Talk talk

About eight years ago, I lost my best friend. I don’t mean that she died. I mean that she and I weren’t friends anymore.

How did it happen? I can’t explain it in short form. What I think happened is that we were both slammed with the paradigm shift that is having your first child in your 30s, after college and the beginnings of a career. We had been friends for 15 years. I called her my best friend, and to her I think I was one of a few people she thought of as her best friends. We had been through a lot together and found ourselves in the same city and having our first children at about the same time. It should have been the middle of a Lifetime channel movie.

Gossip was among the many offenses committed on both sides that led to the end of our friendship. We shared a babysitter, and one day the babysitter told me that my friend had been telling her stories about me. She had been ridiculing my goals to be a writer and talking about what a terrible student I had been in college. There had been a number of reasons why my friend was driving me crazy, mostly, that she was unable to let a day pass without about five calls to me, always at inopportune moments. We both had infants, so answering the phone and having a leisurely chat were not high on my to-do list. But when I heard that my friend had been talking about me to our children’s caregiver, I decided that I was done.

What transpired afterwards was the slow, painful death of a friendship by passive aggression (mine). Rather than confront, like some version of the Real Housewives of West LA, I withdrew. I had a baby to take care of, a marriage to attend to, and my writing to accomplish, when the baby was sleeping. Time passed, painful confrontations with my ex-friend were deflected, and I moved on — but not without thinking about her every day, as though I’d had my appendix removed without anesthesia.

Years later, I’m a parent of two children. I adore the children but hate play dates. Why? Because play dates mean one of a few things: 1) a drop-off play date: I am watching my own children and some other person’s child, which is tough when the other kid has an impulse control problem, a sassing problem, or is otherwise ill-equipped to be around someone other than his/her permissive parents; 2) a nanny play date: I am watching my child play, and a babysitter has been sent along to watch the other child. Sometimes this is fine, but often I’m serving coffee and making awkward conversation with a woman who would rather be on her phone while playing Legos rather than smiling and chatting with me; or, 3) a mom play date: I am watching my child play, and sometimes I’m hanging out with another mother who thinks that a long conversation about fruit, or vaccines, or how much to pay a babysitter, is acceptable among adults.

What I began to realize is that it’s a tall order, almost impossible, to find like-minded adults who have children the same age as your own. It’s even harder to find people like this whose children your children actually enjoy hanging out with.

This is all on my mind because, even though it’s stopped hurting like some unexpected surgery, I still miss my friend. And because recently I was reminded of gossip, and how it’s everywhere. Gossip is endemic to all work places, all social circles, and all ethnicities. And anyone who tells you otherwise has either been drugged or lobotomized. The real problem is spreading it in a way that gets back to the gossipee.

But some of this may be inevitable. A few months ago a new friend, with three young children, called me to ask if the babysitter we both employed had been talking about her.

No, I lied. Why would you think that?

But she must have known that it was true. After all, she had another babysitter who drew all of the gossip out of our shared babysitter, so in essence my friend was just calling me for confirmation, which I was not willing to give. I wish I could have told her that it would pass, this crazy period of time when you’re fussing over your newborn, and the people around you think you’re a little nuts. That she should let it roll off her back and just forget about it. We got off the phone, and I could tell that she was not going to stand for someone gossiping behind her back. She fired the babysitter, and now she treats me like an indifferent acquaintance.

Do I gossip? Like a mo-fo. But I try to limit it to just my spouse, who happens to be a good friend of mine and very discreet.