Making It Up As I Go Along
by Samantha Gianulis
Where have all my bridesmaids gone?
Last night, our family watched our “Wedding Day” videotape. This prompted two questions from our kids: “Why isn’t it on DVD?” and “Who are those people all dressed up standing next to you?”
The DVD question was easy to answer. To the other question about the bridesmaids and groomsmen, I had no immediate answer. It seems that in eleven years of marriage, the landscape of my friends has changed. I am surprised when I realize that I haven’t talked to some of my bridesmaids in more than eight years. I haven’t even gotten a holiday card from some of them for who knows how long. Suddenly, I feel quite foolish and unworthy, as if I have committed a misdeed by not holding on tooth-and-nail to these people. I do a quick friend inventory and realize that almost all of my friends from the wedding party have faded away or been replaced. Except for my matron-of-honor, it seems I’ve become distanced from an entire group of people. How did that happen? It’s my fault, isn’t it? Was it something I did? Was it something I gave birth to? Has marriage and parenthood changed me so dramatically that my circle of friends has been inevitably reconstructed?
The kids want popcorn to eat while they watch the “wedding movie” as my daughter Zoë calls it, so I pop it in the microwave and really start thinking about this friendship thing. I rationalize that my former friends became parents, got new jobs, and filled their schedule with things they had to do, rather than wanted to do. “We’ll get together next weekend” never happened, and Tee Ball games replaced the matinees and lunch dates. All of this makes sense in my mind, but tugs a little harder on my heart.
Now at the heart level (uh-oh), the realization that my bridesmaids are gone has me fully engaged. I would like to think I did not drive them away, that some of my former friends remain, so I grab a sheet of paper and quickly begin to catalog my vindication.
I begin to make a list of my friends (LOSER! written at the top, meaning me.) First, I write the names “Kelly,” “Annie,” and “Karin”, with whom I’ve been friends more than twenty years. Kelly was my matron-of-honor. I was her maid-of-honor four years earlier. Karin and Annie, friends since junior high, were out of range at the time of my wedding but found their way back to me serendipitously. How ironic that my friends in the wedding movie who are buttoning up the train on my gown are now out of range, and how other friends have reappeared and call me everyday.
Now that we’re moms, our choices are based on our children rather than ourselves, or our friendships. We would love to have a standing date for coffee, but something usually comes up that supersedes our plans, like baking cupcakes for class parties or a practice of some sort. On the plus side, motherhood took our friendship one layer deeper as it withstood the demands of family life. The layers of our friendship are visible as we talk, without pausing for breath to catch each other up on our happenings, or as we sit comfortably quiet around each other, watching our kids splashing in the pool, not feeling in the least bit inclined to make small talk.
It’s a quality friend who lets you be who you are. Through fertility challenges, divorce, bed rest, losing parents, moving away, compulsions, and unemployment, we continuously rely on each other’s presence and familiarity with one another. When we call each other for reality checks or sympathy, we read each other with little effort. My friends know my worst idiosyncrasies better than theirs and love me anyway. I can’t say that for all of my bridesmaids.
Still frantically adding names to my list, I hear voices of my old friends on the tape, and I pause, writing to watch them smiling and laughing with me. They are making toasts and pledging devotion (effects of the hosted bar, no doubt.) Mirielle, bridesmaid, former confidante, holds up her glass of Zin. Our friendship lasted a while, but soon ended because she meddled in family affairs. I’ve come to see it’s an instant friendship killer when we get involved in our friends’ family affairs, which includes “extended family” affairs.
My stepson’s mother cozied up to my best friend, Mirielle. It started out innocent enough, when we were all gathered for special occasions like birthday parties, with flattery aimed at Mirielle by my stepson’s mother. “You’re such a good role model.” (Sneer.) I never saw it coming, Mirielle detaching from me and attaching to someone else, someone who had an interest in the dissolution of our friendship. Soon, Mirielle was advising me to contact my stepson’s mother if I had any concerns about their friendship. Any concerns? You’re kidding, right? My imperfections had become liabilities, and I was dumped. I got over it, eventually.
Yet, she took with her my disclosures, and I’m thinking that is why she was flattered and lured. She wasn’t pursued for her unwavering loyalty, that’s for sure.
It may sound terribly dramatic in retrospect, but the proverbial punch in the stomach did me good. When the quarrel was over, we all lived happily-ever-after without Mirielle. But it was hard to let this one go.
My son and Mirielle’s son, friends since birth, have the same name and were born twenty-six days apart. Years following the breakup, my son, Alex, continued to ask me why Mirielle and I couldn’t make up, and if Mirielle, her husband and children were invited to his next birthday party. “Adults don’t always kiss and make up,” contradicted my speeches about forgiveness and the Golden Rules of Friendship. Feeling my son’s sadness over losing people in whom he trusted and felt comfortable, I bucked up once and for all and gave him an “it was nothing you did wrong” easy-to-swallow version of the truth. It must have worked; his next question was “Can I have a flag football party?” (Apparently, I lose my son’s attention as easily as I lose friends.) Mirielle faded further behind us at that moment, and pleasing me more, was the fact that my eight-year-old son is a hell of a lot more resilient than I am.
