Lonely in LA, I made a remarkable friendship with my older neighbour
If friendships are the real love stories of our lives, I can pinpoint the moment I knew Claudia was the one. It was the Saturday night I stood on her doorstep in my pyjamas. I had locked myself out of my house, while collecting a food delivery from the gate, with my twoyear-old daughter, Maggie, alone inside. I was grateful for two things: I had my phone (and on it, an app that allowed me to see my daughter safely asleep in her bedroom), and I had my dog, who would have barked and woken my daughter had I left him alone in the house.
But mainly I was grateful for Claudia, who lives opposite me, in Los Angeles. Because I was mortified and distraught and she was calm and collected. Because she made the necessary phone calls to help track down a spare set of keys, and offered to drive me halfway across the city to collect them. Because she fed my dog, and comforted me for the two hours it eventually took for a locksmith to arrive.
I should add that she was, at this point, also in her dressing gown, ready for an early night after a long day.
I was possibly the last person she wanted to see that evening. We had already spent the whole day together. My husband, Chris, was away on a work trip. Claudia had suggested she drive us to Santa Barbara, about an hour and a half away, for a change of scene. Somehow we ended up spending six hours in her car. Maggie threw up in the back seat, about 90 minutes from home.
It was stressful but memorable, and soon the experience morphed into a funny story, something we joked about weeks later over pedicures, cocktails, brunch. Despite only knowing each other for six months, Claudia and I have lots in common. We make each other laugh. We text constantly. She’s everything I want in a friend. She’s also 72. Three decades older than me.
The irony that I’ve become such good friends with someone old enough to be my mother, while living in a city so obsessed with staying youthful, is not lost on me. Neither is the fact that I’ve put herculean efforts into making friends since moving to Los Angeles four years ago, when my most effortless new friendship is with a woman who lives across the road.
My husband and I were in our late 30s when we relocated to Los Angeles in 2019, following a job offer. We had recently bought a house in London, around the corner from our best friends; we had a full life and plans to start a family. As a time to uproot, it felt less than ideal. But we also knew we wouldn’t be required to live in LA permanently, and it seemed a great opportunity. My mother died in 2017, and I was grieving and mentally unsettled. I couldn’t help thinking a change of scenery was what we needed.
As a freelance writer with no driving licence, living in a city where everybody drives, the odds were stacked against me. With less opportunity to cultivate the close friendships I craved, I knew I would be more susceptible to homesickness or loneliness. So I threw myself into making new friends as if it were a full-time job. I joined apps, said “yes” to everything, used every vague contact I had.
After a few months, Chris and I had a handful of new friends dotted all over Los Angeles. Then the pandemic arrived. Nothing shows you who your friends are like being forced into lockdown less than a year after moving to a new country. Suddenly our world became very, very small. But we were lucky. Living in an apartment complex, bonds were quickly and firmly forged with other Britons over socially distanced bottles of rosé in the garden.
A year later, I became pregnant with Maggie and we moved out of the apartment into a bigger home. The friends we made during the pandemic also moved, to nearby areas, and we remained close. I adore the friends I’ve made in Los Angeles. We are all in the same peer group, grappling with small children, career disillusionment, fears of growing older; muddling through as best we can. But even the most generous, like-minded friends couldn’t prepare me for the loneliness that threatened to engulf me as a new mother in a foreign country.
It was far more complex than the loneliness I feared – and tackled head on – when we first moved to the city. It felt bigger somehow. Friends in LA who were also parents either worked fulltime, placing their kids in nursery, or were stay-at-home mums. I was neither of those things. I felt as if I was bobbing around in the ocean, somewhere in between.
Fitting freelance work around naps and sporadic windows of childcare was harder to manage than I anticipated. I struggled to feel present doing either; I just felt stretched. And that made me homesick. I sought comfort in catchups with friends in the UK and chats with my family (I’m very close to my three siblings and their kids). But that made me feel even more stretched. Physically I was in the US, but my heart was in the UK.
And I was grieving. My mum and I were extremely close – more like friends than mother and daughter. LA had provided a change of scenery. It had distracted me from my loss. But the grief was still there. I felt it when we went to the playground and saw grandparents, when my husband called his parents on a Sunday. I was a mum myself now. But sometimes I just wanted my mum. The longing to talk to her – to have one of our meandering conversations, not about anything specific, still somehow meaningful – was often as overwhelming as when she first died.
Convinced making more friends was the answer to my loneliness, I signed up for various baby groups, including one for new mums, which felt more like a therapy session than a coffee morning. I was open to that, and thought it might even benefit me to share Maggie’s unusual conception story (I am infertile and we used donor eggs). At the group, the words came tumbling out. But the other mums, most of whom conceived naturally, heralded me as some of kind of infertility warrior. And that made me feel like even more of an anomaly.
