Darling Files 002: Friendship, Motherhood, and the 50 Shades of Grey Series

It is somewhere around 2010, and I have a friend named Hannah. Our friendship began literally, in the preschool carpool line. Hannah got out of her car and walked up to mine and started talking to me like we were old friends, and like I am an approachable, friendly person.

Since then, we shared driving our respective children back and forth to preschool. Hannah has lovely, friendly, and hilarious children and my girls love them. Every morning, and each day before lunch when we’d drop the kids off, I enjoy shooting the breeze with her.

I adore Hannah. I don’t take myself too seriously when I’m with her. I laugh. A lot. She is deadpan hilarious. Once, we ran into a Whole Foods because we were starving and it was the closest place to get something to eat, and she asked one of the grocers where the Diet Coke was. She got a long speech about why they don’t carry it, and why it’s so bad for you. She stared at him blank faced and said again, “Yeah, but where can I get Diet Coke?”

We both love to shop, too, and Hannah has fantastic taste, but also knows when and where the sales are. We were in Nordstroms once swooning over Frye boots and Tory Burch flats when she found a pair of 7 For All Mankind jeans that were like 900% off and she threw them at me. “These are so you. Try ’em,” she said. They’re my favorite pair of jeans, and I would’ve walked right past them if it hadn’t been for her. Hannah always sees things I can’t see. She gives things a chance that I can’t, or won’t.

All our children play soccer, and neither of us understand the game all that much. She was sitting next to me during one game when Hadley was playing goalie, and got hit in the face, and I bolted from my chair and rushed the field. The ref told me, “M’am, you can’t do that.” I got back to my chair and Hannah patted me on the shoulder, but then busted out laughing. “M’am, you can’t do that,” she said, and then gave me a hug that got me laughing and crying at the same time.

We meet at the pool, at parks, we go to the dollar movies when it is too hot in DC and we need to just sit down (we have five kids five and under between us). Hannah shows me where the outlet malls in Leesburg, VA are, and we take the route that puts us on a ferry to cross the Potomac River. We can take a more efficient route, but we take this one because we both agree the windy, country road with a river to cross is the far better way to travel.

We talk a lot about the Twilight books, and in 2012, a few weeks after I’d found out I had been accepted into an MFA program, Hannah shows up on the soccer field with the 50 Shades of Grey series. She gives me the books the same day my grad school reading arrives, and so my summer reading consists of the Twilight fan porn fiction series, All the Pretty Horses, and Richard Rodriguez’s Brown.

I have to read the graduate school books every day at the same time, in the morning when I’m fresh and no one else is awake. I must take notes, read any commentary I can find on what these stories are about just to have a slice of an idea of what these books might be about. I read slowly, I am frustrated because I don’t understand, I can’t understand no matter what I do. I do not know it now, but I will learn that going to graduate school is not an arrival. It is a beginning, and it is the most brutal beginning filled with questions and insecurities and revelations that I wonder if I’ll ever have resolutions to. It is pushing a boulder up the steepest, tallest mountain not knowing exactly why except that I kind of like the way the rock feels on my palm; I like the scars it’s making on my fingertips, or the fact that even though I don’t really think I’ll ever get to the top (and maybe I don’t care), I don’t think I mind holding on and pushing – just to see what happens. Just to see what I can do.

I can read 50 Shades any time of the day. It is the equivalent of a Twinkie, or any other Hostess snack that has a shelf life that could probably predate the dinosaurs. Is it good literature? Is it even literature? Probably not, but it gets me and Hannah talking and laughing, and it is this folly we’ve consistently imbibed in and relied upon each other for that forges our friendship. 50 Shades didn’t show me how to be a better friend, or a better person. Every time I see the title though, I think of Hannah and our effortless, fun, and life-giving friendship those early years we both were mothers.

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