My Formerly Hot Life (4 page)

That sounds very free-form, which I suppose Formerly friendships are. And yet, my friendships are closer and more consistently satisfying, even if some are transacted largely over the phone or on Facebook because folks moved to other states for careers and love and the desire to snowboard all the time (something I can’t say I relate to, but hey). “I would say that the major trend is from quantity to quality,” says my friend Jennifer, who also used to have some very intense and sometimes troublesome relationships. Jennifer undertook two big friend-weeding projects when she approached 30 and again when she approached 40, in which she inventoried which friends she felt had her best interests at heart, which she felt most comfortable around and which brought out her good, as opposed to her not-so-hot, habits. Then she let the others recede. “It’s like cleaning out your
clothes. It makes the better friendships seem more sparkly.” My weeding-out process, like most Formerlies’, was entirely passive, though probably just as thorough.

One of my sparklier “new” friendships is actually with Harlene, the woman on the other side of that Berlin Wall, which came down at some point when neither of us were paying attention. We ran into each other at a wedding a couple of years ago, and both immediately missed what we’d loved about each other. The rest of it? Maybe it has gone wherever my perky boobs, voluminous hair and dewy, unlined face have gone. I’m positive all that negative silliness will never be seen or heard from again. Either Harlene and I are too busy pushing our husbands’ buttons to push each other’s, or we simply no longer feel the need. Besides, our husbands click, which, if you’re a married Formerly, you know is almost as good as having a friend with a giant, underused beach house or who’s a doctor and doesn’t mind if you email her pictures of stupid skin tags you’re convinced are cancer.

The bummer part, of course, is that just when we’re self-sufficient, emotionally generous and secure enough to have these incredible friendships, who has time? Familied Formerlies have all these other people—some of them wholly irrational, Goldfish-scarfing, tantrum-throwing, hokey-pokey-dancing little people—to answer to. Never mind that we adore these families, are committed to them and wanted desperately to expand them (in my case paying thousands for doctors to extract my eggs and mix them with Paul’s
sperm to make embryos and then inject them back in me—desperate, right?). They still make it pretty tough to have any other sustained relationship outside of them.

One solution, of course, is to try to make friend-families, entire families with which your family can hang out. Friend-families mean you don’t need to feel guilty about taking time away from your family to see your friends. They’re tricky business, because there are so many variables, but there was a point, when my twins were toddlers, that I was so desperate for adult company that wasn’t my husband (even given my extensive participation, I was mad at him for knocking me up) that I actively sought such families out. Things only clicked with one or two of them. With most of the others, there were either no sparks, extenuating circumstances (perfectly nice parents can breed biters! Who knew?) or the husbands found each other to be big loser dickheads with bad politics. A few of my attempts were outright disasters.

One time, I agitated for a weekend at a friend’s house in New Hampshire. I’d known the female half of the couple for 15 years (I’ll call her Debbie), and loved her. I knew her husband less well, but he seemed like a good guy to me. They had a swing set and a climbing structure so even if the kids didn’t groove they could dangle from things. Fine. But our husbands were like oppositely charged ions, and it was clear both had been “encouraged” a bit too forcibly. First off, Debbie’s husband was a Yankees fan. Mine is a lifelong Mets man. Big whoop, right? I now know that wars have been
fought over less. And to make matters more uncomfortable, her husband had followed the Dead, smoked pot and wore tie-dyes. Mine follows politics, is more of an endorphin-high kind of guy and basically thought her husband was full of shit. They might have found common ground shooting hoops, had hers not gotten stoned and sulked and read the paper all weekend, and had mine looked up from his BlackBerry for more than 11 seconds. Debbie got to acting overly cheery and accommodating to make up for her husband, and I couldn’t penetrate her wall of optimism that this was going to be “such a
fun
weekend!” despite ample evidence that it was not.

In the end, only the kids had an OK time, and protested our leaving as early as we politely could the day after we arrived. On the phone that night, the husbands separated and the equilibrium restored to our friendship, Debbie and I laughed about how stupid it is that we feel responsible for everyone’s enjoyment, as if our husbands were not grown men. We resolved to see each other alone next time, or maybe with the kids, and I filed the experience under Live And Learn: You can’t just plunk two families down in a sandbox together like toddlers and assume they’ll happily make mud pies.