Mirielle contacted my mother, rather than me, when my last child was born. When my two other children were born, she was right next to my husband in the delivery room, hoisting my faint hubby up as his knees began to buckle. “Look, he’s the spitting image of you!” I lamented her absence when my third child arrived. Instead, I got a package from Mirielle to celebrate the arrival of baby number three. She sent a sweet little children’s book wrapped in ribbons, with dried tea roses, an elaborate card — the works (Maybe guilt? Who knows?) Alas, she is committed to memory, but not on my list.
We’re at the point in the wedding movie where Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love” is playing and the wedding party begins to dance. First up on the dance floor that night in July was Melissa, attractive and not easily missed. My former office buddy, and from a different walk of life than I. But she finished my sentences, knew what I was thinking, and we had our own secret language of movie quotes. (I promise you, no man could quote “Caddyshack” better). She had a Paris Hilton-type party habit, but still looked out for me and my interests. At my bachelorette party in Vegas, she made sure I was safely returned to my hotel room (alone) and tucked into bed before she went out and partied until sunrise. She was a temporary shadow of me, but after I realized that marriage was work, I began to see less of her.
Maybe she knew that she became the prototypical friend that every husband dreaded. I didn’t sit in her office and listen to her talk about her boyfriend trouble as I did when I was single. Her 2 a.m. phone calls telling me she was partying with the hottest guy in Major League Baseball ceased. (In all fairness, my husband listened to all the dirt on the athletes she hooked up with.) I began to question what drew us together in the first place, and if we still shared the sameness.
Whatever this sameness was, the self-preservationist in me used a winning strategy of quietly, gradually disappearing. We were in contact long enough for me to tell her I was pregnant with my first child. Melissa inevitably found someone else after I started talking about morning sickness. Her glue wore off, kind of like a sugar high. Melissa doesn’t make the list, but wherever she is, I hope her movie has a happy ending.
The wedding movie is over; the kids go to bed. My list is incomplete, but I pause to feed the dog; now there is a loyal friend. I can see why some people fill their homes with pets. But I need friends who talk. I need to hear, “You’re cared for.” That’s just me.
“Ready for bed?” my husband asks. No, actually, my list is not finished. However, I think I’ve answered my own question. (I erase LOSER!) I’m thinking there will be more names added to this list, people I don’t even know yet. Yes, marriage and parenthood have changed me. I have lost some people in transition. But so what? If I make no new friends other than the moms of my children’s playmates, that will be OK. I have enough friends on whom I can count; I’ve got my husband – who is unquestionably my best friend; and our monsters jumping on their beds, waiting for story time. Marriage and motherhood have taken me on a wild ride at times, but I have always had the right friend at the right time who knew just what I was going through.
I put my friend list into the recycle bin in my mind. Turning the pages of the Pooh book I read to my daughters, I am somewhere else, ruminating about the friends who have come and gone. How they rode along next to me for a little while, until conditions changed and they went in another direction. I waved good-bye, or I just looked and they were gone. Each friend had a purpose in my life.
They had lessons to teach me: self-reliance, forgiveness and relinquishing control. I learned these lessons painfully, at times a little too late. My bridesmaids and I grew apart or we had a falling out, but if I ever see them again I will thank them for contributing to my growth as a woman, a wife and mother, and for pushing me out of my comfortable little niche of “bridesmaid friends.” Their fading away forced me to introduce myself to the new women in my new life —the women I see at my kid's school everyday, the women I run into at
Starbucks, and the women who walk their babies in strollers, just like me.
My bridesmaids didn’t disappear because of something I did wrong. When bridesmaid Jen moved across the country did I expect her to say, “I’m moving to Boston because my husband got a fabulous job, but I’m reluctant to go because I’ll be breaking our Tuesday play dates,” or “I’m relocating because you never return my calls”? Who the hell am I kidding? I miss the bridesmaids who have moved on, but I am sure that they are doing just fine without me. I have no regrets about them, because we are all where we are supposed to be. We are all just doing our Mommy thing, trying to stay sane, keep up with
the laundry, and look put together when our husbands get home..
The next morning I have the perfect answer to my kids’ question about the people in the wedding movie. My story is that they are “old friends,” catalysts in my life, people who told me to turn left instead of right, and saved me from a worse fate. Old friends, people who knew me then and told me not to major in literature, but history, because I had a knack for it. Old friends, those people who aided me in countless little decisions and were there for seemingly minor events that led me to be who I am now…your Mommy — my most important role to date.
 Samantha Gianulis,Editor-in-Chief, writes from Southern California where she lives with her husband and their three children. She writes columns for Family Food Network (www.familyfoodnetwork.com), Today’s Family Magazine (www.todays-family.net), and blogs for Chef Maria Liberati (http://mariaandco.blogspot.com). Her first book, Little Grapes on theVine…Mommy’s Musings on Food & Family, released April 2007. She will be featured in the upcoming A Book is Born (Wyatt Mackenzie Publishing, Fall 2007). Log on to her website at www.samanthagianulis.com and her blog, Vine Chat, http://samanthagianulis.blog.com.
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