Although I’m not heading for some exciting vacation destination, the season keeps offering up change-of-pace delights just the same. Already this season, I’ve felt this in the strawberry field and the movie theater and this past week I’ve felt it outside the Woodstar Café and inside the Osaka restaurant when connecting with friends making this Valley a summer destination.
I went to Hampshire with Jessica. Over the years, we’ve connected plenty because she runs an impressive nonprofit called the Third Path Institute that focuses on something quite dear to me: how families can create situations so their work/life balance works for them as opposed to the other way around. I’ll just say: four kids, work from home, too much community service work; I’ll just say Jessica is so very onto something critical for so many of us. She’s one of the clearest and most direct people I know, something that was true when we traveled down a river with a group of twelve women and six canoes during spring break one year and something that was true in a seminar of women’s health concentrators and something that’s remained true during every conversation we’ve had over the years about work, life, nonprofits and parenting.
I “know” Anne through my friend Amy, who knows her through Lizzie and I only put know in quotes because neither Amy, whom I know well in real life, nor I had actually physically met her before. We got to know each other, though through our writing and through the things we’ve shared with one another—articles, pithy or end-of-rope observations, photographs and recipes—virtually. For women who are political and who write and converse and who like images getting to know more about each other has been pretty easy. Anne’s a Woolf scholar and so she visited Lisa my mother-in-law and through their love of women’s literature they had—for real—a large number of shared connections.
The world isn’t always all that big.
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My own mother, Liz, has amazing friendships, ones that are central to her life, ones that truly sustain them through thick and thin and over decades. Her friendships are enviable. One way I’m lucky to be her daughter is that I’ve this modeled to me throughout my entire life. My mother-in-law has deep, sustaining friendships, as well.
I count them both as amazing friends to me, along with the obvious familial ties.
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And Anne and Saskia even have the same t-shirt.
Feminism—broad and malleable as it is—is one thing that brings me close to many of my friends. Amongst my peeps, feminism assumes a shared belief that women and men can do pretty much everything even when society tells us otherwise. Feminism is a little bit like a secret handshake.
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As mother to three boys with a male spouse, I am not discriminatory; I believe in friendship rather than female friendship. I have important friendships with both women and men. Whether my sons or hubby are friends with males or females matters not; that they enjoy the deep riches of friendships is what matters. I was a tiny bit late to supper because I ran into three friends dining al fresco together. It’s their annual get-together dinner. Two of those women are the moms of my son’s pal and they told me he offered himself up for brunch if they get lonely for some teenage company while their kids are away this month. I think he gets this friendship thing.
Before summer’s out, I plan to have some more really good friend time ahead.
