Category: Family & Friends

Facebook is filled with motherly comments, glowing about their adult children who are their BFFs. I’m envious when I read those posts, wondering why my child and I aren’t best friends. Am I doing something wrong?

Blake and I are friendly but I’m not even sure we’re . . . friends. We like each other, love each other, respect each other, listen to each other’s stories. But we don’t divulge intimacies like my friends and I do.

Our conversations cover the usual – the humor and trials of work and family life, politics, solutions for practical matters. There’s plenty of back-and-forth. Sometimes we agree, sometimes not. Either way, he speaks to me directly, occasionally bluntly. And these days, we often exchange advice on issues about which one of us is more knowledgeable than the other.

On luxuriously long video chats, Blake and my daughter-in-law Thanh regularly share themselves and son Bastion with Dad and me. These chats allow the little one, his grandma, and great-grandpa to get to know each other. And they make me appreciate Bastion’s parents even more. But that doesn’t make my son and I BFFs.

When I mentioned some of these thoughts, Thanh suggested it might be the difference between mother-son and mother-daughter relationships. Yes, I agreed, most of the FB comments seem to be by mothers about their daughters. I felt better.

Blake agreed that “friendship” doesn’t describe our relationship accurately. “We’re not friends, Mom, but we’re not not friends either,” he said. “We do things that friends do – our trip to Big Bend, having a drink together. It’s just a different space.”

He added that circumstances have created some distance. Literally. We live about 1500 miles apart. Plus, he and Thanh have had time-consuming jobs, and now parental responsibilities. That makes it difficult for us to spend relaxed time together. It’s especially frustrating this year when I can’t visit with toddler Bastion, who’ll probably be a foot taller by the time I’m able to squeeze him and kiss that precious little neck.

Then there’s the fact that Blake and Thanh have been a couple since their freshman years at UNC, so they’ve turned to each other their entire adult lives. She’s his BFF, and so far, their lives have chugged along pretty smoothly. I’d like to believe that Blake just hasn’t needed to rely on me emotionally.

I’ll end with a quote from Dorothy Canfield Fisher that I’d like to believe is true for my son and me . . . .

“A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”

I’m good with that.

Last Saturday, Tom Dixon called me, exhaustion in his voice. “Come over and take some photos. It’s a good example of neighbor helping neighbor.” So I rushed over with my trusty Pixel.

When I arrived, a carrot-colored, commercial-grade tractor was lifting and relocating sections of the next-door-neighbor’s pier that had landed on Tom’s pier. Hurricane Isaias had blown the structure’s railing and floor sideways, onto Tom’s property, resulting in downed railings and scattered posts.

Eight or 10 neighbors were there, waiting to contribute as needed. They’d been working all morning before the tractor arrived, and on and off for several days earlier in the week. One chore had been to saw up and remove parts of Tom’s pier from another neighbor’s lawn. They’d already cut the pier debris into sections, pulled some of it out of the marsh and yard by hand, and had generally done as much as possible before the big carrot drove up.

No one had asked for nor expected money. As Tom said, they were just neighbors helping neighbors. Even the tractor operator lived down the street. Later he brought in a cherry-picker for materials too far out in the water for the tractor to reach. I’m pretty sure some remuneration will be made for the equipment costs, but the work was voluntary.

Except for the big-boy toys, I found the presence and persistence of the men unsurprising. Tom and his neighbors, men and women, routinely share their tools and talents, so Saturday’s story was a good photo op, but non-news from my perspective. Still, it was an uplifting story.

After catastrophes, journalists always report with amazement how neighbors are assisting each other during the tragedy. They are even more astonished when stranger is helping stranger. During a flood, boating up to someone’s roof to rescue them. Or wrapping children in blankets and carrying them to safety in blizzards or volcano eruptions.

Can you even imagine helping someone you don’t know who’s in trouble? Of course, you can!

It’s called being a decent human being and it happens all the time in daily life. It’s why we take Red Cross CPR classes, so we’re prepared to help someone, anyone who stops breathing. It’s why we stop when we see a car accident, to call emergency responders and help those who’re hurt until professionals arrive.

You help strangers. I help strangers. Strangers help us. I don’t know how I’d get through a week without others’ generous spirits.

Sometimes we help without even thinking about it – we just do it. And sometimes that help is truly heroic – sacrificing one’s life for a stranger. I don’t know that I’m brave enough to do that, but it doesn’t surprise me that many people are.

Psychologists would lay much of this goodwill at the feet of reciprocity. That trait that humans have evolved in order for society to function more smoothly. In the long run, reciprocity usually helps individuals, too, to survive and thrive.

In Tom’s case, reciprocity might’ve been involved. Certainly, he’s helped many of his neighbors over the years and made his pier available for others to fish from. And they’ve helped him, too. Deep inside themselves, some neighbors might have been responding to his earlier kindnesses or hoping for future help with their own problems.

Some of the neighbors’ kindness may have been due to religious or moral codes. They were living the universally quoted but less-often followed, “Love your neighbor” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Psychologists and preachers and philosophers are probably all correct, but I propose that neighbor-helping-neighbor is simpler. Helping our neighbors, next door or across an ocean, just feels like the right thing to do. For me, it makes me feel like I’m worth the space I inhabit on this Earth.