What we learn from our friends' parents

... and how they help make us whole.

Tom and Colette, second and third from left, reunited with three of their daughter’s childhood friends last fall—at the friends’ request. Colette made homemade pie for the occasion.

In February 2000, when I had known my friend Sarah for only four months, she suffered a terrible accident. A van struck her in the crosswalk of a busy street as she walked to work, on the same road on which a dental student had died after being hit by a vehicle three months before.

When word of the hit-and-run reached the magazine where we both worked, I bolted with Lisa, our website manager to UNC Hospitals a short distance away. We were standing at Sarah’s bedside when she woke up.

“Was it my fault?” Sarah asked us repeatedly, taking in her injuries: a concussion, a broken wrist, and several cuts and bruises. She had been lucky.

“No,” we told her, over and over again. “No, it wasn’t your fault.”

A nurse had witnessed the accident, stopped her car, and brought a blanket to Sarah as she lay in the middle of the street. A chain of emergency phone calls made its way from Sarah’s great aunt, who lived nearby, to her older brothers, who eventually located her parents; they had been driving to Florida and turned their car around. A roommate grabbed Sarah’s knitting bag to send to the hospital—just in case Sarah needed an activity to pass the time in the emergency room.

A skein of yarn and some knitting needles for a friend with a broken wrist and a concussion. That gesture, rooted in a feeling of helplessness, in the kind of fumbling sweetness that makes us human … it stirs me whenever I think about it.

I certainly felt like I was grasping at knitting needles that awful day. So when Sarah recovered, and her parents, Tom and Colette, invited us over to thank us for helping their daughter, I was moved to be included. I felt I had done so little.

I imagine they understood something I did not back then, when I was 27 and responsible only for myself: Giving a child over to the world demands the mustering of a blind trust, a willingness to believe that the people they encounter will care for them when they are vulnerable or lost or cannot help themselves. And, on those magic occasions when the world responds exactly how you’d hoped it would, exactly when you need it to, it’s good to celebrate those triumphs of kindness, no matter the size of the gesture.

I learned that idea from observing Sarah’s parents, and I think about it a great deal these days. I think about it whenever I imagine my own children out in the world without their father and me. That principle, that village of generosity, has never been more necessary than it is today, when so many teens and young adults are struggling with the challenges of disconnection and uncertainty.

I have long been on the receiving end of those villages, both when I was young and now that I am middle-aged. And because of that gift, I still believe there are more ways to be rescued in this life than there are to be broken.

With Sarah on Cape Cod, 2001

A few years ago, my husband phoned his parents’ home in Canada to check in. They told him they would have to call him back. They were busy having a meal with one of his childhood friends, who had just moved back to town after a bad breakup and had stopped by for a visit.

That image of the three of them—two octogenarians and a 50-something who once rode a skateboard in their driveway—sitting around a table without Randy, the common denominator who lived 800 miles away … Well. It plucked a particular chord on my heartstrings. This friend was hurting, as we all will. And he was reaching for better times, as we all do. Pain can pitch us blindly forward, or it can send us grasping for the past, looking around for what remains and hoping for the continuity of our old affections.

I get that.

“Of course he was there,” Randy told me. “His mom would do the same for me.”

Of course. Of course we know this about the people who hold us tight and knew us when. The hackneyed phrase “it takes a village” is true, and let’s hope its streetlights never dim. Because the impact of our friends’ parents on our lives and the fondness we hold for them strikes me as an underappreciated sweetness perched beneath the foundation of who we become, quietly supporting our worth. It wasn’t until I became estranged from my own parents four years ago that the significance of that presence became clear.

Sarah had helped me see it.

I had not been physically struck as she had been on that February day in 2000 while she crossed the street to work. My broken bones were only metaphorical. But in the weeks and months that followed the difficult last phone call with my mother, Sarah had signed her name in giant letters on my plaster casts just the same. She texted, she answered my calls, she invited me out, she refused to leave me in pieces.

“Was it my fault?” I wondered at my lowest moments.

“No,” she would tell me over and over, in a dozen different ways. “No, it wasn’t your fault.”

Sending an adult child into the world demands the mustering of a blind trust, a willingness to believe that the people they encounter will care for them when they are vulnerable.

One day, over coffee at a favorite cafe in our college town, Sarah said: “I wish I could share my parents with you.”

Her words caused a switch to flip on in my head, illuminating several bright lights in succession:

The time Colette gave Sarah her copy of Tara Westover’s Educated to lend to me, thinking—rightly—that I might find some resonance within the memoir’s pages.

The time Colette, a retired social worker, had come to my educational rescue, sending me book recommendations about ADHD that helped me destigmatize and applaud my then-preteen daughter’s differences. She offered words of encouragement to let me know I had this. The sort of thing that helps you trust your instincts, the sort of thing a mother might do.

