Once I thought Fiona would be a part of my everyday life. I knew her as an idea, as a hope, a wish, before she was conceived, because her mother, Karen, was my best friend. Karen and I had one of those romantically entangled friendships women sometimes have, the kind where you talk on the telephone almost every day, tell each other the daily details -- the broken washing machine, the fight with the husband, the struggles with work. We didn't say hello, because we knew each other's voices so well; the phone would ring and I'd pick it up and she would start talking, as though we'd only been interrupted for a few seconds.

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By the time Fiona was born, a subtle distance had grown between us. We changed, each of us, our lives, and week by week, month by month, strain and tension appeared. There came a difficult conversation in which it became clear we were no longer friends -- we were, in fact, strangers. And then there came a time when I realized I didn't know where Karen was living, didn't know her telephone number and would probably never call her again. And I grieved for the friendship, for Karen -- and for little Snow White, when I realized we would not go trick-or-treating together after all.

So many children passing through, passing by, growing and going, waving hello, saying goodbye. Children, grown, gone.

Years ago, I cared for Louise's kids, Addie and Dallas, and she cared for mine, and we talked every day. We lived near each other in a student housing complex, carried our laundry together in red wagons, shopped at the co-op, pushed the kids in the swing. But we shifted lives; I moved, they moved, and then she and her husband divorced and we lost touch. She sent me a Christmas letter this year from the opposite coast. We haven't seen each other in a dozen years, and it was full of news of grown-up Addie in college and grown-up Dallas at his job, and I knew that if they walked past me on the street, I wouldn't recognize their faces.

More recently, I thought it was grace and good luck that our new neighbors became our good friends. But what really happened is that they became the people with whom we tried to be good friends for a long time before it became clear to everyone this wasn't going to work. Still, I was kneeling by the bed when their daughter, Sophie, was born. But after Sophie was born, there was a divorce. A move. Things changed, and I haven't seen Sophie for a long time, and when I did, she was someone I had never known.

A few years ago, a young woman knocked on my door. She looked vaguely familiar, petite and punkish in a thin undershirt, her nose pierced, her hair bright red. "Hi!" she said, smiling. "It's Lorena."

Lorena. She never liked me. Her stepmother, Judy, and I were best friends for several years. We lived on the same block and saw each other almost every day. Judy and Lorena didn't get along; Judy never wanted to be a mother, didn't know how to make it work. Lorena saw me on the enemy's side, snapped and stung at me, and after the divorce and the sudden, devastating end of my friendship with Judy, I never saw Lo again. Until that day when she stood on my porch, smiling. We talked awkwardly, about where people had gone and what she was doing, and finally we said goodbye and she walked away, and only later did I realize I didn't know where she was going or if I'd ever see her again.

And now, I chat on the telephone with the young sons of my friends -- silly Ben and opinionated Thomas and smart Nathan, all of whom I've known for years now. I'm just a person in their lives, just a friend passing by, talking at them, eating dinner with them, saying hi. But they're more than that to me -- and not enough, not as much as I want. I fear they will pass by and away.

My brother has a new son; I have a nephew, James, a big boy, already rolling over. They live hundreds of miles away. I plot how to enter James' life, how to appear as a visitor in this boy's world and be the welcomed auntie, a face he knows and wants to see. I make plans involving toys, candy, surprises. But I make plans that require me to be leading a very different life than the one I lead now, and I know that perhaps none of it will come true.

My friend Scott, a suddenly single father when he least expected to be a father at all, brings Ezra with him everywhere he goes. He has no choice. When I see Scott, I see Ezra, and shy Ezra, bit by bit, has turned 2 this month and smiles at me when he sees me now. When he comes to our house, he knows there will be a wind-up duck on a bicycle waiting for him, and a lava lamp, and he comes ready: "Duck!" and "bubbles!" were two of his first words. I plot about Ezra the way I plot about my nephew -- planning ahead, painfully aware of time, change, what might come.

And I know others think of my children this way. Nancy knew I was pregnant with my now-grown son the same moment I knew -- she did the test. She has seen him as regularly as she can for 21 years. She is like his aunt, his eccentric, nosy aunt who quizzes him about everything from music to sex and gives him her old televisions and a lot of advice. She has always been in his life, and I don't think it occurs to him -- the way it has certainly occurred to Nancy -- that this may not always be true. Our best-laid plans, our finest hopes, our most cherished expectations, give way to what comes next. And what comes next, with children, is that they are not children anymore.

So many friends passing through, passing by. We revolve around each other like heavenly bodies, masses of various sizes in orbit, and each pass changes our own motion. And each of our changes changes the motion of the bodies around us. We orbit near and far, elliptical and round, fast and slow, large and small, and there is no predicting all the permutations of change at work. Friends arrive, appear, enter my life; friends change, I change, we pass away; divorce and work and age take a toll; children arrive, appear, enter and go. Sometimes I imagine I stand alone in the center and all this spinning goes on around me, and I wave at the parade of faces with tears in my eyes. But that's not true. I'm spinning, too, just one of many revolving bodies; I'm passing through, too, speeding up and slowing down and never knowing where the next turn will take me. By the time I pass this way again, these little planet bodies, these babies and toddlers and upright little ones, will be gone.
salon.com | April 8, 1999

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