The Garden Requires More Than One Flower

Summer 2024, I am driving when my phone buzzes with a text from Elisabeth: “Guess what? We are moving near you!!!” My eyes go wide at a red light. The next message is an address, and I know that street. I grew up with someone who lived down it. I drive past it every day on the way to the kids’ school. I pull over and open the maps app to find the exact house.

With that message, a woman moved toward me and said, in her own way, I want to be close to you. Something in me answered before I decided anything, the half-second reflex that fires the moment another woman reaches for you. Yay or nay. Open or closed. Navigating that choice is what this entire book is chronicling, and for most of my life the move was to give into the instinct to keep her (any woman) at arm’s length.

Nay.

This time it was yay, and I sat on the shoulder of that road a little stunned by it.

Soon, I would be driving past my friend’s house every morning. I could stop over whenever I wanted. I could leave a package on her porch, the way she and I have been trading kid toys and outgrown clothes back and forth.

Elisabeth and I go back further than a handful of hellos at church gatherings. She was there when I was dating my spouse. She has been in our lives through the whole decade since, and now she is going to be down the street. Her eldest son will graduate from my own high school two years later. We are still figuring out motherhood with kids spread across every age and stage, still learning how to be wives, still building careers, still renovating and managing our homes, all at the same time, in houses soon to be only a few minutes apart.

I grew up in this same neighborhood with a few girlfriends I could reach on my bike, close enough to walk to on the afternoons I wanted to be anywhere but my own house. I do not talk to a single one of them anymore; nevertheless, they are still part of who I am. After sixteen years away, Teena was the first adult friend I made back in my hometown. Nancy was the second. Elisabeth moving down the street makes three, and this time it feels permanent in a way I do not question.

Three women veterans, each a friend of mine, close enough now to do life together for the years we have left.

For most of my adult life I wanted friendship but told myself I would get to it eventually. One year was for keeping the job. And then it was for keeping the bills paid. And then it was for keeping the kids alive.

Friendship was something I would allow myself to enjoy once the urgent stuff calmed down, but the urgent stuff never calmed down.

Choosing everything else over friendship never announced itself as a choice. It came as a series of small, sensible thoughts, and each one felt true.

When the other women went together to evening cocktail hours and networking events, I thought, I have to be home with my kids, I have no one I can count on to watch them and no money for a sitter.

When a woman I admired came back glowing from a trip to Italy, I thought, she just got back from Italy and I am over here trying to figure out the water bill, we are not living the same life, why would she want mine near hers.

When a woman I barely knew threw herself into celebrating me (more elaborately than I knew what to do with), I thought, this is too much, a handwritten card would have meant more to me. My walls went up instead of my arms opening.

Each thought was a brick. On its own, not one of them was wrong. I really could not get a sitter. The water bill really was due. She really did give in a way I did not know how to receive. Yet I set one down, and then another, and then another, for years, until one day I looked up and the bricks had become a wall. It was tall and solid, every brick laid by my own hand and every one justified.

That wall kept me moving fast and hard down the only path I could see, with no idea that the garden of abundance I craved was growing on the other side of it the whole time.

That is how a hand stays closed, never from one clean decision, but from a thousand small ones, each friendship set down for a reason that made sense at the time, until the fist is all you know how to make. Then one day you open it and reach, and you find out what the closing has done.

You can hold everyone at a distance for years and never feel it, until the day you reach out and find no one there. That day came for me at the end of my first marriage, years before returning to Michigan, before Elisabeth, before any of the friendships in this chapter existed.

The grounds for divorce were my ex-husband’s drinking, and my lawyer asked a straightforward question. Did I have friends who could serve as character witnesses, women who had watched his drinking go out of control?