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the call to friendship

3 Comments

One of my best friends from college came to visit last weekend. She lives 400 miles away, and as a physician, she leads a unenviable schedule in one of the most demanding professions around. But she had a rare free weekend, so she dropped me an email and said she could catch a bus if we’d like a visitor? Even in the throes of morning sickness I couldn’t decline that sweet offer.

So she hopped the bus to come see us for the weekend. We had a great time catching up, hanging out, and even venturing downtown in a rare burst of energy on the part of yours truly. She was a fabulous houseguest, especially given the laid-back (read: lazy) state of affairs in exhaustion-ville, population moi. And as always happens when any members of the college crew get together, I felt like I got a bit of my old groove back. She brought a bright spot to a gloomy January.

I was really touched that she made the trek: solo, in the dead of winter, on the bus, with no prospects of an adventurous weekend out on the town. She just wanted to see…me. Us. And her visit really cheered me up during a spell when I’ve been mostly down.

Since she boarded the bus back home, I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship. To be perfectly honest, this is an area of my life where I feel I’ve fallen way short since S arrived. I remember a nagging sense of guilt in the foggy newborn days, but I figured it would pass: once I got the hang of this parenting gig, I’d have time back for my friendships again, right?

But then the months began to pass and life seemed overwhelming in its busyness; time kept slipping by me as I felt worse about not having the time to pick up the phone and check in with all the friends I normally kept in touch with. It sounds awful to say, but even now at the end of a busy day of work and caring for S, the last thing my tired self usually feels like doing is returning phone calls or emails from the friends who were thoughtful enough to keep in touch. It’s not that I don’t love them or feel grateful for their checking in; I’m just exhausted. The triage of choosing where to give my time and energy means that I can’t give to my friends in the same way that I could before.

A few weeks ago, a woman told me that even since she became a single parent, she had to consciously distant herself from her friends. “To me, friendship is about giving. And in this season of my life, I have to give to my daughter, and to my work, and to myself. I can’t give to my friends in the same way anymore. It makes me sad, but it’s the reality of right now.”

Her words seemed so depressing when she first shared them. But then I realized I could sadly relate. I try to do a decent job of staying in touch with friends via email, Face.book, phone calls when I can. But I always feel like I’m falling short. People I love are facing really tough situations right now, and I want to be there for them. Yet many days all I can do is send good thoughts and prayers their way. With all the other callings in my life, I simply can’t do much more.

The sad truth of a 24-hour day, my own limitations, the demands of work and family mean that in this season, friendship cannot be one of the primary callings in my life. It was definitional in high school; it was life-changing in college; it was life-saving in grad school. But as a young mother trying to balance work and raising children, my priorities have shifted.

I have to grieve what that means in certain respects and celebrate it in others. This chapter in my life is the fulfillment of a dream, no matter how tough, how stressful it can be at times. And it is not the last chapter; there will be many others to follow, in which my friendships will surely play a more central role again. Falling short in friendship will not be the reality of my life, but it’s the reality of right now.

So for today, I’m left with the challenge of being the friend I can be, to the many friends I love, with the resources and energy that I have. Perhaps I will always feel lacking in this respect – that there are always more visits I want to make, more cards I want to write, more email catch-ups I want to send. But I have to know my limits in giving of myself what I can and releasing from the guilt that I cannot do more.

The beauty of long and true friendships is that we ride out these roads. We forgive our friends when they get caught up in new love or tough work or messy crises and they can’t be there for us in the ways we hoped. We know their true selves, and we trust that they will come around in time – that our care and love for each other is stronger than the moment’s preoccupations. So we stay in touch, we let them know we care, we do what we can across long distances and changing lifestyles.

I’ve been blessed with some unbelievably amazing friends over the years. My prayer for the next few years is that I can know how be a friend to them in turn.

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Comments

  1. Maureen says

    7 February 2011 at 4:10 pm

    Thank you for sharing. I know just what you mean. My husband and I talk about this often – we are just in a particular season of life when our worlds have to revolve around our immediate family. And any extra minute I have I want to give to my husband!!

    I find comfort in knowing that since most of my friends are now mothers, they are also going through the same feelings of guilt and remorse and nostalgia over friendships that have to be put on hold for the time being.

    I have made a real effort to find new mommy friends in my neighborhood, and this has helped tremendously. We really only get together during the week when the kids aren’t napping, and we always do things that the kids will like (park, children’s museum, etc). They are special friends for this time in my life.

    Reply
  2. LKF says

    7 February 2011 at 4:26 pm

    Great point, Maureen. I too have been able to make some wonderful “mommy friends” since S was born, and it’s great to have people who are going through the same experiences and questions that you are. Plus as you say, they’re often free during the weekdays that I’m solo with S, and it keeps me sane to have company to get both of us out of the house!

    I think it is harder to understand this reality until you have kids, so I guess I struggle more with keeping up friendships with those who are close to me but spread all over the country, and/or not necessarily in the marriage-and-babies phase of life. Keeping a balance between friends who are going through the same things as me and those who aren’t – and thankfully can give me great perspectives and pull me out of my bubble to see life from another point of view.

