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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

For all the girls
First, my daughter came out. Then, she took me out with the girls -- to see the Sinatra who packs a dildo.
By Lee Uttmark
[10/18/99]

I cannot tell a lie
What happens when a hooker confesses to her parents.
By Tracy Quan
[10/15/99]

Anyone for a poop daiquiri?
I can't do the stony-face thing when it comes to bathroom humor.
By Carol Hall
[10/14/99]

Bad fortune
When the nanny foretold disaster, my son gave me a lesson in blind faith.
By Allison Hoover Bartlett
[10/13/99]

My seeds are sprouting in two wombs
Hank Pellissier, giver of sperm, is about to receive. Last heard from while contemplating insemination, he's now got a girl coming with the wife and a boy on the way with the lesbian gal pal.
By Hank Pellissier
[10/12/99]

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I know of such friendships. We all do. They are the stuff of fiction and melodrama: the YaYa sisterhood, Judy Blume's "summer sisters," Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey on the beach. But these are not real women, women, like me, who have moved eight times and lived in six different states since graduating high school; who have shed people with each move; who have had to trade friends for kids because there wasn't time to be good and true to both. Women who have mostly kept their own counsel.

But it's hard to be jealous of fictional pals.

Then I read a story in a magazine about five women who have been meeting for dinner once a month for 27 years, and I was, for a moment, truly envious. These were real women. I cannot imagine the stability of a group friendship like that, the sense of history -- the marriages, divorces, births and deaths, toddlers and teenagers that must have come and gone -- the ease, the comfort, the fullness of time. I will never have that.

But I have had something else, a kind of friendship that may be even more miraculous. It is a sudden, intense friendship born of adversity, a fierce, temporary connection that comes when you need it and fades when the moment has passed. When it is happening, it is the most important relationship in your life. When it is over, the hole it leaves closes quickly.

"There's something suspicious on your mammogram," the nurse had said. I knew there were many things it could be, but I also knew there was only one thing it was. The biopsy, a day later, confirmed it. Nancy was the only person I could think of to call when I got the news. She was the only woman I knew who had had breast cancer. She was not a close friend, but she was more than a nodding acquaintance.

"Shit," she said over the phone when I told her, a reaction I came to appreciate later after two friends fell apart on me when I told them the news. What you don't want when you tell people you're facing something terrible is pity. You've got enough of that going on inside. What you do want is anger. There's energy in anger.

Nancy came over that afternoon and sat with me at the kitchen table for hours. I don't know what she did with her two children. I don't know how, for the next two weeks, she rearranged her life so that she became a fixture in mine. I never asked, and she never burdened me with the details. During those weeks other friends called; other friends cared. But they didn't know what to do. "Call me if you need anything," they would say, meaning it. But of course I didn't. I couldn't articulate what I needed. I didn't know what I needed. Nancy knew.

She is a large, solid woman who listens carefully and measures her words. She is not a hugger, but when she hugs, you stay hugged. That first afternoon she sat and listened as I railed on about death and dying and how I couldn't believe this was happening to me and how I would never live to see my kids get out of middle school. Every once in a while she would pour more tea. When she got up to leave, she took hold of both my hands and looked me in the eye. "I'm still here," she said. "You will be too."

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