YWBB

Making New Friends


On the drive to school yesterday my daughter asked me if I had made any new friends yet. This isn’t the first time she has asked me about this. Making friends is a big deal in her five year old world, and she assures me that she has made many new friends since moving here. Friends at school. At dance. With the children of people Rob and I know. And she considers herself a great friend of our next door neighbor, Charlotte. Katy can spend hours following Charlotte around as she does yard work and other outdoor chores. Of course this got me thinking, once again, about me and the friends thing. I just have never been one to make friends easily. Even when I can manage to be outgoing, I am an acquired taste it seems. Since coming here to live, I haven’t given the whole friends thing much thought. I have been more focused on activities I like and finding groups and venues that allow me to pursue them. I wonder sometimes if this will eventually lead me to friendships, but I don’t dwell on it. Still, it worries my daughter or she wouldn’t bring it up.

The majority of friends I have made since leaving college for the adult world have been made in the workplace. The trouble with job friends is that they are relative to that job. When you leave for another workplace, you leave behind those friendships. A few have survived. Meg and I met twenty years ago now and we are still good friends. Her girls are like nieces to me and if I were to have an older sister, it would be Meg. I met Sandi at Goodrell in the mid-nineties but it wasn’t until we worked together on the 8th grade team that we became friends. We keep in touch by email now, and she read this blog (Hi Sandi!), but with as a full time teacher with a husband and three little ones she is a very busy woman. Judi taught next door to me at my last teaching assignment. She is still there and we too communicate now through email. And then of course there are those I met via the Internet. My mommy friends who I post with still after nearly seven years and though I have seen pictures of them and their families, I haven’t met a single one in person yet. There is Liz on the soap board too. I don’t watch the soap anymore but I continue to keep up with her. I don’t even know what she looks like. I have met a few people through the Widows’ board. Rob, of course. But also Cheryl, who came to our wedding and we keep in touch with on Facebook. Marsha in Illinois whose blog I read. Fi and Sarah here in Canada. Fi found me through my blog and we are friends on Facebook too. Sally too is a widow friend and fellow blogger who I hope to catch up with in person one day.

Is it odd to have so many friends that I don’t interact with in the flesh? It would seem odd to my daughter. I guess it would seem odd to many others too. Without a job I am left to meet potential friends as I may. The gym is not proving to be a fertile ground for friendship, nor is the swim class I attend twice a week. I go to workout. Like reading or writing, I get in a zone and disappear. The writing groups I have joined are still possibilities. I met some really great women in the group I belonged to back in Des Moines, but I haven’t been attending the groups here long enough to know for sure yet.

I should worry more about this, I know. One of the worst side-effects losing my first husband was that I lost many of the social contacts and friends I made while we were married. Aside from my best friend, Vicki, everyone else fell by the wayside. Not that I dwell on this much, but if something were to happen to Rob, there would really be no one here for me. Most everyone I know, I know through him and if you have ever been widowed (and I imagine the same holds true for divorce) you know that your spouse’s friends are really and truly just that. His friends. At the moment though, I am usually so busy that I don’t really notice, and I guess it helps too that I have always been able to be alone. That’s not true of everyone.

I am not going to worry about it. Friends come along, like love, when you are just living your life and making the most of every minute.

Real Writers don’t Blog


A columnist in the Daily Mail and Globe (Christie Blatchford), which is the Canadian equivalent of USA-Today minus the excess pictures and celebrity suck up section, wrote her Saturday piece about bloggers. Her disdain for the genre and the poor writing. She holds the common opinion among those of us who can write that writing is not for everyone. I agree. Writing is a gift that some of us are born with and develop over the course of our lives, but it isn’t something that just anyone can do. It’s like singing or dancing or painting. It’s an art. Having said that, I don’t think being a person of average writing skill should preclude anyone from writing and seeing that writing published somewhere. There are people who sing and dance and paint who haven’t much skill either but sometimes that’s not the point. We all deserve an artistic outlet regardless of whether we are truly talented. What someone might call a hobby is someone else’s great soul fulfilling passion.

I think what puzzled this columnist the most is why anyone would put what she considers to be no more than a diary up on the web for public display. The simple answer is that writers, good, average or really awful, want to be published. The only medium to which people have a fairly democratic access is on the Internet. To someone who writes for a living, and to whom the finished product is a matter of a paycheck, it would probably seem odd as well that anyone could write for free or without benefit of copyright. However, to someone who just wants to write and would be happy of any audience, blogging or Facebook or just an online community can be a welcome opportunity.

Another point of contention the writer had was with the concept of online communities and the idea that you can have relationships with “virtual” people. Like most who have never truly experienced this, she falls back on the snotty superiority of the fact that she not only prefers REAL friends, she actually has them too. While it is true that there are many people for whom online communities are their only social outlets, it’s not true for all people. The majority of those I have met via message boards have families, friends and rich REAL lives. They came to the different boards during times in their lives when they hadn’t anyone in their lives they could connect with for various reasons. One group of women I have been messaging with for over six years now came to be when we met on a site called BabyCenter. We were all “older” women trying to conceive and most of us didn’t have peers are our age to relate to when it came to trying to get pregnant in your late thirties or early forties. As we one by one became mothers, we moved our group to a private message board and continued to share our lives with each other because by this time we were friends who had move to talk about than just ovulation charts and birth stories. Two of us became widows in the time we have known each other. There have been location and job changes. New babies to celebrate. Some of us know each other offline and those of us who travel quite a bit meet up from time to time when things can be arranged. I wouldn’t consider any of us freaks or even freakish.

