But I’d found a house I loved in a neighborhood I liked with close friends and my parents nearby. “Go back,” the therapist told me, “and get it right.”

I tend to take any assignment with goodie two shoes seriousness (a habit which I suspect, along with the Wranglers, had something to do with the bullying), and so we bought the house, and I threw myself into my task of getting it right. For a while, the job was easy. But gradually, my girls got older. Third grade rolled into fourth, fourth into fifth, and before I knew what hit me, my SUV was rolling around the circle drive of Junior High. My girls were in sixth grade, and once again, so was I.

In an instant, I was off the wagon, undone, nauseous as could be when I dropped off my kids in the morning. When I looked out the window at the kids clustered around, I saw potential social terrorists. When I watched my own kids head into the melee, I saw potential targets. This time around, however, I vowed to be on guard, to get it right.

In my efforts to do so, I led my daughters in a series of well-intended but largely ignored lectures which touched on themes such as bullying, cyberbullying, empathy, inclusion, how to look our for yourself, why to not look out only for yourself, and when all else fails, how to throw a right hook.

I also committed to keeping tabs on social dynamics, which I quickly realized was more difficult than anticipated due to modern technology. Gone are the days when a parent can keep a finger on the pulse by simply pressing an ear against a bedroom door. Kids don’t talk, they text. So one day I decided to read, and I never stopped until the phone broke down. All in the quest to have what my mother did not—a sense of what’s going on.

The irony, of course, is that nothing is going on. In six months of school, while I’ve been patrolling and panicking, nothing has happened. As twelve-year-olds go, my children’s friends are saints. They have kind hearts, good values and nice families. It seems the only troublemaker in the sixth grade so far is me.

The other day I had to fill out a profile on each of my kids for camp. Has your daughter ever been teased? It asked. And I, in turn, asked my kids. “Have you ever been teased?”

Lilly answered with, “I don’t think so.”

Gracie answered with, “Only by Lilly.”

Their answers and their relaxed attitudes beg a few follow up questions for me, like can one really “get it right”when so much—having a twin, having nice neighbors—comes down to luck of the draw? Which in turn begs a better question: what the hell have I been doing with my time? Except, I’ve realized during the idle hours I’d allotted for advising on the non-existent bullying, scarring my children. In the name of getting it right, I have been screwing it up by handing down my issues—an aversion to groups, a distrust of people, the assumption that a friendship can go permanently south on a dime. My guess is that I am, like a parent who passes down an addiction, giving my own sixth grade to my daughters. Let’s face it, when the last words children hear as they head out the door are, “Stick together and don’t take shit from anyone,” their outlook on the day can only be so grand. I assume many parents would tell me that a better approach would be the more traditional, “Have a great day, girls. I love you.” Obviously, these are the same parents who aren’t sneaking peeks at their children’s texts, the well-adjusted ones who weren’t bullied in sixth grade.

I admit that maybe I have erred in the opposite direction as my mother. But isn’t that what parenting is all about? Swinging the pendulum, over compensating for the ways in which our parents fell short, making the big mistakes that keep therapists in business. My girls may likely grow up to be cynical, paranoid people with attachment issues. After all, one is already showering with a phone. But I hold out hope. There are still three months left of sixth grade and an entire year of seventh—an eternity at an age when all can go south on a dime.

Francie Arenson Dickman‘s essays have appeared in The Examined Life, A University of Iowa Literary Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and Literary Mama. She lives outside of Chicago with her husband and twin daughters and is currently completing her first novel.

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Dancing Queen

Posted on March 24, 2014 by CNF • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged daisy florin, dancing, friends, fun, marriage, moms, mothering, summer, vacation • 3 Comments

By Daisy Alpert Florin

Last summer, my family and I spent a week in Vermont at the kind of family resort that promises fun for all ages. It delivered: while our three kids participated in wholesome summertime activities with their peers, my husband, Ken, and I had time to reconnect during long bike rides, canoe trips and swims in the lake. Each night, the resort offered after-hours activities as well, most of which did not appeal to me. Bonfire and sing-along? Too hokey. Trivia night? Too geriatric. But Thursday night’s offering seemed perfect: Dance night with DJ.

I love to dance. Years of childhood ballet have not translated into a lifetime of grace, but give me a few drinks, blast some pop music and I’m unstoppable. At 40, the opportunities for dancing are few and far between. Before last summer, the last time I had been dancing was four years earlier at a friend’s wedding. I danced non-stop, sweating through my dress, pausing only when the DJ took a break for the father-of-the-bride’s toast. So any chance to dance, I’ve come to learn, should not be passed up.

