My Friends Are Awesome

...worse than just about anything else is the agonizing issue of how on earth anyone can bring a child into this world knowing full well that he or she is eventually going to have to go through the seventh and eighth grades.

--Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

Parenting middle schoolers can be a depressing business. With a sixth grader and an eighth grader in the house, I find myself having a lot of conversations about the way people treat each other, as well as reprimanding the boys for random acts of dickishness to each other and their little brother. I have had long conversations with Son #1 about what motivates some of the worst of middle school behavior--insecurity, and the instinct to tear other people down so that you either feel bigger or don't become the next target yourself. I like to think that by giving the boys knowledge, I'm giving them a little bit of armor to get them through these awkward years. But I have to acknowledge, even to them, that it's flimsy protection.

This year Son #1 had to deal with his first full-fledged incident of mean-spirited middle-school teasing. He had gotten friendly with a girl (I'll call her Maria) who was in a couple of his classes. I think at the time he thought she was kind of cute, though since he's really just emerging out of the girls-have-cooties stage of development, that mostly meant answering any question I asked about her with a loud exasperated "Moooom! Please!" (I have told both middle school boys that girlfriends are totally out of the question for them right now. Them trying to get a girlfriend in middle school would be like a dog chasing a car; if they caught one, they wouldn't know what to do with it.)

Several of his classmates in the two classes Son #1 and Maria shared started teasing them both. Son #1 tried in his earnestly Aspergery way to try to convince them that there was nothing between him and Maria, but of course that just led to more taunts. I tried in vain to coach him to display a convincing level of indifference, but it probably would have required an Academy-award-winning performance to make a dent. Son #1, I'm proud to say, spoke to his teachers, counselors, and the magnet coordinator before I could even suggest it in order to stand up for himself and enlist their help. Finally, the whole sorry incident died out completely, due to the combination of school pressure, Son #1's continued professions of indifference, and the long winter break.

I hated middle school myself, and the vicarious walk down this particular stretch of memory lane is one I've been dreading for a while. I do feel my boys are having an easier time in middle school than I did, but the continual talk about the ungenerous ways people can behave to each other out of their own insecurities was making me feel pretty low. One day I posted a somewhat veiled status update on Facebook about Son #1's situation, and I was buoyed up by the response of my own friends, who sympathized, offered to kick some middle-school butt, and just generally showed me that I and Son #1 weren't alone.

Which brings me, in a sort of roundabout way, to the point of this post. A couple of weeks ago, two college friends of mine, Sree and Cameron, asked me if I would be willing to do a video chat interview with them for their new project. They invited me to look at the first video they had shot, of another friend from our college. My jaw dropped when I realized that the name of their site was MyFriendsAreAwesome.com. I squashed down my first instinct, which was to tell them no, they really ought to go find someone who was actually awesome to interview. I feel pretty darn ordinary most days. But these are two people who have known me since I was eighteen, guys I consider dear friends, and they are each awesome in their own way. It would have been a cop-out to say no.

I had a great conversation with them last night. And I realized afterward that there's no reason to let middle school get me or my boys down. The true emotional antidote to jerky behavior or random dickishness is not pretending to be indifferent or psychoanalyzing your emotionally immature peers (though that can be amusing). It is choosing to spend your time with people you like and respect who think you're awesome, just the way you are. Whether they are friends who offer their support when you need it or who just want to talk to you because they enjoy it, they are the armor against the douchebaggery of the world.

So I invite anyone who's made it this far to check out MyFriendsAreAwesome.com. Watch Cameron and Sree's interview with Mark Piane, or even mine. I may not have unlimited money; I may not be famous. But I am a rich woman, because I have friends, and my friends are awesome.

Getting Over Myself to Accept a Favor

One day about two weeks ago, I got a phone call from a friend of mine. She was headed off to the hazardous household waste disposal and wanted to know if I had anything I needed taken over there.

Boy, did I. I have been saving dead batteries for years, knowing that they didn't belong in the regular trash. However, I never quite managed to get them to any one of the not-so-conveniently located disposal facilities, so they piled up. So what started out as a small plastic bag of dead AAs and AAAs became a larger bag, which then finally ended up as a 25-pound box of batteries. (Yes, I weighed it before I handed it over to her.) To her credit, though my friend was visibly surprised when I lugged it out to her car (I think she was expecting a few CFLs and maybe a handful of batteries), she gamely took it, even when I expressed doubt that the facility might have a limit on how much material you could turn in at once. She reported "mission accomplished" via text about half an hour later.