Or the summer of 2001, when I stayed with Sarah at their Cape Cod rental. Tom, who had spearheaded Oxford University Press’s relocation to North Carolina before retiring, sat across from me at a rustic picnic table and engaged me in thoughtful conversation about the past, the present, and my future.

That day in their kitchen after Sarah’s accident, when they handed me a warm slice of homemade pie and made me feel as though I belonged in their home.

And of course, their daughter, who had inherited and somehow expanded on their extraordinary capacity to understand and comfort others.

I wish I could share my parents with you.

I looked across the table at my steadfast friend of 25 years, my (much taller) sister, and I shook my head.

“You already have. You always have. You still are.”

In Durham in 2014. (I’m the short one.)

Tom and Colette had joined a circle of friends’ parents who’d been guiding me all along, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unwittingly.

I have a dissertation’s worth of memories from the kitchens, living rooms and back decks of my friends’ homes, from the trusty brown Subarus their parents ferried me in as a grade-schooler to the ovens their mothers pulled cinnamon toast from on sleepover-Saturday mornings. I remember fondly the parents who directed me to the snacks available upstairs whenever a horror film was playing downstairs. They did so quietly and without fuss.

I remember, too, the college friend’s mother who read the faraway heartbreak in my expression while I was visiting her home one spring. She knew me in the vague way many friends’ parents know you as a young adult: through anecdotes her son had shared over our decade of friendship. And yet, she walked over and squeezed my shoulder with a tender familiarity. She took a seat across from me, fixed her kind eyes on mine, and told me that, whatever was troubling me, I was already enough.

By then, I had a full-time job, my own apartment (above a garage, but it counted), and a side-hustle to help with my grad school loans. I was adult-ish by most measures. And yet: I still needed my friends’ parents. Somehow, her intuition told her so.

The empathy and observation required to open your heart like that inspires me. I want it bottled and delivered to every doorstep in this country with a note that reads, “Open in case of vulnerability … or estrangement … or bullying … or othering … or the year 2025.”

The impact of our friends’ parents on our lives strikes me as an underappreciated sweetness perched beneath the foundation of who we become, quietly supporting our worth.

When I visited Colette and Tom at their retirement community in Chapel Hill several weeks ago, I wondered if they knew of their impact on their children’s friends.

“Just as you mentioned it,” Colette said, “I was remembering the day I was standing in our kitchen when our sons were in high school, and this kid walked in alone whom I had never seen before. He came in the back door and he said, ‘I’m starving.’ And he opened our refrigerator and helped himself to a few things. I asked him his name, and he told me. Then he finished his snack and left. It was the damnedest thing.”

She didn’t know at the time that the mysterious visitor was a friend of her teenage son’s. But it also didn’t matter. “Because he seemed like a nice kid,” she said, “and he was hungry.”

But childhood is a different organism now, as Colette pointed out. More scheduled, less free for interpreting clouds. More scattered across traffic on the way to a soccer game, less centered on the neighborhood relationships that prompt a kid to seek a snack at that friendly house down the street. More screens, fewer real-life examples of grown-up compassion.

As a teenager in the 1980s, Vivian Keh watched Tom and Colette laugh and twirl around their Montclair, N.J., kitchen together, still the people they were when they met in Boston: She, the college freshman from upstate New York with a rapier wit, and he the senior English major and jazz drummer with a philosopher’s soul.

For Keh, the impression lasted.

“I always remember those images at Sarah’s house,” said Keh, a San Jose playwright and gifted arborist whose home life was turbulent growing up. “It was really important for me to see what a positive relationship looked like.”

For Sarah’s parents, however, it was all just life: Raising three children, loving each other, appreciating every era of their story together.

“It always surprises me that the memories are there (for children’s friends), and that they are often so vivid,” Tom said. “Things that were just part of the landscape of our daily life.”

Tom and Colette take a twirl.

Every October for the past 22 years, we’ve celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving in our home with a close group of friends. The tradition began before any of us had children. The babies arrived one by one, and the six of them grew into toddlers and grade-schoolers and teenagers together. More like cousins than friends.

Over the past couple of years, some have started their lives as young adults at college. We no longer see each of them at our annual dinner, but we know their personalities and interests. We know their strengths and their sensitivities—when they learned how to walk, when they earned their Eagle Scout badge, which nuts they are allergic to (pistachios and cashews). I know that any one of the eight of us older folks would be ready with a shoulder squeeze and a word of encouragement in times of challenge. Sarah, in fact, has been my children’s emergency contact for years.

So we are the friend’s parents now.

There’s a quote that makes the rounds on social media—usually around Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, usually in flowy script over a beach scene or a burbling lake or an image of a parent holding a child’s hand. It goes something like, “Don’t complain about what your parents gave you; it was probably all they had.”

I imagine that’s true in all sorts of ways. I imagine that mine gave me what they could. But that’s the genius of the villages we build: There is always another door to knock on, always another light on in the kitchen. ♣