Praise for mom’s best friend
Mary Schmich: Let’s take a moment to honor not just our moms on Mother’s Day but also the friends who helped them through. John Kass: All our mothers teach us what’s important. And what’s important to them might become important to you.
My mother and her best friend Martha were in their mid-80s when they saw each other for the last time.
They had been friends since they were 18, both of them students at Wesleyan College, an all women’s school in Macon, Georgia. This was during World War II, in an era when only a tiny percentage of women pursued higher education.
Martha had come up to the big city from a small Georgia town. My mother, Mary Ellen, had traveled only a few miles, from her parents’ home in Macon. They wound up as suitemates in the dorm.
My mother was the dreamy, artsy one, and she loved to read, lying in bed late into the night while smoking cigarettes and imagining her life as an actress. Martha was more practical and efficient, or so I deduced from what I witnessed years later. Martha was a bridesmaid in my mother’s wedding.
I’m not sure what they had in common except the basic qualities that cement any friendship for the long haul: They trusted each other, helped each other, made each other laugh, and they did the work of staying in touch even when life separated them.
Their trust and laughter lasted a lifetime, though their lives went in different directions, geographically and otherwise. Martha spent most of her adulthood in Atlanta, where, along with working fulltime for many years, she raised three kids — I think it was three — with a husband she seemed to get along with. My mother, meanwhile, raised eight children, and during her financially and emotionally troubled marriage moved many times, which included several months living with her family in seedy motels.
I sensed that my mother hid her troubles from most people, including relatives, but not from Martha, and I knew from my mother that Martha carried her own sorrows. Their willingness to share sorrow without judgment was part of what bound them.
Once when I was in my 30s and newly living in Atlanta, I wound up in the hospital. I had no friends nearby. Who would come pick me up? Who would take care of me while I recovered?
My mother called Martha, and Martha picked me up and took me in until I was better.
The best friendships require communication but can also withstand periods without. I sensed that there were stretches when Mama and Martha didn’t communicate a lot — this was before the ease of emails and texts — and yet I always knew they stayed vivid in each other’s minds. Mama mentioned Martha often.
But they hadn’t seen each other in several years on that day in 2008 that I drove my mother to Martha’s house for their final visit.
Mama lived in Oregon at the time, near several of her children, and I’d taken her on a trip to Georgia, with the feeling that she knew it was a valedictory tour through the place she still called home. Martha was high on the itinerary.
My mother was stooped from osteoporosis by then and shuffled around on a cane. Martha was having memory struggles.
But when my mother hobbled into Martha’s house, the years seemed to drop away. They threw their arms around each other.
My mother visibly relaxed in a way I’d rarely seen, and a much younger woman emerged from her depleted body. Whatever Martha had forgotten, it wasn’t her old friend Mary Ellen.
They sat out on the deck, two old women, laughing until they were giddy, my mother’s crooked, arthritic fingers resting on Martha’s thigh, Martha’s bigger hand resting on my mother’s.
I snapped a photo, thinking: There is a part of my mother — something joyous and young and free — that exists only in the presence of her best friend.
I left them on their own that night, chaperoned by Martha’s husband, Ray, and when I came back in the morning, they were still thick in conversation. They’d drunk some wine, stayed up too late. I can only imagine the stories they shared, about children and husbands and griefs and fears, knowing that no one but each other would understand as well.
A few weeks later, I sent my mother a copy of the photo I took of that day.
“I look like a crazy lady,” she said when saw herself crunched up in laughter, and over the phone I heard her laugh some more.
Less than two years later, I called Martha to tell her my mother had died. Of all the people I had to tell, she was the hardest
because I felt it was an erasure of her past and a forecast of her future. After that, we lost touch.
But I still of think of her, especially on Mother’s Day, and how that friendship fortified my mother. Thinking about their friendship, I think of how my oldest friends and I know each other in ways younger people can’t know us, and in ways children may not want to know their mothers. Old friends keep each
other’s sorrows, yearnings, ecstasies, mistakes and adventures alive in shared memory, memories that are more than stories told after the fact.
On this Mother’s Day, let’s take a moment to appreciate not only our mothers but also the good friends who helped them through, witnessed them, carried them in a way no one else could.