Here's the crazy part of this story: When she called to ask if I had anything to get rid of, I almost said no. While one part of my brain immediately started trying to figure out where in the garage that box had been stashed, an internal counterargument immediately kicked in, which sounded something like, "It will be a lot of trouble for her to take care of that for you. You should do it yourself. It will be too embarrassing to show her how long you've been putting this off." It did take a slight effort of will to ignore that inner voice and just take her up on the offer. After all, she was just offering to take something along to a place she was going anyway--so why did I feel like it was such a big deal to let her do me a favor?

There are two answers, one simple and one more complex. The simple one is that whatever that box physically weighed, its weight in guilt was enormous. It was a pretty potent symbol of the domestic things I do not manage to get done, and getting rid of it appropriately was, from an emotional standpoint, a pretty huge favor.

The other one, though, left me wondering about the nature of friendship. I realized that I often do not ask for favors from my friends, even when I need them, even when the task is simply accomplished, and even when I know the friend who I would ask would be more than willing to help out. But the part that gets really screwy is that I don't mind being asked for a favor when the situation is reversed.

I found when I first moved to L.A., over 12 years ago, that making friends was harder than I expected. My main avenue for meeting other women was through my kids, and I rapidly found out that sometimes all I had in common with them was the fact that we both had kids. It took a long time to find anyone with whom I felt comfortable discussing more than the superficial dishing that parents do with one another on short acquaintance about lack of sleep, the nastiness of dealing with diapers (and the related discussions on green poop), and Odd Things That Children Put in Their Mouths. It felt kind of lonely to constantly be communicating at the level of cocktail-party banter, all amusing anecdotes low on substance.

In those early years, I made some rules for myself to help weed out the acquaintances that I knew would never end up in the category of Friends I Call for No Reason Whatsoever When I Need to Talk. One of the first rules was to avoid flagrant violators of the unwritten Social Contract of Sisterhood in Motherhood, which states that when someone tells you something unflattering about their child, you do not respond by talking about what a perfect angel your child is. For example, if I told another mom about how Son #2 got into the laundry room and dumped a cupful of cat food into the fountain-type water dish, necessitating a half-hour cleanup and a superhuman effort on my part not to swear in front of him, and she responded with an anecdote about how her similarly-aged daughter insisted on putting her own dishes into the dishwasher immediately after every meal, then I'd know she wouldn't make the short list. You are supposed to then relate how your child did something similar (i.e., telling a tale about how your child is apparently using the scientific method to determine exactly how large a toy can be flushed down the toilet before it stops working entirely and a plumber has to be called) so that your friend can feel assured that her child is not the only one in the world who does stupid/mischievous things.

The other major rule was to avoid the What Did Your Little Devil Do to My Little Angel types. These people are pretty easily spotted when their kids are in preschool, because preschoolers tend to get in spats where everyone involved has done something wrong (i.e., Child A grabs toy away from Child B, Child B responds by whacking Child A). In a perfect world, Child A's mom would explain to Child A that while it was not okay for Child B to hit them, it is also not okay to grab toys away from other people, and Child B's mom would be giving the reverse explanation to Child B (with perhaps a soupçon of "hitting is worse than grabbing" thrown in). Ideally both moms would then talk to the kids about the appropriate way to interact. With the Little Devil/Little Angel types, what happens in practice is that whatever your kid did was wrong and whatever their kid did was okay, thus throwing all the blame on to your child no matter what the situation is (i.e., Child A's mother insists that Child A had been waiting a long time for that toy and just can't be expected to wait forever, and Child B is a monster for hitting them). These people are impossible to deal with, and while the situations get more subtle as their kids age, the basic M.O. is the same. 

The rest of my friend-selection strategy simply has to do with time. I don't have a lot of it, so I'm choosy about who I spend it with. I love to read and I hate reality television, so I'm not likely to have much in common with someone who reverses those preferences. My idea of a luxury shoe buy is a pair of Dansko clogs (so comfortable...), and most of my friends similarly favor comfort over style in their footwear. In short, I do consciously what we all used to do unconsciously in our youth--find my level with people who have similar interests and attitudes.

Luckily, in the nearly eleven years we've lived in our current house, I've gotten to know a number of women I would describe as good friends. So why do I hesitate to accept help from them when I need it? And why do I almost never ask? Have I simply lost the ability to instinctively know who to trust after all those years of holding people at arm's length until I could determine if I could relate to them? I'd describe this as a personal problem except that I see my friends do the same thing all the time. Not all of them, though; clearly the "rugged individualists" among us need to take a cue from the moms who are more willing to connect and ask for help.

I'll remind myself of that the next time I hesitate to take up a friend when they're offering me a hand. After all, what's 25 pounds of dead batteries among friends?