I met my husband Rob through an online community for younger widowed people. We started off as email pals much in the same vein as the old pen-pals of yore. Another member of the same community is a friend to the point that she attended our wedding, and there are several others we keep in contact with via email and their blogs. The community itself has produced a viable offline network of events and countless friendships and romances (some that also have led to marriage) have blossomed because of this. I think it is easy to look down on or even make fun of online social networks but it would be a mistake to think that everyone engaged in this rather recent means of meeting people is just for the desperate. My husband’s two twenty-something daughters have met some various nice people via Facebook and we use the site as a way to keep in touch with them and with extended family and far off friends. In a world where we are so far from the “neighborhoods” we grew up in and Grandma doesn’t live just a few blocks over anymore, it’s a good way to stay connected.

Opinions



I ran into an old co-worker/friend today in the hallways of the high school were I teach. She is retired now but she still volunteers, working primarily with the work-study program placing kids in jobs and internships. I haven’t seen her since just before Will was diagnosed almost four years ago. She didn’t know that he had been ill or had died, which should speak volumes about the nature of our former relationship and to how much we have kept up. Since we do know people in common though I assumed that she did know, so when she asked what was new I told her about Rob and our plans. And of course, since she didn’t know, I had to back track a bit.

J. has always been the kind of person who interrupts you when you are having a conversation with her. The main reason is for clarification because she doesn’t hear well and for her to one  up you. Today’s conversation was typical of how I remember her. She was very upset, not about Will’s death as she barely reacted to that news at all, but about the fact that Rob and I met on the internet. This has upset, and continues to upset, people who basically don’t know either of us very well. Our family and friends have settled into acceptance and happiness for us but there are still incidents like today.

J. wanted to know if I had “checked” him out and knew for sure he was who he said he was. It amuses me a little when someone assumes that the people you met on the web are somehow more dangerous than the guy who lives next door. Just because you can see someone in the flesh, doesn’t make them safe. My next door neighbor all but stalked me last spring and summer after he discovered that my husband had died. It got so bad that I couldn’t even be out in my own yard to mow or play with my daughter without him watching my every move. He is an alcoholic and scares me frankly. But, apparently, I should fear him less as he is “real”. I won’t rehash my history with web-friends and message board communities, but was I less safe with the men I emailed while exploring the on-line dating than I was with the co-worker I barely knew who showed up at my late husband’s visitation and looked me over as though I were a snack while he was offering his condolences?

I was annoyed for a bit after running into J. At first I thought it was because she was critical of my relationship with Rob and the plans we have made. She has no right to question my judgement. We haven’t had more than a few brief encounters over the last fifteen years. Her basis for judgement is the 

twenty-eight year old I was when last we had any meaningful contact. I am a long ways way from that girl now. But, as I thought about it more I realized that what was truly upsetting me was that she hadn’t offered condolences about Will. She didn’t ask how he died or I was or how Katy was doing even. She was just worried about the fact that I was marrying some “stranger” from the Internet.

And that is what it comes down to in the end these days it seems. I am marrying again. A friend on the YWBB suggested that it might be a case of “all better now” in that obviously anyone who can love and marry again must be over their grief. Maybe. I know that people are certainly more comfortable with that idea than the reality that I will always carry the grief with me. No one wants to know that because who among us doesn’t lose a loved one at some point in our lives? Someone close whose death will sear and leave scars. They want to believe that tragedies have endings because how do you survive something that doesn’t have an endpoint? 

I think though what is also in play is the idea that there is a right and a wrong way to grieve. Those of us who adhere to arbitrary timelines, wear the emotional equivalent of sackcloth for all to see and admire are good little widowed people who obviously had true and beautiful love with our late spouses. And then there are the rest of us.

Rob got PM from a widow on the YWBB who is actually known for her rather harsh assessments of other people’s grief. She doesn’t post often but she is sometimes scolded for being too presumptive and  judgmental when she does. Which is ironic if you know the board at all.

At first he was going to just let it go, ignore it. Not something I would have done given the some of the things she presumed and implied, but he is not the type of  person to let other people’s opinions bother him. In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen him ask for advice of anyone on the board. He reads. He tires to be supportive. He takes his problems to “real” people. But, this widow stepped over the line, and it was that which prompted him to reveal the PM. He had read a post earlier in the day where someone was telling a newbie (widow only a little ways out) that the board was a safe place to post your feelings and thoughts and experiences. It isn’t though. That is a near total lie. There isn’t a less safe place I can think of to reveal yourself. Rob only mentioned in passing that we were being married soon in response to someone new wondering if there is happiness again someday. He was just telling her there was and offering himself as an example. The widow who PM’d him made a rather nasty assumptions that his marriage must have been bad at the time of his wife’s death, and he must not have loved her much if he could marry me so soon. 

Those two sentences leapt out at me when I read the message. They were mean and calculated to be so. Typically that is not how many of the others at YWBB read it. They naturally jumped on our upcoming wedding and droned endlessly about the sacred nature of PM’s. I say this only because if they could read with understanding, and had properly read the two sentences I did, they would have seen what was wrong with that PM. It was condemnation couched in opinion. There is this odd belief that you can hide any nasty comment behind the veil of  “just my opinion” and therefore be unaccountable. Rob was right to call this widow out. 

Two different sides of the opinion coin today. I didn’t like either one. Or rather I didn’t like the tone and hadn’t much respect for the sources.