friendship maintenance

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Five for Friday

1. For the month of September, I have been waking up at 5:41 and getting out of bed at 6:00. This past week, I’ve been pushing it back a teeny bit; my alarm goes off at 5:21 and I get out of bed at 5:45. The cat has been extremely accommodating in terms of hopping into bed and purring loudly at me at about 4:20. My question is, how freaking early do I need to get up to be able to DO things? 

    Things I’d like to do: Lie in bed for 15 minutes to do the Wordle and Connections and possibly read a blog or two. Make some tea. Take care of the cat. Unload the dishwasher. Write a blog post. Spend 10 minutes watching cat videos with Carla. Get dressed. Eat something. Get out the door on time (7:15). In an ideal world, I would also be able to exercise and shower before we leave for school, but that seems much too ambitious. It’s still something I’d LIKE to do, though.

    Things I have been able to do: Lie in bed to do my word games. Make tea. Take care of the cat. Spend 5-10 minutes watching cat videos with Carla. Get dressed. Eat something (sometimes). We haven’t been out the door on time since the first week of school. Admittedly, this isn’t always my issue. But lately I have been scrambling to be moderately presentable and still be 15 minutes late. 

    Possibly I can squeak back my out-of-bed time to 5:00; but even then, I don’t know if I’d be able to get in a blog post. Definitely not exercise, too. If you exercise before work or school, HOW????

    One of the reasons I want to work exercise into my morning routine is because it’s often the first thing I jettison if the day doesn’t proceed as planned. For the past two days, I didn’t exercise as planned because my days got thrown out of whack. It’s not the end of the world, or anything; I don’t set exercise goals, so I can’t fail, take that perfectionism – and I did at least manage a decent walk on Wednesday – but it’s frustrating when I’m trying to prioritise exercise for my mental, physical, and future health. (The British/Canadian spelling was accidental but I’m keeping it. I think Ses are much prettier than Zs.) Plus, “exercise” is a catch-all term that includes showering, putting on clothing an actual reasonable person might wear, and possibly even doing my hair and/or makeup. Even if I do a shorter workout, and even if I take a ten-minute shower, and even if I throw my wet hair up in a claw clip instead of drying it, the Exercise Plus Shower Plus Getting Ready routine takes about an hour. I have no earthly idea where I’d get a whole extra hour in the morning. I can’t go to bed earlier than nine; Carla’s bedtime is 8:30 and I read to her for thirty minutes. And if I went to bed promptly at nine, I would never see my husband, which is an unacceptable tradeoff for exercise. Listen, I know I don’t really have anything to complain about here. My schedule is very flexible, for the most part. I guess I just keep on working in a workout where I can, sometimes sacrificing it to the whims of life.

    2. I had a baking success and a baking flop this week. The flop was the apple honey cake I made in a nod to Rosh Hashanah. It looked lovely – although I had expected the apple-covered portion to be much darker and more caramelized; not sure why, the photo on the recipe page is not dark and caramelized – and it was fine. But it wasn’t my favorite. The crumb was too big; I think it compares in crumb size, if not exact texture, to cornbread (although my husband disagrees). And the cake had, to my tongue, no flavor. Also, the apples weren’t caramelized enough. The other thing I baked were brownies. Since I was making them for a loved one who’d just had surgery, and since this person is trying to avoid excess sugar and carbs, I decided to try a sugar-free (ish), flourless brownie. The brownies are flavored with dark chocolate, dates, and vanilla, and get their fluffiness from eggs and baking soda. I was skeptical, since I really am not a fan of dates. But they turned out SO well. They are fluffy and soft, rich and chocolatey, and perfectly satisfying. The only real difference I noted between these brownies and “regular brownies” is that they have a slight coconutty flavor (because they are made with coconut oil). Carla loved them; the person I intended them for loved them; I loved them. My husband’s reaction was “these are weird.” Next time, I might try them with butter instead of coconut oil, although I didn’t mind the coconut essence. I am definitely making them again. I like how I didn’t have to chop up the dates; I just let my food processor do all the work. 

