My Formerly Hot Life (3 page)

The thing about rich, skinny, young, fabulous and broke is that they are all extreme, albeit arguably glamorous, conditions. But I’m less extreme about most everything, a perk of Formerlydom, I’m discovering. I’m not skinny, but neither am I fat. I’m not young, but not old. I’m not fabulous, although I do some things fabulously, and I have enough money so that if my daughters, who are six, need braces so they can be a bit more fabulous when they get older, it’s not a huge hardship. Life is no longer one long music video, complete with the dramatic lighting and the outfit to go
with it. When I did feel that way, for a few intense, traumatic periods in my 20s, it was electric, to be sure. But it was also debilitating. Nowadays, I’m happy, self-confident and don’t take myself too seriously.

I still take myself seriously enough, however, to refuse to buy jeans from the Misses department, and I’m not sure I would laugh if I saw my jeans parodied in a
Saturday Night Live
sketch. If some smart designer wants to make some real bucks off those of us who are willing to tap into the kids’ future orthodontia fund for denim that appeals to the Formerly condition, I have some suggestions for brand names. Maybe Formerly Hot is not an image most people would race to identify with, but it’s a label I, for one, would be proud to slap on my ass. Others include:

The point (which I will probably need to learn and relearn a few more times before it sticks) is that the clothes I wear as a Formerly need to work for and reflect my life as it is, not some weird coked-up version of Mary Kate and Ashley’s fabulous life that probably isn’t that much fun even for them, poor little urchins with their soulless, hungry eyes.

Still, I occasionally forget this and go so far as to try on backless tops, pencil-leg pants and bras that are cuter than they are supportive. For obvious reasons, I don’t buy them anymore. While they still have a place in my imagination, they no longer have a place in my closet.

T
he other night, I met up with two girlfriends, both of them young enough to remember what it was like to go out drinking and enjoy it, but old enough to realize that even one night of moderate revelry these days means they’ll pay in ways unfathomable to their younger selves.

Setting up a date with friends used to mean a couple of 30-second phone calls or maybe a group email. Now it involves a series of high-level negotiations, painful compromises, expenditure of precious marital capital and backroom dealings that rival what it takes to pass health-care reform.

Below is more or less the process I went through to overcome the combination of exhaustion, inertia, ever-present responsibilities, spousal scheduling complications and random pediatric dental emergencies to deliver my Formerly butt onto that bar stool next to my friends:

And it
was
fun, just not as much fun as it used to be when my body didn’t shut down so early. These days I am awoken at 6:30 by children asking where I hid the baking soda and vinegar because they want to make a volcano like the science dude on TV—on the rug. Plus the people-watching, guy-scoping aspect of the bar scene is pretty well moot when you go out with your married, Formerly girlfriends
who you don’t see often enough. I want to talk to them, not some random dude who’s 15 years younger, even on the off chance that he’s got a thing for women who look tired even after they’ve slept. If I’m going to have a good bonding session with my friends, I’d rather be caffeinated, not sleepy.

Still, the next time someone suggests drinks, I’ll most certainly drag my creaky, rotting carcass out to a bar and do it all again. And I’ll call it fun, even though it feels like fun’s much older half sister from Dad’s failed first marriage. Because there is a certain value to swishing into a bar, kid-, husband- and/or boyfriend-free, ordering something with a goofy name and remembering what it’s like to have to yell over loud music to be heard. If nothing else, it’s lovely to come home, hoarse and tired, and be happy to be there.

And I got to see my girls.

The thing about friendships when you reach your late 30s and early 40s is that even though you have much less time for them, the quality is so, so much better than when you were in your 20s. Fortunately, just as some über-potent medications come in pills the size of a caraway seed, a small dose of friend time has the intended effect. Plus, these friendships are so much easier. With few exceptions, we all seem to have fairly low expectations of one another (“Please—you remembered my birthday
month!
No, no, no, I love you, toooooo!!!”) and an understanding of what it takes to meet even those low expectations, given the madness of our Formerly lives. Perhaps that’s why when those
expectations are unexpectedly surpassed—which they are all the time, in ways small and enormous—my Formerly friendships seem like even more of a gift.

