At the end of last summer my close friend Karen and I were having a glass of wine in my living room. Karen’s kids, slightly younger than mine, had been absorbed into the happy chaos that reigns over our household each evening, especially in the summer.
Karen and I like chaos.
We became close friends—both California girls—when we found ourselves across the country as Dartmouth freshmen, where the first New Hampshire snows fell fourteen days into the fall semester.
In college, “happy chaos” might as well have been our motto. There was dancing and long jogs and drinking and floating in inner tubes down the river our sophomore summer, all with a little studying interspersed.
But Karen and I also helped each other through bruised hearts and the odd bombed exam. I did what I could when Karen’s father—during our finals, senior year—died of a sudden heart attack.
I was incredibly proud that when Karen gave birth to her first child fifteen years later, I was the friend called upon to head right over and help negotiate the complexities of a temperamental breast pump.
Karen's daughter. My twelve-year-old's fashion guinea pig.
That evening last summer, our conversation turned almost immediately to our kids, as it had since we became mothers.
The topic that night was Karen’s son. Edward had been—eight years before—the most gorgeous infant, no exaggeration, that I had ever seen. He was now incredibly bright and affable, utterly charming and still one of the most handsome kids I know. He had also just been diagnosed with dyslexia.
Because Karen and her husband are conscientious, loving, resourceful parents, they worked hard to secure a spot for their boy at a world-renowned school that would supply Edward with all the skills he needed to remain on his path toward excellence in all endeavors.
This school was a solid twenty minutes up the highway.
This school meant shifting their schedules and expectations and working far harder with their son than they had before.
Most daunting yet? The school had a mandatory summer program that required their summer—Karen and I have always loved our hang-loose summers—be radically reshaped to accommodate what felt like an extra six weeks of school.
“But, so,” I said to Karen, “is he liking it?”
“Yes!” she said, as though this were vexing. I was slouched at one end of our wide couch, Karen’s long legs up on our coffee table. It was as if we were still nineteen, her feet on the cardboard box I’d covered with a batik tapestry in lieu of furniture in our freshman dorm. “He really likes it!”
“That’s great!”
“Yeah. No. Of course that’s the important thing.” She looked totally despondent.
“What?”
Karen said, “I just don’t want to do it!”
And I understood right away. Karen didn’t want to spend over an hour in the car each July day when she and her kids could have been out hiking or swimming or sleeping in. She didn’t want to put forth the effort it would take, that fall, to make new friends with new moms and arrange new playdates for her kid in a new school community. She didn’t want to spend August thinking about supplemental work packets and curriculum and strategies and processes when we should have been barbecuing!
“I so know,” I said, “what you mean.”
Because the fact was, in half-an-hour when Karen and I plunked chicken nuggets down in front of our kids, I didn’t want to ask Will about his blood glucose only to find he was 312. I hadn’t wanted to wake up in the middle of the night before to check to be sure he hadn’t over-corrected a wacky bedtime number. I hadn’t wanted to take him to the clinic last week at 3:45 on a hot afternoon when we would all have rather stayed home reading and lounging, and I didn’t want to think about getting him organized for the upcoming weekend away with his buddies that would mean trips to the pharmacy and lists of extra pump battery caps and infusion sites and I.V. Prep, all while forcing myself to dwell on worst-case scenarios.
“Isn’t it crazy?” said Karen. “This stuff you’ve never even thought about. Stuff you’ve never even heard of!” She was referring to type 1 diabetes, which I hadn’t known a thing about before Will’s diagnosis two years before. “All this stuff you end up doing for your kid.”
“Soo true.”
Karen looked resigned but also strangely content because we can be honest and fully ourselves when we are together. She laughed a little. “The thing is, I just really don’t want to do it.”
“No,” I said, laughing too, and feeling like a little kid, Karen and I both looking down the hallway to where shrieks might have been of joy or serious pain. “Me neither.” We settled back in on the couch, deciding on joy. “I don’t want to do any of it. Not ever. Not any of it. Ever.” We smiled again at ourselves. “Not one little bit.”