Ken and I reserved a babysitter, put our kids to bed and headed up to the inn. The breakfast room had been transformed into a dance floor, complete with disco ball, strobe light and a mountain of sound equipment. When we entered the room, a few guests were taking salsa lessons. I sipped my maple mojito through a skinny straw and watched the sad scene unfold.

“What’s up with the salsa lesson?” I asked Ken. “I thought we were here to dance.”

“Calm down. There’s the DJ,” he said. “Let’s just wait.” He patted my hand, trying to keep my tantrum at bay.

Dancing, or the promise of dancing, can bring out my nasty side. At my five-year college reunion, fueled by several foamy beers and the crush of alumnae dancing around me, I had yelled at the college students sneaking some grooves on the tiny square of dance floor set up on the grass for the class of 1995.

“This is our dance floor, yo!” I’d hissed at them. “Get the hell off!” I couldn’t stand the thought of them dancing every weekend the way I used to, traipsing from frat house to frat house in search of the best crowd and the best tunes, while we returned to entry-level jobs in the city, our weekends spent in overpriced bars with nary a DJ in sight.

The salsa lesson ended and the dance floor cleared out. The DJ started spinning some tunes, mostly unoffensive, generic stuff: “I Will Survive,” “Holiday,” “Dancing Queen.” All in all, pretty uninspiring. The crowd apparently agreed with me: fifteen minutes in, the dance floor was pretty much empty.

“This is lame,” I said to Ken, eyeing the middle-aged crowd around us.

“Do you want to go?” he asked.

Before I could answer, the doors opened and a crowd of staff members entered the room. This could get interesting, I thought and ordered another drink.

The young men and women, released from their day jobs as camp counselors, waitresses and Zumba instructors, sauntered in in groups of four and five. Having shed the cocoon of their uniforms, they emerged like butterflies in low-slung jeans and baby doll dresses. All week long, I had been obsessed with the group of young people who kept the resort running. I invented fictions about them–love triangles, bitter breakups, kinky sexting. Each morning, as I biked from our cabin to the resort’s main buildings, I passed by the staff’s residence. It was a shabby Victorian-style house covered in layers of colorful paint and strung with Christmas lights. I could only imagine the amount of screwing that took place inside.

The staff greeted each other, some affectionately, others nonchalantly. I recognized the waitress who served us breakfast each morning standing on the periphery of a loud group of girls. She was wearing a brightly patterned dress, high-waisted and billowy around the hip. Looking around at the other girls, I noticed they were all wearing different versions of the same dress regardless of how it suited their figures. They were too young to know how to dress for their bodies, but young enough for it not to matter.

Watching them, I couldn’t help wondering how I had entered this other group, parents–or “guests” as we were known–when deep down I felt like I should be hanging out with the the staff. Why had I never had a job like this instead of wasting my college summers working at internships in fields I’d never entered? They got to go dancing.

As Ken and I sipped our drinks and grooved half-heartedly to ABBA and Van Morrison, the staff played out their own dramas, oblivious to us. My eyes tried to meet theirs across the dark room. Can’t you see? I tried to telegraph. I’m really one of you.

After a few more songs, I walked over to the DJ.

“Are you going to play anything more current? Like Katy Perry or Rihanna?” I asked the boy-girl pair parked behind the turntable.

“Yeah,” the girl answered flatly. “We usually play the older stuff first for the older crowd and then we’ll start with something more modern.”

My eyes met hers straight on. “Well, let’s hit it NOW, O.K.?” I think I kind of yelled.

Seconds later, Macklemore’s “Can’t Hold Us” exploded through the speakers. I ran out onto the dance floor, pumping my hands toward the roof as the chorus rang out. I twisted and grooved through the twangy horns section and stamped my feet during the final na-na-nas. The music continued, the songs of summer streaming out one after the other. I knew them all from listening to the radio in my minivan. I closed my eyes and felt the music pulse through my body. I shouted along with lyrics that had nothing to do with my life anymore, stories of love and breakups played out in school yards and on city streets.

After awhile, I gave Ken the O.K. to head over to the bar, and I moved around, unfettered, looking for a new group to join. I found our waitress dancing with a group of her friends. Their circle opened slightly and I poked my way in.

Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” the biggest hit of the summer, came on and the crowd screamed. It was a song my kids and I had hooted along to during our morning ride to day camp. Now I mouthed the lyrics seductively in the dark: I know you want it… I know you want it. The girls and I swiveled our hips and shimmied our shoulders, shouting when Robin anointed us all “the hottest bitch in this place.”

Wanting to end the night on a high, I slipped off the dance floor as soon as the song ended. But before I left, I grabbed the waitress’s arm and pulled her toward me.