When my girls were in preschool and I was working full–time, maybe three years ago, I had a problem with my brain. The problem was that it had desiccated into a tiny little porous pumice stone rattling around in my skull, no doubt from all the stress chemicals that it had been marinating in since I had the twins. So one day, the teacher sent a note home asking us to send in white tees for the kids to tie-dye, and, what with my pumice stone for a brain, I had no recollection that I had children, let alone that it was tie-dye day. I was digging around in my purse for a dirty tissue or something the girls could tie-dye, when Ronni, a woman I’d recently become friendly with whose daughter was in my girls’ class, showed up with a pack of three white T-shirts. She bought the three-pack even though she has but one child because she thought “maybe” I’d forget.

The gratitude I felt at that moment could not have been greater had she given me a chunk of her liver. I almost cried. Seriously. Since then, I’ve been doing things like that—carrying two Shout Wipes instead of one, calling a friend when I pass a sale in a store I know she likes. I’ve missed more than my share of showers and birthday dinners—but if you need a Shout Wipe, I’m your gal.

Formerly friendships also have the advantage of being all but drama-free. By now we’ve been rocked by bona fide, life-wrecking drama and have lost any taste for the manufactured
kind that a deep breath, a shred of common sense and a drop of self-reflection could have averted. Gone are the days of friends sleeping with barely dumped exes, strategic non-invitations to events, allegiances forged and jockeying for position or any vestige of junior-high silliness that remained when we were in our early 20s. There is no hierarchy, at least not that I’ve noticed.

Back in junior high, which was the height, or rather the nadir, of awful female friend pettiness, when you walked into the cafeteria, everyone was already seated in her little clique. As you approached each cluster with your lunch tray, you could feel the vibes emanating—hostile, neutral or mildly welcoming—and from there you decided where to sit. Above all else, a dork was someone who couldn’t read the vibes, and plunked herself down where she wasn’t wanted, thus opening herself up to possible scorn.

Now, either there are no such vibes, or I’ve become that dork and have lost the ability to read the sit-here-at-your-own-peril signals. Social hierarchies might be one of the things, like what guys are “really” thinking about you in bed, that Formerlies have become blissfully oblivious to. Either way, it’s awesome! If I’ve been scorned by any of my figurative seating choices lately, I haven’t noticed. That seems to be how it is for most of us: We’ve all been rejected enough times and done enough rejecting for it to cease being interesting. What’s more, we know the value of what we’re bringing to the table—ourselves!—and would rather enjoy eating alone, if that’s what it comes to. But it rarely does.

When I was in my early 20s, I had a close friend who I adored—she was hilarious, loyal, whip-smart and felt likewise about me. We were in the same circle, lived blocks apart, both worked like mad and dated tons. When we weren’t barhopping together, we spent much of our free time watching
Party of Five
and shopping and dissecting our many relationships and friendships.

But we had major Issues, the it-really-hurts-me-when-you-[    ] kind of issues that as a Formerly one only has with people we’re explicitly committed to. We had sit-down talks about our feelings and cold wars and reached détentes and then fell out again—it was all terribly intense and upsetting and there was much venting to other friends, which only amplified it. She and I constantly felt betrayed and let down by each other. We were like Lauren and Heidi on
The Hills
, except we weren’t blond, or morons, or on television. Or rich, with our own clothing lines. OK, we weren’t anything like Lauren and Heidi on
The Hills
, except insofar as we were very dramatic. Eventually, we threw up a Berlin Wall and avoided each other.

[An aside here: Can I tell you how wonderful it is to be able to make a Berlin Wall reference and know that every person reading this will have some sentient-being recollection of the Berlin Wall? Formerlies are so great to write for.]

I cannot imagine a friend now, as a Formerly, with whom I could have an unpleasant breakup; things just aren’t that combustible. I also can’t foresee any come-to-Jesus talks.
First off, few of us are able to finish a sentence without someone needing a cheese stick or a trip to the potty. But more important, it feels as if most Formerlies have reached a tacit agreement that we will not ask any more of one another emotionally than the other can realistically provide. The disappointments are minor, no one gets off on pushing anyone else’s buttons (on new friends, we don’t even take the time to learn where they are!) and we cut one another as much slack as we know we’ll need sometime in the near future, given how complicated everyone’s lives are. “I don’t expect all things from any one of my friends,” says my friend Julie. “I can take what people have to offer, and I don’t have to be friends with everybody.”