Friendship à la mom

Learning how to be stubborn and sweet

My mom always told me I was good at making friends. 

This has seemed incorrect on many different occasions. In ballet class, in lunchrooms, in college lectures. I am quite adept at the practice of observing other people huddled in platonic devotion. Always making references to something that happened at someone’s party, or the plans they have to hang out in the future. And me, outside of that, now knowing how to penetrate, not understanding how to become relevant in a structure that’s already been refined.

But my mom has always wanted me to believe the very best things about myself. It is the warmest intention, yet my inability to synch up with her biased vision of me has sometimes felt painful and confusing.

“Your mom looks at you like you’re a unicorn,” a friend once said to me.

She does, too. Cheri exhibits the sort of all-encompassing motherly love that blurs her vision. No matter what I do, she thinks I’m incredible. Which is really nice, although it does make it hard to trust her judgment.

Once we were out having breakfast together in the suburbs. Obviously we decided to split something savory and something sweet. When the dishes came, I started scraping half the scramble onto an empty plate.

Cheri was beaming.

“You’re so good at that!” she said. “You’re just so talented!”

There are at least two categories of Things My Mother Has Taught Me:

1. Those she intended to teach me

2. Those she unconsciously modeled by example

The notion that I’m good at making friends falls under the first. But observing how my mom made and managed her friendships allowed me to pick up on real, useful strategy. 

Before I was born, my mom worked in radio. And even though it had been years since they were in the industry together, even though they all lived in cities far away, Cheri never lost touch. She’d ring them up from the kitchen phone, standing between the cluttered secretary desk and the olive green stove. She and her radio friends called each other by their last names.

“Eden!” she’d say in salutations. “Russel.” 

As in, hi Peter Eden, it’s Cheri Russel. 

I must have watched her make these calls from the dining room, watched as the tangled phone chord wrapped around itself like a limp vine and carried their voices to each other.

Part of what my mom modeled on her telephone check-ins was the devotion required to keep a good thing going. Persistence was key. Perhaps if she hadn’t kept up the practice, she and Eden would not be in touch. Someone has to be willing to admit that they care more than they don’t.

I took this to heart, and I paired it with my stubborn personality and theatrical view of life. The blend of determined, dramatic commitment to people made me the natural “Russell” of the Eden-Russell dynamic.

Once, when I was in middle school, my mom and I were driving around in the countrified suburbs of our small city. The radio was on, as always, and “Drops of Jupiter” was playing. We sat listening, cruising, allowing Pat Monahan to work his way through the bridge. 

Can you imagine no love, pride, deep-fried chicken

Your best friend always sticking up for you

Even when I know you're wrong?

My mom turned her shoulders to me, keeping her eyes on the road ahead. “Can you imagine your best friend always sticking up for you?” she asked, dripping with sentimentality.

“Yes,” I nodded dreamily, matching her tone. 

I looked out the van window and imagined my Best Friend at her family’s home, which to me seemed like the fanciest, coolest house any family could live in. They had a pool and a long driveway, a big television surrounded by puffy couches, and bedrooms upstairs. Hers was lined with high-up shelves that were full of Barbies preserved in their boxes.

While I was stoically dwelling on the depth and devotion of our friendship, she was probably occupying her time with lighter matters. Taking a swim or learning a dance or watching TV. I knew better than to call her up and share my reflections on our companionship in the context of a Train song. The assumed lightness of her life was part of what made me like her so much. She seemed to move through her world effortlessly. Things were always fun with her, simple yet outrageous, like we were living in a Disney Channel movie. Everyone cute and popular liked her, a huge accomplishment in my eyes but no big deal to her. She was good at making friends.

I was not subtle about my devotion to my Best Friend. I named my dog after her. I cleverly and carefully wrote her name on a grain of rice and gave it to her in a vial. I copied her outfits as best as I could, begging my mom to spend $26 dollars on specific graphic babydoll tees from Abercrombie and Fitch. 

At 34, my favorite thing about her is that she was so cool to me even when I was obviously swooning. She knew how to laugh at my gestures in a way that was joyful and inclusive, rather than judgmental and isolating. That, to me, is worth all the devotion.

Eventually my Best Friend changed schools and we drifted apart. It’s hard to intentionally foster your relationships when you’re bound to places beyond your control. I made a new Best Friend, aided by our mutual untethered statuses. Two girls with no one to sit with, so we sat together—or so she tells me. 

That was the start of what has now been the longest friendship of my life. And it developed not because I possess some natural social skill, like my mom would have you believe, but because I am inherently available and stubborn. 

Sometimes I suspect my mom likes to make people tear up. Not one for small talk, she will quiet her voice into something gentle and saccharine and prod you softly with the suggestion of emotion. It is part mom, part counselor. This was the voice she used when she asked me to meditate on the lyrics of “Drops of Jupiter.” And this is the voice she used when she framed my friendships in her narrative of my life.

“She really means a lot to you, doesn’t she,” she would ask. Or, “You love your best friend, don’t you?” She’d wait for the response with dewy, sympathetic eyes. 

Always I would nod with sober earnestness, like my friendships were holy vows I had taken on the path towards enlightenment.

My mom’s “Drops of Jupiter” voice doesn’t work as well on me any more, but I value the introspection that it brought me. Because of its prompts, I am deeply familiar with my relationship to relationships, the way I need them, that I can let them go if I have to and still survive, and that they are one of the sweetest parts of life.