“Listen to me,” I said, my lips close to her ear. “Go dancing every night you can, OK? And just, like, own it. Do you get me?”

And then I was gone, pulling Ken away from the bar and out into the summer night.

“Did you have fun?” he asked as we walked along the dark path back to our cabin.

“It was good,” I said, yawning. Nestling closer to him, I remembered that all I’d ever wanted during the crazy nights of my youth was a man to walk home with afterwards. All the primping and preening, the sexy moves on the dance floor, all of it had been in pursuit of the life I had now. The moon rose high in the nearly black sky, crystalline stars stretching on as far as I could see.

Daisy Alpert Florin is a freelance writer. She lives and works in Connecticut.

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Friend Time

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged children and childhood, family, friends, parenting, Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser, siblings • 2 Comments

One of the reasons we like where our house is situated is its proximity to the local high school. If you have a house near the high school and are reasonably welcoming, I think the likelihood that many teenagers will pass through your doors, sit (or sleep) on your couches and eat your food is high.

Location, location, location!

The crowd we know is the theater folks. They are dramatic (ahem) and relational and funny. They sometimes show up between school and rehearsal; they often show up after performances (fortunately, my husband is a night owl by nature).

This snowy winter has made me keenly aware of my good fortune in terms of location. Our neighborhood boasts not only this teen central roost (with another a few blocks away; we can ship ’em between spots when necessary, say, during four-day snow day plus weekend marathons), we have besties within reach for all of them.

Sometimes, it means we have many kids of one basic age or kids of all ages. Occasionally, it means our house, even during a snow day, empties out (or weekend day). This access to others lessens the cabin fever when we’re relatively stranded and makes after school hours and weekends much more pleasant.

I was reminded on holiday last week with three kids just how much I rely upon the “home away from home” aspect of our daily lives when I was in a house (in the lovely, lovely Mecca far from New England midwinter, Florida’s Gulf Coast) with three of my four kids (and my mom) and each day there was some cabin fever in the form of siblingitis. There were, too, many companionable moments when the play flowed like so many waves—the sand digging or wave hopping, the underwater play in the swimming pool. However, my eleven-year-old wanted his yoyo buddies and my six-year-old wanted her BFFles and even my not all that social fifteen-year-old wished to speak with people other than his siblings, mother and grandmother. I wanted more time to speak with my mom! Therefore, for this one week, I missed my kids’ friends far more than I missed my own.

Anyway, on Thursday morning we woke to young voices next door. And there was Pippa, age seven and her brother Ben, age five. For my just-turned-six year-old gal, life was absolutely brilliant. For two glorious days, she played and played and played.

I loved how the duo—Saskia and Pippa—and the trio—Saskia, Pippa and Ben—spent hours between our two houses. I’m not sure what they did. Mostly, they wandered back and forth. The freedom of this bubble—friends in motion—entertained them even when they didn’t exactly “play” anything specific. It reminded me how both vacation and childhood have that suspension of time and that the lack of specific activity is, in fact, important. It’s not boredom and it’s not boring to pass the time with a friend or with friends.

Come to think of it, my house often feels exactly like the space between our vacation house and the vacation house next door felt—only with teenagers. They, too, fill a lot of time together—and they aren’t bored, exactly; they are companionable.

I logged my companionable hours during adolescence, too. When I try to remember what we actually did, it’s hard to pinpoint so much. Sure, we went places and had parties and did homework and studied for tests. But the memories are much less about events than a film—not video—in my mind that’s more carpets and beds and couches and there’s a soundtrack (Joni and Jackson and Bonnie and the Stones and the Who, etcetera) on vinyl. We kind of just were together. I know that when I see many of these folks, even after years apart, I feel so familiar, so comfortable with them and it’s because, I think, I lived some life with them. Plus, we shaped each other with our sensibilities.

My adolescent BFFle lives in my town and so, although our kids aren’t exactly the same age, we’ve logged time in adult years and parenting years and we each call our kids “lovey” at times and I know that somehow we got that from the same city and the same era and our very different parents. Obviously, through our parenting of adolescents, we serve as one another’s touchstones. Not only do we remember one another as teens, we remember each other’s parents and how we were parented (but that’s another story, for another day).

For now, it’s Pippa and Ben, who served to remind me that friends matter, new ones, old ones, and ephemeral ones.

A Child-less Party with a Child-free Friend

Posted on October 7, 2013 by Lauren Apfel • Posted in Articles Page, Highlights • Tagged baby group, book club, child-free, child-less, friends, friendships, Lauren Apfel, motherhood, parenting • 4 Comments

I went to a party on Saturday night and I stayed late. This is newsworthy, believe me, I don’t get out much. For the past nine years I have been knee-deep in various stages of pregnancy, breastfeeding, broken nights and the exhaustion that attends them all and I am someone who bows to the demands of my body. I am usually in bed by 10:00 p.m. But my youngest children are not babies anymore and a good friend was turning forty. It was time to celebrate.