    3. After your extremely helpful comments last week, Carla and I (and the cat) tackled her bedroom on Tuesday. We got rid of so much stuff. My strategy was to tell her that I would clean her room for her, she just had to tell me what to do. She had complete control over what stayed and what went into the donation pile (or the trash). I was so ready to get a handle on the mess that I only faltered once, when I saw a beautiful sweater I bought her just last year in the donation bag. But she’s the one who has to wear the clothes. If she’s not going to wear it, it shouldn’t be in her closet. We also got rid of tons of old socks and underthings that are way too small, and I placed a big order for replacements. Even though I said I would do all the work, Carla ended up doing a ton of stuff herself. She organized all her dresser drawers, for instance. AND she did all of her own laundry. She even said it was fun. While I don’t expect that will last, I feel so much relief that her laundry is now HER problem. Her clothing selection is much more manageable and her room looks so much better. 

    Oh hello there, you can’t seriously think this drawer would be better suited to T-shirts, can you?

    4. This weekend, a friend I haven’t seen for years is bringing her daughters to stay with us. I am so excited to see her! And her children, whom I anticipate I will hardly recognize, it’s been so long. One thing I’m trying very hard to do is to resist the little voice in my head that keeps saying, “She’s going to think you got so fat.” My friend, though it should not matter in the least except in terms of the pride I feel for her, is a tiny person to begin with. But she’s also extremely fit – like, she literally has two World records in the fitness arena. My little inner voice, which apparently ignores what a nice and non-judgy person my friend is, thinks she will judge me for being large and soft. 

    Here are my coping thoughts: When I went to my twentieth college reunion a few years ago, I was shocked by how OLD some of my classmates seemed. Some of them were balding, or had grey hair, or looked like – gasp! – middle-aged moms. It was especially shocking to see these aging people next to my dear friends, who looked exactly the same as they’d looked twenty years before. Obviously, it wasn’t that my close friends remained unchanged while people I didn’t know well had aged poorly. It was that my love imbued the people dear to me with youth and beauty that transcends time. I experienced this phenomenon more recently, when I got to see a college friend perform with his college band. The bar was packed with a bunch of half-drunk middle-aged farts. But my friend and his band were exactly as they were back in college. Love is transformative in so many ways, and I think it can allow you to see your people in their best light. The way I look at my husband, a distinguished, respected physician who brings hope and relief to so many patients, and see only the cute charming finance major I met nearly a quarter century ago. Anyway, I am trying with all my heart to believe that my fit friend is going to arrive and see past my frumpy, overweight, perimenopausal self to her dear friend of many years.

    5. I have two recent purchases to recommend. One is a fidget toy. Carla apparently saw that a classmate had one, and she wanted one, too. So I caved and got it for her. It’s not silent, per se, but it’s very quiet – just makes a soft shuck when it changes shape. And it is very cool; the shape shifting is mesmerizing. Even the cat likes it. Speaking of the cat, we bought him yet another cat toy. (The poor cat is once again hiding under the bed; it’s been a traumatic week, and he does not do well with loud sounds. This time, the loud sound was me putting ice cubes in the dryer to de-wrinkle my duvet cover. He has never scratched me before, but I have three large gashes to commemorate this particular trauma.) Anyway: this toy is perfect for him. It has a little butterfly dangler on the top, it has a couple of balls on a track that he can push around, and it has a little fringey thing who pokes his fringey face out of hidey holes at random around the circumference of the base. This toy is electronic (uses batteries or a charger) and it has several settings. With one, just the fringey guy hides and appears. Another setting turns the butterfly dangler on, so that it spins, stops, and spins the opposite way. Another setting has both things happen either at once or one after another, I haven’t figured it out yet. It will turn itself off after a few minutes if the cat ignores it for awhile, and then it turns back on as soon as he touches it. Leo LOVES this thing. I put it up on top of a cabinet when he’s not using it (so he doesn’t get bored with it – cats get bored so easily) and he will walk over to the cabinet and look longingly at it and meow until I fetch it down for him. 

