Growing Up Together: Kids who need us, and friends we need

My friend Kelsey Blake has been a mom for three months. Baby Rowan is smiling and “talking” and figuring out how to roll over, sooner than his mom might like. When all the big kids went back to school last month, he started school – daycare – for the first time. Kelsey went back to work as a data manager, missing Rowan and looking forward to afternoon pick-up.

The same week, my baby packed up and left for college for the last time. We kept her apartment over the summer, meaning she was already moved in, so I didn’t go with her to help. Sitting around a little table at Tres Market having coffee with her and her older sister just before she drove off, I realized this was our last back-to-school send-off. 

Also the same week, I sat at another little table having dinner with my mom friends, the ones who, as young mothers, had figured out which baby monitors and diapers and all the other things worked best, just in time to help me navigate my own Babies“R”Us checklist. I told them about a neighborhood text chain a colleague had recently shared with me. One neighbor messaged how she couldn’t believe her son was about to start kindergarten.

That mom shared: Time flies is an understatement. I want them to stay small and need us forever. If anyone has tips on that let me know, she wrote. 

Another neighbor answered, Let me just say as a parent of a 10- and 12-year-old, they still need us…just for different things. Enjoy the journey.

And then another neighbor chimed in: And at 20 they will still need you. Except now it is a phone call asking how to cook something or to mail them HEB tortillas!

My mom friends, who spent several years pregnant with me 20 years ago, laughed. That night, one of us was helping a soon-to-be fiancé surprise her daughter with a ring, another was helping a new college graduate think through his next-step options, and I was answering FaceTime calls from a daughter whose lips had sunburned at a 21st birthday party in Cabo.

Over a shared Tiny’s pizza and a glass of rosé, Jacqueline said, “We’ve seen this movie.” She and Meredith reminisced about their children’s pediatrician, Dr. Frank Hill (who died in 2021), whose mantra was Pick ’em up and love ’em. Then we all reminisced about when exactly we first met. We couldn’t believe it was 30 years ago.

Back then I remember Jacqueline’s advice: A housekeeper will save your marriage (it didn’t, but it helped at the time). Then Meredith walked us through breastfeeding (none of us, as I remember, were huge fans). Then there were solid foods and playdates and advice for when our 3-year-olds started sneaking into our bedrooms every night at 2 a.m.

And then there wasn’t much. Our children were all in different schools with different friends, and we were figuring out how to get dinner to all our people at all, much less savoring it at a candlelit table with friends on a Tuesday evening. 

But then all the children started leaving the nests (or the beehives as my friend Tracy calls our homes, because the kids just buzz in and out). And we remembered we had friends we hadn’t met at our kids’ schools. Somehow our somewhat grownup kids still needed us, and we still needed each other. Jacqueline was the one who turned me on to the (unused) elastic cup covers I sent abroad with a child when I panicked that someone might drug her drink. When I worried about leaving a child in an unknown city for a summer, Brooke was adamant that sending your child somewhere they knew no one was the best thing you could do for their confidence. 

To the moms of the kids starting their first school year, just know that at 54 I still call my own mom for advice on coaching my daughter as she figures out a career path.

My friend Kristin, who has a 16-year-old and two in their 20s, says it best: “All the young moms say It’s gonna get easier, right? I just tell them it’s gonna get different. 

“And, yes, I packed H-E-B tortillas when I visited Drew in D.C.”