I tried everything from exercise groups to local music classes, and while they were fun and provided Maggie and me with some weekly structure, they didn’t spark friendships. My heart sunk whenever I spoke to someone born and bred in LA – it meant they probably already had their quota of friends, and likely had family nearby, too. What was I looking for? I already had friends. Some who had become like family. What was it that I was really lacking? I didn’t know. Until I met Claudia.
It’s an autumnal afternoon. Maggie and I are walking our dog, Sebastian, in my local park when a woman approaches me. “I just wanted to come and say hi,” she says, “because I’m your neighbour!” I look at her blankly – I thought I had met everyone in our building. But it turns out she lives in the building across from ours. Our homes are on different streets, separated by a small alleyway. Our windows look into each other’s.
I am frazzled that day, and not in the mood for a conversation with a stranger. Chris is travelling for work – it is becoming a more frequent occurrence – and I am home alone juggling looking after our daughter and a dog with separation anxiety. But Claudia is so friendly I warm to her immediately.
Polite conversation deepens into something more extraordinary. She says she is delighted to meet me because she watched my pregnancy from afar but never knew whether I had a boy or girl. She tells me she was recently widowed, that she doesn’t have children but always wanted them. I tell her I’ve lost both my parents and thought I was unable to have Maggie. In a scene out of a Modern Love column, we both start to cry, and envelop each other in a hug. Then we part ways.
I don’t see her again for a few months, which makes the whole thing feel like a figment of my imagination. Then I bump into her when I’m with Chris. The conversation is so easy, it feels like we already know each other. Again, we part ways without exchanging numbers. I kick myself for not asking for her details. Had she been around my age, I probably would have got her number when we first met. Why should this be any different?
And so I do something a bit old school. I write her a note, with mine and Chris’s numbers on it, and post it through her gate. She texts me as soon as she finds the note and we arrange a coffee date at my house. I have no idea what to expect. I don’t know if we’ll have anything in common or anything to talk about beyond our experience of loss.
When she arrives, armed with thoughtful gifts for Maggie, including a book she loved as a child, she is wearing a cashmere sweater with jeans and her long blonde hair is down. She has a smile that radiates such warmth you feel happier just looking at her. I learn that she is from Boston but has lived in Los Angeles for over 30 years. She was married (and divorced) young, to a man who didn’t want children. She met her second husband, and the great love of her life, Moty, when she was 41, and was with him until he died two years ago.
The following week is the anniversary of Moty’s death. It happens to be the same day on which my father died, in 1994, and so we get together at her house to toast “two wonderful men”. Claudia’s house is stylish but cosy, lived-in but immaculate. When I take my shoes off and let my feet sink into her plush carpet, I feel as relaxed and comfortable as I am at home. We polish off a bottle of wine (the first of many over the coming months) and make plans for the following week, when Chris will be away again. We go for brunch, walk Sebastian. One night she comes over with a bottle of wine once Maggie is asleep.
We don’t stop talking, about everything from the TV adaptation of Daisy Jones & The Six, to mindfulness apps – and I feel completely unselfconscious
in conversation, the way you do with a family member, not a new friend. Claudia loves the British sense of humour. I love that I can make her laugh so much. Sometimes it only takes a look for us to erupt into giggles.
By the end of the evening, I’ve had too much to drink and tear up talking about Maggie and the loss I’m grieving but don’t discuss enough. “I know,” she says, holding my hand. I text her later that night before going to bed. “I’m so glad we met.”
Over the coming months, over many walks and many dinners, we talk about the big stuff (I help her flesh out her retirement plans) and laugh about the small stuff (Sebastian pees on her posh carpet). We’re having dinner at hers when the latter occurs. I’m mortified, until Claudia texts: “My home felt so full of love. Who cares about a little pee!” before posting a reel of cute pictures on Instagram.
It’s hard to describe the impact meeting Claudia has had on me. It’s not as straightforward as “I was lonely and then I made a new friend who made me feel less alone,” because what Claudia has brought to my life is something else. It is the unconditional love, protection and emotional support I once received from my mum.
The feeling is mutual. “I love everything about you, as I have got to know you better,” Claudia tells me. “I especially love the marriage you and Chris have. The respect you have for one another is what Moty and I had.”
We’re not a particularly spiritual family, but my sister reckons my mum is somehow behind Claudia’s appearance in my life, at a time when I was feeling so lost. I would agree. In fact, I no longer believe you can search for new friends – I think they simply appear in your life when you most need them. Like Claudia. Who now has a spare set of keys to my house.
We talk about the big stuff and laugh about the small stuff