    Keeping this butterfly thing AND the little fringey guy in line is a very serious endeavor.
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    Supporting Friends in Times of Loss

    The prevailing advice for friends who want to support others in times of loss (or new baby, or after surgery, or during other tumultuous life events) is that you should offer something specific, rather than saying something generic like, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

    Photo by Angel Ayala on Pexels.com

    In fact, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do” seems frequently vilified as actively non-helpful. And I get that. I certainly don’t want to ask my friend who is grieving/recovering/etc. to take on the additional work of assigning me a job to do. It’s just that sometimes, a person really DOES want to help, and yet doesn’t have the full picture of what “help” might look like. 

    When dear family friends of ours lost their mother, I tried to do the specificity thing. I said, “I am happy to come do laundry, drive kids to appointments or activities, pick up groceries, make meals – whatever you need.” Okay, I suppose that is still a little broad. 

    I did check in with my friends every day for several weeks, and am trying to continue to purposefully reach out because I know they are still grieving. That feels doable but also like not enough. 

    Another close friend – K – recently lost a family member – a person I’ve never met. She asked if I could sit at the house for a few hours to accept food and flowers. I did not know this was a role people needed to fill, but I am so glad she reached out and I’m so glad I am able to do something to help. 

    K noted that she felt lucky to have a friend she could ask to take on this task. That sounds self-aggrandizing, but I’m not trying to toot my own miniature horn here – her point was that it feels important to have people in your life that you can count on for that kind of thing, that you know you could ask to do your laundry or buy you groceries or sit in your house and accept food and flowers. She said this experience of dealing with death has sharpened her sense of urgency around cultivating close connections with people. 

    I take her point. If I contemplate a situation where I needed someone to drive me to chemotherapy every week or couldn’t get out of bed and required someone to do laundry or drive Carla to and from school or any of the ten thousand mundane things necessary even during times of crisis, I do think I have a few people I could call on, without embarrassment, without feeling as though I were overstepping the boundaries of our relationships. Do you have people like that? It’s a small group, for sure, but I’m grateful it exists. (Unfortunately, two of these members of my support system live several states away which makes it much more difficult. When they’ve lost loved ones, it has been so hard to know what to do and how to support them from afar. In one case, I was able to fly to my friend’s house for the funeral; in another case, I was not able to leave Carla and it wouldn’t have been feasible/appropriate to take her.)

    The thing is, when I think about DOING supportive things for other people, the circle enlarges quite a bit. The neighbors in our old neighborhood, who were so kind to Carla when we lived there, and with whom I still exchange texts and holiday cards, and occasional visits: I would be happy to do any of those things and more for any of them. My neighbors here, whom I know less well, but with whom I feel like relationships are blossoming? Same. Any of the women I volunteer with. Any of the other parents of Carla’s classmates. Any of my blog friends. (Although again, there’s the distance issue at play with many of us.) A person in my outer circle had surgery a few years ago, and called me crying because she wasn’t able to lift her mattress enough to make her bed, so I went over and made her bed for her. It was such a small thing, but it took only a few minutes out of my day, and it helped her, and it felt so good to be useful.

    Because I know that I am a perfectly ordinary person, I am going to assume that most of us feel that way. That if help were needed, and we were available, we would step in. That’s comforting, and I hope when I do need help, I remember that. 

    I also hope I remember that “please let me know if there’s anything I can do” comes from a genuine desire to do something, anything in support. That it isn’t a meaningless platitude, but a sincere wish to know what I need. 

    That said, it would sure be nice to have a manual of all the things that are DEFINITELY NEEDED during times of life upheaval or crisis or transition. I’d even settle for a list of what to do in times of bereavement, because all of us will encounter loss both at home and in our communities.  

