no one has died

Before children, I considered myself a busy person. When I became a mother, I realized my concept of busyness had been idiotic. Busy? I had been drowning in free time! With children, time that once belonged to me has disappeared. Now, my free time exists solely between the hours of 8pm and 10pm, though that’s also when I grade papers and do dishes and put away magna-tiles. 

A few months ago, I read Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois. It’s a novel that jumps forward and backward in time. When we first meet Emily, she is fresh out of college, and she forms a deep friendship with a woman who’s also named Emily. Thirteen years later, Emily is now a new mom, and she hasn’t spoken to Emily in years. They’ve had some sort of falling out. And then, they run into each other. And then, they have lunch:

“Walking down Broadway she asked herself why, exactly, she had decided to let Emily back into her life. Maybe it was that her night out with Liuba, the night she’d seen Emily at the bar, had been fun but hadn’t made her and Liuba close. Her life was not filled with the kinds of friendships she made when she was in her teens and twenties. Louis had left New York like so many other college friends. Some friendships had faded; some people had died. She had gotten busy and lost track of others. She had Alan, which made up for a lot of it, but she still felt that absence, the absence of a woman her age who knew her to her bones.” 

I loved this novel, and I was grateful for this passage, which encapsulates my current existence. I feel loved by many people, people who know me to my bones, but most of them don’t live in Wisconsin. My family is in Wisconsin, and they are invaluable, but the few friends I still have from high school do not live here anymore. There are people I like, people I could be friends with, but I simply don’t have the time to truly know them. I started a book club out here, and the women in it are lovely, but an hour and a half with them every month cannot compare to the exorbitant amount of hanging out I used to do at other points of my life. Those friendships - formed by long afternoons at coffee shops, late nights in our living room, never-ending open mics, road trips, brunches, hikes - have richness and depth that I’m unable to replicate. And so I’ve been lonely, and feeling stuck in this loneliness.

In Vintage Contemporaries, Emily and Emily reunite, and they are better for it. After I read the novel, I felt a sort of conviction. I am lonely, but I am not friendless. And in addition to the two hours each night after my children go to sleep, I do have one more pocket of time that is technically my own - my commute. Each work day, I drive 25 minutes to and from work, and the past couple months, I’ve decided to use that time to call old friends. 

I don’t remember really talking on the phone with people since high school. In college, texting became ubiquitous, and a phone call suddenly became unnecessary, or too formal, or, somehow, awkward. 

A number of friends have picked up the phone tentatively, and I’ve realized I need to open the conversation with a disclaimer that everything is okay, no one is dead, I’m just calling to chat. Sometimes I wonder if they feel tricked, if they only picked up because they were certain an accident had happened, my husband was on his deathbed, I had received a terminal diagnosis. 

It is odd to talk to these people, some of whom I’ve never spoken with on the phone before. Some of them I have not seen in years. Some have children and partners I have not met. And talking on the phone is not the same as hanging out; it’s not my preferred way of spending time with them. But it’s better than nothing. It’s a thin little thread, tethering me to them. I still feel lonely, which might be an inevitable feeling with small children who take up so much of you, but I do feel a little less alone after these calls. 

My parents are incredibly social people, and I’ve often been struck by how many friends they have. If you ask my dad who his best friend is, he’ll say, the same way a middle school girl would, that he has multiple best friends. Dick is his best friend, but so is Dennis… And when I consider all my parents’ friendships, it comforts me that most of those friendships were formed after the arrival of children. It will be harder to make friends in this stage of life, and it will take more time, but it is possible. 

In the meantime, I will give you a call.