Friends, scarcity, plenitude

Earlier this week, Phantom said that her purpose in blogging was "certainly not to realign [her] social circles or to revise [her] narratives of some of the unhappiest moments of [her] life." Reading that I thought, "whoops! if you substitute 'traumatic' for 'unhappiest' that's pretty much exactly why I started blogging." Those of you who've been reading awhile will know about Z.'s birth and hospitalization, but the social piece I haven't really written about.

When I was in college, I attached myself to the class ahead of me, mostly because I had already had the sink-or-swim experience of living in France in a host family, and then had come out, so I felt impatient with my fellow first-years who were in the middle of upheavals I'd already survived. Now, I'd lived through the grief of older friends graduating before, so I took the precaution of making some friends my own year, but the morning after the class of '92 graduated found me driving my packed car to California for the summer, playing a mixed tape from the woman I'd done everything with for a year, weeping out my abandonment pretty much all the way to Chicago. Yeah, it was like that.

The person who was most important to me through all four years of college was another member of that class, K. There were people I had more intense, briefer, attachments to, but having K. in my life was the avenue by which I emerged from college more sane than not. She took me in and balanced me out and saw me, and I think she got something like that from me, and we just plain enjoyed each other. We stayed close through my senior year, then drifted. I shouldn't have let that happen. I owed us both more.

Over the years I find I've left a trail of lost friendships, abandoned not because I loved the person less but because I loved them too much still, and the pain of staying connected across distance was too much for me to live with.

I did okay that way because there were always people around to love until, you know, there weren't. We spent two years in Madison and when I came home, pregnant and enmeshed in business planning, we found that all of our friends had left during our absence--my grad school friends for academic jobs, A.'s college friends for graduate school, our synagogue friends for a combination of relationships and grad school and pulpits. It was a piecemeal exodus that, from our distance, we hadn't added up until we came home to the desolation. And it continued: the couple we thought was so great from childbirth class moved to Seattle, our midwife is now in Berkeley, the neighbor I befriended when I first moved here 8 years ago is about to marry and move to Boston. And in the complete involvement of baby-parenting and business-building, in the emotional fragility of my last two years, I have not been able to see my way out of this isolation.

When Helen died, there was an impromptu memorial for her in New York. I went up because I had to be with people who knew her, and sit for awhile with others who'd just had whatever was left of their trust in the universe shredded. One of the gifts that Helen left behind her is the web of people she tied together during her lifetime. I had not realized that I was still part of that web until I got the phone call about her death and had to pass it on, and then walked into that darkened room in January--a prodigal from Philadelphia who had burned through not money but ties--and walking into that room was like walking into the distillation of my college dining hall, and K's face was the first one I saw. I hadn't seen her in at least a dozen years. Somehow, that evening, that friendship was restored to me.

And blogging. When I started writing this blog, four months ago, it was definitely out of a sense that a web could be spun from a blog. I gave the url out to old friends, those I could find of the scattered ones who used to be, at some point, integral to the rhythm of my life. I imagined they were my audience, and my mother, and A., and Z. when she grows up enough, and Phantom, whom I'd found and corresponded with because of her post on Helen. I knew other people would find me and I would find them, and the new medium was fascinating, and I just kind of plunged in. For a few weeks I read enormously, trying to figure out the webs of connections that were already out there. Now, I think I'm starting to worry less and enjoy it more. And something odd has happened.

Last weekend I met, or re-met, three of the people in this new web of mine. And had that rush of new friendship I hadn't had since graduate school. And since I came home two more of you spontaneously wrote to me. In the last few days and weeks I'm taking this blog more seriously. And I think--right now, today, anyway--that it may be that I'll be okay.