    My first instinct is always to make food. When a neighbor’s spouse died several years ago, I made a big pot of stew and a batch of cookies, packaged it all up with some disposable napkins, plates, and cutlery, and walked it down to her house. That felt like Doing Something. I hoped that even if she couldn’t eat the stew/cookies for whatever reason, she could share it with visitors, or at the very very least would take it as a token of my sympathy.

    But food is just one thing that’s universally needed! There have to be others, right? If there is a need for someone to sit at a house and accept food and flowers, there are certainly other roles that need filling. Collecting flowers and food from the funeral home after a wake? Making a post-funeral meal for people to come home to? Taking all the funeral clothing to the dry cleaner? Caring for pets? Watering plants? Running the vacuum around the house and cleaning the bathrooms? I don’t even know. 

    If you have lost someone (and if so, my heart is with you), what did you find most helpful from those around you? Or what did you most need during that time? If you’ve been the helper, what have you done to offer support? 

    Part of MY problem is that I get too much in my own head about stuff. I feel a little reluctant to say, “I will do X” when I don’t know if X is needed, or if X is something my friend might prefer to do herself (making her own dinner might feel like an injection of normalcy; she might think giving me her laundry is too intimate a task), or if X infringes on her privacy or personal space (I’m happy to pick up groceries, but maybe she doesn’t want me poking around in her fridge or pantry to put things away). 

    People are so gracious and so unwilling to inconvenience others, but I think most of us want to HELP, and don’t see helping as an inconvenience. If only we knew what to DO.

    I’m not sure how to end this post or if it even makes sense (I was up until three last night and that is the third night in the past five days that I’ve been involuntarily awake in the three o’clock hour, so let’s blame any issues on this post on THAT), but I would be interested in your thoughts. 

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    Birthday Sleepover Awkwardness

    Why yes I am dramatically behind in planning and/or even thinking about my child’s birthday party this year, why do you ask? 

    For one thing, my husband is on call on Carla’s birthday weekend, which means we have to find a different date for the party (just… trust me. we are not doing a party on a call weekend), and I can’t figure out what that date should be. Seems like it should be obvious, or that there should be some reasonable candidates, but I am struggling. We’re up against camp and holidays and other birthday parties and vacation and no date seems workable.

    For another thing, Carla has been happily discussing plans for her party for several months now, so it feels like I don’t have anything to do. When in reality, I have ALL THE THINGS to do because her saying “I want to have a water theme” doesn’t make water-themed décor magically appear in my house, nor does her making a list of kids she wants to invite equate actually inviting anyone.

    Let’s start there, with the invitations, because that’s part of the delay, I think. 

    Carla wants a sleepover party this year. Here’s the thing: I refuse to have more than six children in my house overnight. Why this number, I don’t know. All I know is that I can hardly deal with having one child over for a sleepover, it goes against everything in my constitution, and the thought of something like ten kids makes me hyperventilate. I know a large sleepover party is doable. One of Carla’s friends had, like, twenty girls sleep over last year. But that kid’s mom is a very different person from me, in almost every way, which instead of making “big sleepover” seem possible, makes it seem even less possible, if that makes any sense. Hell, even my own mother hosted big sleepovers with probably ten or more kids when I was in middle school. My mother was FANTASTIC at birthday parties, let me tell you.

    Carla is amenable to the limit, but she would love to have a BIG PARTY with all her friends, and then have a select few stay the night after the party and I… well, I have put my foot down about this. And I’m feeling like I want to walk it back, but I also still agree with my reasons for saying no in the first place. 

    This may sound like a non-sequitur, but stay with me here: We have reached an age where birthday party invite lists have begun to be… tricky. Like, I am theoretically 100% behind Carla or any child only inviting people to her birthday that she wants at her birthday. We are long past the days when you invited the entire class or – in some cases – the entire grade. And I theoretically completely understand that just because parents are friends with one another does not mean their children are also friends with one another. 

    In practice, it feels so different and yucky to leave people out, especially if they are the kids of your friends. And yet: six person limit. 

