By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison

“Would you like to invite a friend to go to the park with us today?” I ask the question without really thinking, but before my daughter even opens her mouth I know what name she will say. The possibility drops like a stone in my stomach and sends out ripples of worry. 

“Nora,” she says. “Can we ask Nora to come?”

It’s been fifteen months since they shared a preschool classroom and longer still since our last botched playdate. How long until she forgets? 

“Sweetheart, we aren’t having playdates with Nora anymore. I’m sorry. How about Ruthie? Or Kate? I could see if Emmie and Ella are free.” 

“But why don’t we have playdates with Nora anymore? How come?”

I walk over to her bed and sit down. There were months of more simple explanations dotted with intermittent excuses, and there were months of redirection, and now here we are again with a genuine, but incomplete answer to her question. It’s no wonder it doesn’t make sense to her at four—it barely makes sense to me at thirty-three. 

“I wasn’t able to be friends with Nora’s mommy anymore.” I say, watching her face for comprehension as she traces the flowers on her bedspread. “When we spent time together, it didn’t feel good. It made me upset. And the way that Nora played with you also made me upset. I know you have so many special memories from when they lived next door. But now we don’t see them because we live in a new house, but also because Mommy needed space from them.”

“But I want to see her! She’s my best friend.”

There are countless other friends. Friends that she has just as much fun with. Friends that she’s spent more time with at this point. But Nora was her very first friend, and even though there’s so much she doesn’t remember, she also can’t seem to forget. 

“I’m sorry, honey. It will need to be a different friend.”

Her brows knit together and she looks up at me, confused and disappointed. “Why didn’t it feel good for you to spend time with Nora’s mommy?”

I put my hand on hers, shaking my head. “I love you so much sweetheart. I’m sorry this is hard. Emmie? Kate? or Ruthie?”

She drops her head and mutters, “Ruthie.”

On the way to the park, I glance in the rearview while she looks out the window. I can’t burden her with talk about boundaries and respect, about the nuance of vulnerability versus emotional unloading in friendship. I can’t explain the way my jaw tightened every time the doorbell rang, or how unfit I felt, still bleeding and post-partum with her little brother, when Nora’s mommy seemed so full of unspoken expectations around how this child of mine would fill the space in her life, too. How something as simple as a friendly neighbor could grow unwieldy, requiring the most delicate wording of texts, rehearsals of boundary setting with my therapist, and a constant redrawing of lines in the sand.

In the early months of renegotiating the friendship, I sat with my infant son on my lap while the girls played on the carpet at our feet. I tried to seem relaxed and compassionate as I listened to her latest struggles. Within a few minutes, the girls had disappeared and a quick search revealed that it had happened again, Nora had locked herself and Penny in her room and would not come out. Yes, it was those old skeletons, rattling fears from my own childhood. It shouldn’t matter at this moment with my daughter. But the way Nora was always pulling her away, out of sight, somewhere private. The way my daughter was too young, as I once was, to explain what had happened when no one was watching… It was too much. 

And so I redrew the boundary in my mind: only playdates at our house. Then, they stayed too long. The girls toppling toy bins in every single room—Penny, wild and defiant in ways she never was until Nora was around, and I couldn’t even allow them to stay a moment longer to help clean up because every drop of my emotional reserve had been spent. Another line drawn: Only playdates in public settings. But when I looked up from reading to the girls at the bookstore, Nora’s mommy was gone. My baby, in her arms, was gone. And the train hurtling through the pit of my stomach whistled with every exasperated word she had ever spoken about her own daughter, every rose-colored memory about babies, and—even though I wished I could stop it—every uncertainty about her mental well-being, all throttling through my mind. I took each girl by the hand and sprinted past bookcase after bookcase, each empty aisle filling me with fear until we met her returning from the front of the store, my son asleep against her chest. 

“You can’t just disappear with my baby like that,” I choked out, my eyes full of tears. She blinked back at me like I was crazy, and I thought, maybe I am crazy. But I have never had a friendship that required such constant reassertion of boundaries, such casting around in my mind for the right words, such strong ropes of guilt keeping me in, keeping me close, when there was nothing left for me anymore. 

Penny shouts from the backseat as we pull into the park. She can see Ruthie on the slide and she can’t wait to join her. For now, Nora is forgotten, but the lines of connection run deeper than I want to admit. She will probably ask to see her again, and again I will have to say, no. 

Someday, maybe I can help her understand how hard I tried to renegotiate the relationship so that the two of them could remain friends. The last boundary experiment was this: We can only have a playdate in public settings in a group of other friends. Nora and Penny and a handful of other preschoolers bounced around on a trampoline while the moms chatted about summer vacation. Nora’s mom stood apart from the group. It was her loneliness that drew me in from the start, that deep and familiar ache for friendship. I steadied myself and walked over to say hello. It’s been six months since the bookstore and weeks since we last passed one another at preschool drop off. 

“How are you guys?” 

“Good. We’re really good.” She recounted her latest parenting woes for a few minutes before saying, “And I meant to tell you! My husband and I were just driving in your neighborhood the other day. We’re thinking about buying a lot and finding a builder.” 

And just like that, my best attempts, my empathy, and my grown-woman boundaries are knocked to the floor like a tower of carefully placed blocks. I want to have grace. I want to love even when it is hard to love. I want to make this friendship work for my daughter, but I just… can’t. 

After a session with my therapist, I craft a text with the most gentle wording I can find: I am so grateful for the time we spent as neighbors and the memories our families made. I know I have been more distant since Theo was born. That has been intentional. I care about you and your family but I am not able to return to the closeness in friendship that we once had, even if we become neighbors again. I would like to stay in touch and support the girls’ friendship as best as I can. Nora is such a special friend to Penny.

Her response was bitter, a slammed door, the end. It was painful to pass Nora and her mom in the hallway at preschool the following year. Penny’s questions and requests to see Nora filled me with dread, a deep disappointment in myself, and the sense that I was withholding something from her, that I was being unfair. But these were just clouds passing in front of the sun. My life is lighter without the burden of this friendship, and I am reminded of the simplicity of playdates unencumbered by anxiety and conflict. 

At the park, Ruthie’s mom pushes Theo in the bucket swing while I pass out snacks for the girls in the shade. Their legs swing freely as they sit on the bench and talk over one another, recounting their favorite scenes from Frozen 2. Someday, maybe, I will tell Penny more of the story. Someday when she’s drawing her own lines in the sand I will stand beside her and tell her that it is good to be strong as well as kind, to protect as well as share, to be willing to walk with someone a little while and be willing to let them go. 

Photo by Lottie Caiella.