My Formerly friend Kathleen, who has a daughter, echoes the sentiments of many Formerlies when she says that kids are the beginning of the end of your social life. While it’s true that being beholden to someone whose bedtime is 7:00
PM
can put a real damper on your party schedule,
I can’t really blame the wee ones for this (and believe me, I blame them for a lot of things, not least of all for making me see the Hannah Montana movie, which I wound up not hating, which I found hateful in myself, which is their fault, too). In fact, some of my better friends now are newer, parent friends, and I have my kids to thank for them.

I’ve come to believe that it’s the route most of us take to having kids—coupling up—that can make or break friendships as a Formerly. When I first got together with Paul, I was not yet a Formerly, I had no kids and lots of time to hang out, but I remember some of my single friends not being as available when I was free. There was no acrimony, just a longer and longer period between coffee dates. Part of me thought that they assumed they were second choice after Paul and resented that, or maybe they found me boring, now that I didn’t have wild anecdotes about guys who had 37 guitars and a futon but no toilet in their apartment.

And perhaps there
was
a mosquito netting of boringness that descended upon me once I stopped being able to contribute such tales, but I also think my friends were respectfully backing away now that I was part of a duo. I certainly didn’t ask them to, nor was I aware of sending out practically-married-lady vibes. But in retrospect, when you get serious with someone, there’s some major circling of the wagons that takes place, and that can shut out even the best friendships. My Formerly friend Melissa (who has three kids under six, so she’s barely alive) said it took her a few years to adjust to being married; she felt that her allegiance had
to be to her relationship with her husband and that she needed to wall off her marriage for it to feel central. “When Ben and I were first married, it was like, No one can ever know if we have a fight. I was embarrassed,” she says.

She nailed exactly what I experienced: If women’s friendships are built on shared emotions and commiserations, and you’re not talking about what is now the most central relationship in your life, you’re not going to feel as close to friends. Paul and I were just married and back in New York from our honeymoon in the summer of 2001, right before the planes hit the World Trade Center. He and I had very different ways of dealing with 9/11. I was frozen with anxiety and grief, jittery and fragile and I didn’t know where I could rest my gaze. Certainly not on the TV screen; I couldn’t bear to watch the footage of the planes hitting the towers (I still cannot), let alone in a 24-hour loop, as was on the news for weeks after it happened. Paul, on the other hand, was contained and logical and seemed to feel that the more information he had and the more news he absorbed, the better. He met my emotions with facts meant to reassure me, mostly about the relative odds of a repeat occurrence, our pissant Brooklyn block being an unlikely target, and how all the stepped-up security made New York City the safest place in the universe right then. I didn’t find it soothing. He didn’t get my reaction and I didn’t get his. We couldn’t comfort each other very well, which put a huge strain on our fledgling marriage.

I did discuss how I felt with my girlfriends, even how Paul
and I weren’t connecting on this subject, but I remember choosing my words with care so as not to paint Paul as in any way less than the ideal husband. If my friends saw him as callous or even simply someone who didn’t get me, I felt, they might think I was hasty in marrying him, or they might hold it against him, neither of which I wanted. They probably wouldn’t have, but my marriage felt too new to risk it. What my self-editing meant, however, was that my friends couldn’t appreciate what was upsetting me, and couldn’t be supportive.

Dishing about a boyfriend, of course, is one thing. If it isn’t serious, it almost feels like sport; those conversations often end in your friend advising you to dump him. Speaking about private things that involve your husband, particularly when you’re newly married, feels like a betrayal. That’s why many women, myself included, find the first years of marriage to be a bit isolating, even lost years, in terms of our friendships. If things aren’t hunky-dory—and in case you haven’t heard, marriage is freakin’ hard, even when things are good—and you’re not talking about it with your friends, you have no idea if they’re having the same issues, which makes laying yourself bare even riskier.