    My reason for not doing the big party with the smaller sleepover is related to that yucky feeling. I don’t want to leave anyone out, I don’t want anyone to feel less special or less of a friend or lesser in any way because they weren’t included in the super exclusive sleepover contingent. Carla’s argument is twofold. First, she says that other kids have big parties and then a few kids sleepover. Second, she says that she would never, ever mention to anyone that only a few kids would sleepover. My rebuttal is that kids a) aren’t great at secrets and b) can be mean and c) people always find out! 

    Other people DO do this! I have picked up my kid from several birthday parties, and a couple kids remain behind to stay for a sleepover extension. This has never bothered me because I have only recently allowed Carla to sleep over anywhere. But it has bothered Carla. She always feels left out and wonders why not her. We had a good reason: she wasn’t allowed. That helped soothe the hurt feelings. Plus, she’s a very cheerful kid who gets over things pretty swiftly. But what about the other kids who may not have mean sleepover-hating moms to blame their lack of fun on, or who may be struggling with finding their crew, or whose feelings are sharper and longer lasting? 

    (I have no good place to stick this point, but I want to head off any suggestions that Carla invite one or even two people over. I think I could be okay with a Big Party and one kid sleeping over after. But Carla doesn’t have a Best Friend, so that doesn’t really make sense in her situation. Plus, I think part of the allure of the Big Sleepover is the BIGNESS of it.)

    We’re not doing Big Party with the Small Sleepover. We just aren’t. I mean, I suppose I could hold two events on two separate days but NO THANK YOU ONE PARTY IS ENOUGH I MEAN IT. Please, back me up here, because I can feel my resistance crumbling as I type and I know I will RUE MYSELF if I give in to the two party plan. Can a person rue herself? Even if that’s not a thing, I will.

    Because I cannot and will not host two separate parties (right????? that would be dumb?????), and because I refuse to make a portion of birthday invitees feel like the B Team, I am trying to work myself up to a slightly bigger sleepover. Like… eight people??? Could I do ten? It’s always possible that we invite ten and only three show up. That would be IDEAL, honestly. But in my experience, if you plan on that kind of attrition, everyone shows up and also one kid brings her out-of-town cousin. 

    Carla is not the problem here. She has narrowed her list down to five invitees, with very little pleading and negotiating. I AM THE PROBLEM. There are some kids that I would like to invite just out of… I don’t know. Mom friendship? Duty? Duty invites? That’s awful. No one wants to be at a party because the birthday girl’s MOM wants you there. I am sure the duty invitees would HATE THAT, and Carla might also hate it too, and I can see right now that if I tell her to invite A, she will ask, “If I can have an extra spot for A, why can’t I invite B instead?” which makes total sense; I refer you back to my theoretical conviction that a kid should only invite kids to her birthday party that she wants at her birthday party.  And even if I upped the guest list count to ten, there’s no guarantee that the duty invitees would make that cut, either. (Ugh ugh ugh. I need a different way to frame this than “duty invitees,” because these kids are sweet and wonderful and fun and they just aren’t in Carla’s immediate circle, that’s all there is to it.)

    Listen. Pretty much no one these days is going around inviting every kid in the class/grade or even every kid of one gender in the class/grade. Carla has been invited to three birthday parties this year, that’s it. So I get it. Not everyone gets invited. That’s not how friendship works. We moms all say, “We understand.” And I know that we do. If Carla didn’t get an invitation to a specific kid’s party, I would understand. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t sting. 

    Someone’s feelings are going to get hurt. Perhaps many someones. Perhaps someone’s mom’s feelings are going to get hurt too. I don’t want to be the cause of it!

    Do you see? Do you SEE why I am struggling to plan the party when I cannot figure out the guest list?????? 

    Clearly I am in bit of a tizz. We’ll have to reconvene later to discuss present ideas and cake. (We have one gift for Carla: a pair of tickets to a play we think [hope] she wants to see. Nearly Twelve is exceedingly difficult to shop for!) 

    Let’s look at a soft sleepy kitten to soothe the jangled nerves.