September 20, 2023

The Long Game

In late 2009, a pregnant friend of mine purchased a baby carrier that was a different brand and model than the one I’d recommended—I’d had a baby for five months at the time, and knew everything—and I was devastated. And not just because my hard-won advice had been passed over either, but because I knew that my friend and her child would suffer the consequences of this choice, and the stakes were just so high. Which is ridiculous, but also it wasn’t, because becoming a mother had blown my universe to tiny pieces and there were these certainties I had to cling to in the chaos, or else I’d have nothing to hold onto and be wholly lost in space.

I thought of this last week as I watched the inevitable online furor in response to a cover story in New York Magazine with the headline “Why Can’t Our Friendship Survive Your Baby?” I actually wasn’t very interested in the article, because I’ve been so bored for so long by how women with children and women without them are pitted against each that I edited an entire anthology about it (The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, published by Goose Lane Editions in 2014), but the friendship angle was interesting to me because I’d just the week before published my fourth book, Asking for a Friend, which is all about how experiences of motherhood (and pregnancy, and abortion, and miscarriage, and infertility) can make friendships so fraught.

And not least because new mothers can be more than a little nuts (and I’m speaking for myself here—but I know I’m not the only one). It all can seem so personal. Case in point, my upset about the baby carrier (Team Baby Trekker for the win!), but also any debate over breast versus bottle, sleep training or attachment parenting, cry it out or (you, personally) crying it out. The best thing about my kids being older now is that we’re beyond most of all that (and guess what?! Almost none of matters!), though there are new tensions—what age do we let our kids have phones, for example. Or that I am relatively comfortable with my low-stress approach to my children’s education, but sometimes when I see the cars lined for pickup at the intensive after-school math program in my neighbourhood, I wonder how we’ll ever know for sure if we’re doing it right.

One of the epigraphs to Asking for a Friend comes from Erin Wunker’s Notes from a Feminist Killjoy, a line that, when I read it, articulated something I’ve been struggling with for always. “Is it to hard to write your own narrative and witness another’s, simultaneously? …Is that why some friendships between women crash into each other, noses pressed against glass, waving with wild recognition at the person on the other side, and then recede with the same force? Too much, too close, too similar, too uncanny?” (The other epigraph comes from a poem from Erin Noteboom’s new collection A knife so sharp its edges can’t be seen, that poem beginning with “What things are lost? / Many. Most. And those that make it,/ spared by chance…”)

I think that what I’m trying to say is that it’s amazing that any friendship survives at all, and that there are sometimes gulfs among friends who have children that are just as insurmountable as those between people with kids and those without them.

Ann Friedman phrased this so beautifully in her newsletter last week where she wrote:

“The kids question” is not a binary choice, but a complex and personal orientation that is also fluid—likely to shift over the course of a lifetime.

The term also helps me understand why phases of life when many of us are in the throes of working out our reproductive identities (um, our entire 30s?) can feel so stressful between friends. It’s rare for any two reproductive identities to be identical, even when the surface-level choice appears the same. Calling it an “identity” really captures how deep the feelings go, and how tectonic the shifts feel. How hard we have to work to understand and be understood.

“How hard we have to work to understand and be understood.” That’s the crux of it, right? That female friendship isn’t easy, regardless of whatever a particular friend happens to be going through, though there are some women who find it easier just to opt out altogether (“It would have been so easy to count the ways I’d been betrayed by girls… It was not that way with men,” was the line in How Should a Person Be? where Sheila Heti lost me altogether). But behind that hard work, all the doing, the fraughtness and the tension, there lies the richness, in being seen and known and understood, especially by people who themselves have made different choices and live in different circumstances.

From Ann Friedman again:

Or maybe I’ve always known…that friendship is a long game. That sometimes one friend is going to require more generosity and understanding than the other. That you can’t grade a lifelong friendship based on one year’s performance. That it is deeply rewarding to have friends who lead very different lives than you do.

One of the infinite number of wonderful things about being in my forties now is finally beginning to see how the long game is going to play out, realizing just how much staying the course is actually worth it, and how much all those early tensions—as we were becoming ourselves—would really cease to matter at all. And yes, being seen and known can be as agonizing as it is rewarding, but the true reward—of course—lies in the company we get to keep.