But just because your friendships take a backseat to your marriage early on doesn’t mean you need those friendships any less. In fact, if you’re married, you may well need your friends even more than when you were single. That’s because friends come through with a different kind of support than your family—a less invested, more you-centric type of
support. Of course, your friends care that you’re making decent choices, but they’re not as personally affected by your choices, so in the end, whatever makes you happy, they’ll find a way to get behind. Not necessarily so, your nearest and dearest.

Let’s say I wanted to become a midlife stripper, determined to show the world more and more of me, just as cultural norms and people’s near-universal preference would dictate that I reveal less and less. For the record, I think that my becoming a stripper would be awful for everyone involved, but Paul is very supportive so I don’t have an example of anything I truly want to do that he has disapproved of.

So let’s pretend snaking my fish-white mom body up and down a pole is an aspiration of mine. I’d go to my friends and excitedly and convincingly frame it as an exercise in positive body image: The mass worship I’d get for flaunting my Formerly form would maybe make me feel “empowered” as a woman, which I’ve seen certain strippers interviewed on TV claim is the true payoff, not the cash tucked into their G-strings. I could sock away that off-the-books G-string green for my kids’ college fund, of course, and I’d maybe tap into my sexual core, whatever that is, which would no doubt enhance my intimate relationship with my husband. If nothing else, I’d have more to write about, as if there weren’t enough stripper memoirs out there to keep the hellfires burning for eternity.

Then I’d assure them I was serious, and ask what they thought. Some friends would raise an eyebrow and suggest
selling pencils from a tin cup outside the Empire State Building might be a more reliable revenue stream. But if it was obvious that I was jazzed about the plan, at least a couple of the more outré would say,
Sure. If it will make you happy, go for it! It’s more remunerative than an advanced degree, and possibly aerobic
.

His in-theory support being tested, Paul, of course, would vote a loud no, out of concern for my safety and dignity, his career, what his parents would think and perhaps because he’d see it as evidence of our profound incompatibility. My girls wouldn’t like it, either; streaking is a joy for them, but the sight of my mature booty ducking into the shower elicits shrieks of “Eeewww, mushy!” They are just a couple of years away from being mortified by everything I do, and stripping would be worse than even my singing Go-Go’s songs as I drop them off at school (they already hate that).

The bottom line is that as a familied Formerly, you don’t always have the support of those closest to you to do what you want or need to do. In this fictitious example, my family’s happiness is directly dependent on my remaining clothed. And that’s totally fair. But that leaves Formerlies like me back in the situation we were when we lived with our parents: negotiating with people who may not feel as we do, and who have a say in what we do. Remember how your ’rents had their own feelings about your donating your college fund to free Tibet and becoming a cranial sacral masseuse? You really needed your friends then, whether you
went to college or not, if only for empathy. All stripper silliness aside, there may be times when my husband and kids won’t like what I need to do and I will need to do it anyway. It will be so important to have my friends’ support.

Many paired-off Formerlies seem to get this, which may be why our friendships are so rewarding—they remind us that we exist separately from our families, as we did in our previous incarnations. Melissa says her Formerly friendships are the best she’s had since before she was married. Her marriage is now a fact of her life, not something that feels new and sacred, like it needs to be encased in glass lest it gets covered with greasy fingerprints. “It doesn’t feel as private and primal as it once did, like no one can know that we had a fight,” she says. “Now I know it’s nothing to be embarrassed about, that all my friends have struggles with their spouses, with motherhood, with the balancing act. It feels like we’re living the same lives. Even though I see them less, it reminds me of when we were all single and freaking out about being single.”

And speaking of single, obviously not all Formerlies are part of a pair. If you’re not—by choice or by default—you might, like my friend Rhonda, find yourself counting quite a few non-Formerlies among your friends. This is, of course, because single people may also be child-free, which means they can actually leave their homes after dark and meet up for dinner or drinks or (gasp!) both, even when it’s not their birthday. Younger people are likewise able to do this, plus you might just plain have more in common with them than
you do with someone who talks about poopy diapers like it’s not totally gross. Rhonda is one of my closest friends and Auntie Rhonda to my girls. We spend loads of time together, often with my kids. But if my girls weren’t mine, I don’t think I’d want to stick around for chicken nuggets with us and call it a rockin’ Saturday night, either. We are each other’s road not taken.