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When I was a child, my mother stayed at home. We lived on a street where most of the mothers stayed at home, and my mother was friends with our neighbors. Summer afternoons were spent running between houses. You might eat lunch at your house, or Sean's mother might feed you, if you were at her house at lunch time. Mothers gathered at this house or that one; they organized collective trips to parks, zoos and occasionally, the now forbidden Burger King. At night we had bbqs, campfires, trips for ice cream, and sometimes the women had Tupperware parties. As the years went on, the families vacationed together, the grown-ups went on cruises, and neighbors grew into family. Many years later, even after most of the families moved off the block, ours included, those women are still best friends. They dance at each others' children's weddings, they celebrate 50th birthday parties, and they help each other through difficult times, like divorce, health issues, and death of parents. Sometimes they sit at one another's' holiday tables, with children and grandchildren in tow. And I have seen from my grandmothers, that these women will see you through deaths of husbands and even your eventual death.
Nowadays, after college or graduate school, when do you have an opportunity to make friends. Yes, you have work friends, but are they more akin to acquaintances or colleagues? In this economy, is it not more apparent than ever that when the proximity ceases, so does the relationship?
For working moms, is it even possible to develop friendships like our mothers and grandmothers? If you are in the office 40-50 hours a week, and then you have the cleaning, cooking, shopping, laundry, whatever is left seems to be left for family time. When work requires that you are available 24/7, when do you have time, to slowly stitch the friendships that will last through your life?
The same technology that makes me have to check my email during dinner, which leads me to be disconnected from my family, allows me to connect very deeply with my girlfriends.
Toward the end of middle school, somewhere around our eighth grade dance and eighth grade graduation, six girl friends started hanging out and talking almost every waking moment. In high school, we were nicknamed the "clique." We teased the boys that we dated that we were a package deal. While most of our high school went to Cancun for Spring Break, five of us (one of us was not allowed to go) headed off to the Bahamas. When it was time to go away to college, we all went our separate ways, many of us thinking that the friendships might not last. And for one member of the clique, she went off on her own. But for the remaining five, we called each other, sent cards, wrote emails from our college computer labs, and visited each other often. We continued to vacation together whenever possible, and as the years went on, our email correspondence increased. Through marriages, careers, babies, miscarriages, and illness, we are there for each other. At least one of us emails the group almost every day. We get together as a group once maybe twice a year, but some years not at all. We meet up for one on ones whenever possible, and sometimes three or four of us find ourselves in the same town on the same night, which is certainly a reason to open up a good bottle of wine! We still vacation together every couple of years, and sometimes, even with our children. Sure, we all have other friends, but no group as close or significant as the bond that we share.
These women are my soul sisters. They are the women that I correspond with daily, sometimes about nothing, and sometimes about incredibly personal issues. We cry, we smile, we laugh and we listen over email. I would argue that through email we are knitting the fabric of a friendship that will last through out our lives, just as my mother and my grandmothers have and had.
Do other working moms have "virtual friends"? Or do you find other ways to connect and create significant lasting friendships?