The friend is a member of my book club, the only regular engagement on my social calendar. Book clubs are the stereotypical outlet for parents of young kids and ours is no exception. We take it seriously, don’t get me wrong. The books are read, the issues are aired, it even gets a little feisty with dissension from time to time. But more often than not the conversation is pulled, a moth to a flame, in the direction of our children. It is a blowing off of steam in the most needed way: the majority of us are mothers obsessed with mothering.

I tend to surround myself with mothers for just this reason. Before the party, for instance, I had dinner plans with a couple of other friends, a rare occurrence of having double booked the evening. These friends are women I met in a pre-natal group, when we were expecting our first babies. I remember sitting around a cramped room with them, a lifetime ago now, it feels, sizing up each other’s bulging bellies alongside each other’s hopes and fears. We talked about epidurals and episiotomies and I wondered if we had anything in common other than the fact that these creatures we were housing in our bodies were due to make their appearance within days of each other.

It turned out it didn’t matter what else we had in common. As soon as the babies came, once a week throughout that unseasonably warm September, we clung to each other like ivy. Feeding times, how often last night?, cracked nipples (ouch!), the poo is green, that can’t be normal, the tiredness, so tired, our husbands, can they do anything right? All of a sudden, there was very little else to say. My world had shrunk considerably (though happily) and I wanted, I needed, to occupy it with people whose own horizons were comparably narrow.

Of the many gulfs of interest that divide people, children are a chasm. Mothers, particularly new mothers, have tunnel vision. That’s understandable. But it can also be boring, tear-your-hair-out boring, especially to those non-mothers who can see the light, so to speak. I hold onto this perspective tightly, because I didn’t have it when my first kid was little. Sometimes I hold onto it too tightly. I now err on the side of assuming, if you don’t have kids yourself, you don’t really want to hear the minutiae of mine.

But that’s not always the case. Friends without children support friends with children routinely and, often, genuinely. They coo at the photographs. They applaud the story about how the baby turned over the hard way. They make sympathetic noises at the lack of sleep, the cascade of dirty diapers, the diabolical temper tantrums. A lot of the time, though, they do this because they are child-less and you are simply a step ahead of them. They are not child-free, which is a distinction with a profound difference.

One of the women from my book club is decidedly child-free, but she engages with enthusiasm when the rest of us spin our progeny-laden tales. She was there, at the birthday party that night, and we fell into a head-touching kind of conversation, fueled as much by alcohol as by opportunity. We like each other, instinctively, but we don’t spend that much time together. I imagine at least in part because of the fact that she isn’t a mom.

Somewhere in between the third and fourth glass of champagne, or maybe it was the fourth and fifth, our focus shifted onto why this was so. “It’s not that I woke up one morning and decided,” she said. “It’s that I’ve never longed for a baby enough to give up what I love about not having one.” And then her tone grew confessional: “nobody’s ever asked me why before.” She said it almost with giddiness, like this was a conversation she had been waiting to have. A successful and happily married woman on the cusp of forty, I understand the reason the subject isn’t raised off-hand: who likes to conjure the specter of infertility?

Because that’s the assumption, of course, that child-less-ness is more a matter of “can’t” than “won’t.” Mothers can be blind in this way too. Once we embrace the title for ourselves, we fail to see the meaning in an existence without it. We struggle to believe that having it all is not a question of how best to balance kids and career: it is a declaration of not wanting half of that equation in the first place. I fall into this trap myself. Motherhood has become so consuming to me that, despite best efforts, I find it hard not to project onto other women a desire for the sense of purpose it offers.

The party was a revelation in this respect. For as much as I looked at this lovely, child-free woman and wondered if something was missing, I discovered that she was looking at me and wondering the same thing. “Sometimes I think,” she said that night, clearly weighing up either her word choice or whether to continue at all, “What could Lauren be if she didn’t have four kids?”

At 2:00 a.m we left the dancing behind and that question, among others, unanswered. We went our separate ways, back to different houses and very different lives. I would be woken in the morning, too early, by the scurrying of feet and the tips of my daughter’s hair on my face. She would be stirred by an alarm clock, perhaps, or by the rhythms of her own body. My day would unfold, for the most part, according to the needs of people other than myself, with all of the beauty that entails. She would rise to a day of her own choosing, with all of the beauty that entails. And we would both be happy.

Illustration by Christine Juneau