    Reply

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  1. and our hearts forever… « mothering spirit says:
    7 January 2013 at 2:06 pm

    […] Because it was where I made my closest friends. […]

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I’m Laura Kelly Fanucci. Mother, writer, wonderer. This space is where I explore mothering through writing. It’s where I celebrate how God shows up in the chaos of raising children. It’s where I love to build community with readers like you. Read More…

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Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated Nearly 20 years ago (!) these crazy kids graduated from Notre Dame. Now we’re thick in the midst of life-with-kids, celebrating middle school & preschool & everything in between. 
 
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“How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “H “How did you do this?” I want to ask her. “How did you let your heart break a thousand times?”

I want to call my mother and ask her impossible questions, to probe her heart that held five children and let each of us go in the hardest ways. But I know what she will say, “It’s hard. But you’re doing a beautiful job.” She can’t give words to the deepest yearnings and groanings. None of us can.

I wish I could ask my grandmothers, each of them gone for decades now, each of them matriarchs who raised big broods of their own. I never got to know them as an adult, but I have heaps of questions: How did you do it? How did you not lose yourself or your way? Or did you, and that was precisely the point?

I want a whole book of answers to impossible questions, and none exists. So I send my thoughts to the mothers of faith whose short stories, mere snippets on pages, have sparked small lights to guide me along. To Sarah and Ruth, Hagar and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth. Every unnamed anguish the holy ones carried, every treasure of love they held in their heart.

Is it any coincidence that birth often brings both cries and screams, laughter and joy?

We hold it all within us. We cannot give words to the enormity of what it means to mother.

I sit outside a coffee shop two blocks from my children’s school on a sunny afternoon, the last day of the year. I wipe away tears for the natural nostalgia, but I also feel the gutting grief welling up from my own wounds of motherhood to know a deeper truth: marking milestones with love and longing is nothing compared to the gaping loss of not having your child here to break your heart in a thousand tiny ways.

So I resolve again, a hundred times again, to let this vulnerability become the strength that keeps me fighting for all children to have what I want for my own: life, love, health, safety, support, opportunity, community, hope. This is how parenting asks us to change. To let the particulars of our lives stretch us to love more widely.

I once thought “to mother” meant to have and to hold.

Now I know it also means to let go.
Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I s Many of you asked me to save these suggestions I shared after the school shooting in Uvalde.

Remember: we can’t do everything, but we can each do something.

Just because we can’t eradicate evil overnight doesn’t mean we can’t take small strong steps toward change.

Any work for justice and peace is long and hard. But we can build this work into our daily lives in concrete ways.

Look at the children in your life. What would you do to keep them safe and alive?

Start there. Let your life and love lead you.
When women meet, the world changes. Today is the When women meet, the world changes.

Today is the Feast of the Visitation. A day when we remember the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.

Two women pregnant with new life, blooming with prophetic power.
Two mothers called to change the world.

What would happen if we gathered together like this today?
How could the world change if we made Mary’s song our own?

“He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.”
(Luke 1:51-53)

Imagine if we stayed in this holy space—not for a moment’s meeting, but for months together—to gestate the dreams God was waiting to birth through us.

Imagine if we let ourselves be filled with the Holy Spirit to shout out with loud cries.
Imagine if we lifted our souls with prayers of justice and joy.

Imagine if we gave each other strength and service, courage and compassion, as we kept asking how to answer God’s call in our ordinary lives.

When women meet, the world changes.

If you want to know how to fight for justice for your children, for your people, for this world, look to the Visitation.

The mothers will show us the way. They already have.

(Image from the “Windsock Visitation” by Br. Mickey McGrath, OSFS, commissioned for the Monastery of the Visitation in north Minneapolis.)
Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached t Here’s what I wish I would have heard preached today on the Ascension.

Right now is a time to be prophetic and pastoral, a time for each of us to ask how God is calling us to act.
I am writing this to us next week. When our right I am writing this to us next week.

When our righteous anger will have quieted down. When the white-hot fury pulsing through our veins will have subsided. When the news cycle will have moved on.

Do not forget how we felt tonight.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

We cannot live like this. Literally—our children are dying. Our elders are being murdered. We have accepted violence as—a way of life? An unfortunate side effect of freedom? A helpless shrug?

No. I am not resigned.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

Remember how it felt today to hear the news and feel the world crack open—again, for we have heard it a hundred times now. Remember how you felt sick to your stomach. How the children around you glowed, alive and fragile, miraculous and vulnerable.

Remember how you wanted to do something, anything, how you wanted to act, how you wanted to stop and scream for it to end, how every cell in your body cried out that this was evil and unjust and horrific and cannot continue.

Press into that memory like a bruise.
Stay angry. Flip tables.

The only way anything changes is if we change. Change what we believe. Change who we support. Change how we vote. Change where we give. Change how we act. Change how we speak. Change how we pray.

There are no easy answers to terrible, complex problems—which is what gun violence in the US has become. But the lack of easy answers makes it all the more urgent and vital that we press into our righteous anger and say NO MORE.

Stay angry. Flip tables.

I am writing this for us, for tonight, for next week. And I never want to write it again.
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