Why Try?

Maintaining friendships is such a drag when mixed with motherhood.

Here is how my latest attempt went:

I call a friend of mine on Monday afternoon and invite her and her nearly one-year-old daughter to meet me and my kids at the Japanese Gardens on Wednesday at whatever time works for her. I leave this invitation on her machine.

I run some errands, and come home to a message from her on my machine. She'd love to get together on Wednesday. She asks me to call her back to set up a time.

It is early evening. I put Little Beauty in the tub with some toys, and put Little Handsome in his highchair and begin feeding him his dinner. With my free hand (haha) I grab the phone and call my friend back. I'm busy with my kids, she is busy with hers, but we manage to have a brief conversation about Nanny 911 of all things, and then, after discussing the kids nap schedules, we decide to meet at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday. I write it on my calender.

Great!

Wednesday, 11:00 a.m. - I call to confirm. We are still on, and we decide to meet a bit earlier, 12:45 p.m. All is well. She even says that she will try to be on time (quite the challange with kids).

The Japanese Gardens 12:45 p.m. I pull into the parking lot and don't see her car. I'm not worried though, we've been so diligent in our planning.

1:00 p.m. LB has the koi swarming beneath the little bridge as she drops dried pellets of fish food which she has purchased with a quarter. I'm wondering if my friend knows where the Japanese Gardens are because we didn't talk about that. But they are on the campus of the college she attended, so . . .

1:30 p.m. We've walked the loop of the garden twice and spent another quarter on fish food. LH is asleep in the stroller and LB keeps asking where her "baby friend" (my friend's daughter) is. I tell her I don't know if they are going to make it. LB says it wil be sad if they don't make it. I agree. I curse myself for not having a cell phone. Who do I think I am, living without a cell phone!

1:45 p.m. We walk the loop one more time - around the lake, over the little arched bridge, past the garden of immaculately raked stones, beneath the blossoming tree and darting hummingbirds. I realize another attempt at friendship maintance has gone awry and we decide to leave. LB is sure we will she my friends car when we go to the parking lot. I tell her that we won't, but we will probably have a message on our answering maching when we get home. She asks me what an answering machine is.

The message: my friend says she forgot to ask which Gap we were meeting at, so she is going to go to the one on 2nd street and hope to find me there. I think, The Gap??????

We talk later that afternoon. She thought I invited her, on that original message I left, to meet at the Gap at some gardens. She says my voice was muffled. In subsequent conversations we never discussed where we were meeting, just at what time. The location was a given, for me it was the Japanese Gardens, for her it was the Gap at some gardens.

The moral of the story: We both laugh (more like a fatigued, dissapointed chuckle), knowing that it is par for the course. Then we bravely make plans for next Wednesday, tenative plans anyway. So why even try? Because I wasn't the only one feeling stood up and bummed out, my friend was too. And the idea of giving up on her, not to mention my other friends, just because we have kids and it is hard to get together - I can't think of anything more depressing.