My Best Friend and I Broke Up. Our Moms Didn't.
The names in this story have been changed.
When I was 18, my best friend stopped talking to me. She wasn’t unfriendly about it. When we crossed paths, she would still smile. We would still interact when necessary, for school assignments, because we shared nearly all the same classes and extracurriculars. We’d set up our schedules that way, because we were best friends, and neither of us realized that at one point we wouldn’t be.
There wasn’t a big fight or even an obvious reason why it happened. It was just that one day, she stopped eating lunch on the grassy hill we inherited from the last year’s seniors, coveted for the trees that provided shade from the Southern California sun and cursed for the seagulls who perched in their branches. (We’d all been pooped on at least once.)
But one day, Brianna sat across the sunny outdoor pavilion, at the tables where the popular crowd hung out. She hovered on the edges, orbiting around people with whom we were friendly — people I liked, actually, some of them. But in high school, your lunch friends are your real friends, the people you choose to be with, and she wasn’t choosing us anymore.
It would be years before I learned the reasons why, which amounted to a series of health and personal issues Brianna was going through. All I knew was that at at this point, in December 2012, she put the nail in the coffin by going to the beach with a few of those popular people instead of coming to our friend group’s Christmas gift exchange. She didn’t tell us; we found out on a very early iteration of Instagram, or maybe Facebook. I remember how hurt I felt, and angry.
After that, the breakup accelerated and so did my grudge, to levels I’m not proud of. When Brianna tried to come back to sit under the tree, we shunned her. Of our group, I’d been the closest with her, so I knew it would hurt the most when I went cold. No more late nights working on calculus homework, sharing a bowl of popcorn on my twin bed. No more concerts downtown, stopping at In’N’Out on the way home in her green car with the rusting hood and the backseat we wouldn’t touch because we were pretty sure her older brother had sex back there, at least once. No more long summer days in her pool or on the beach, her turning brown and me painfully red. We went to prom separately and when I got into my dream school, I didn’t text her about it.
We were in lockstep, and then we weren’t, and then we all scattered anyways because that’s what happens at the end of senior year. And then my only connection to Brianna was through social media — and our moms.
My mom and Brianna’s mom, Rachel, had a lot in common: smart, with high-status careers (my mom was a lawyer, Rachel was a doctor) that they stepped away from when they had kids. Both were involved in their communities and in their kid’s lives, but not to an invasive degree. Both had similar values and politics. Brianna and I used to joke that they even looked similar: both tiny in comparison to their tall, athletic daughters.
It’s really convenient when your mom is friends with your friend’s mom. You can carpool to field hockey games with the moms chatting in the front seat and the daughters chatting in the back. You can extend Saturday pool parties into Disney movie marathon sleepovers without much pushback. I don’t know what it’s like when your kids stop being friends with your friend’s kids — and I realized recently that I still don’t.
My mom tells me now, when I call her to ask, that while she and Rachel first became friends because Brianna and I were close, their relationship developed apart from ours, too — a concept I probably could not have comprehended as a teenager. (My mom is her own person?! Inconceivable.)
Instead, at the time, I was aloof. My mom gave me updates on Brianna’s college life that I dutifully passed on to my remaining high school friends: her major, the fact she joined a sorority, what her brother ended up doing after moving on from the high school girlfriend.
When my friends asked how I felt about it, the fact that our moms were still friends, I shrugged. “It doesn’t mean I’ll ever be friends with her again,” I said, turning the subject back to the real main character, me. I was still faithful to my grudge and my lingering hurt, but Brianna and I lived in different cities now, and were making different friends at college. Maybe we would’ve grown apart anyways. I didn’t love that our moms were still friends, but it didn’t impact me much, if at all. That thing that happens after high school was starting to happen to me: my world was getting bigger, and my high school problems were getting smaller, receding into the past.
I realize now how lucky I am, that the problems I had back then were the kind that could shrink with time. It turns out Brianna’s were not. The way my mom puts it is that Brianna’s personality changed for reasons she couldn’t control, reasons I wasn’t fully aware of until this recent conversation: a combination of serious health and personal issues. I knew about some of it at the time, but not the extent to which they affected her. Included in the fallout, and the list of things she lost, was our friendship.
Talking about this with my mom changed the way I view our friendship breakup. It’s been long enough that I haven’t felt real pain or hurt over the situation in years. The primary emotion now is the creeping feeling of guilt over the way I treated her, during the times when she made an effort to rejoin our friend group. I wish I’d had more grace with her during high school, that I responded with more openness the one time she reached back out to me during college. We met up, I heard her out, she told me some of what had been going on, but I wasn’t ready to forgive her. I wish I had been. You really never know what people are going through, even the people we love, even our best friends.
After Brianna went to college, Rachel moved out of the neighborhood. My mom hasn’t spoken to her in a few years, but she remembers how they talked about the end of our friendship, while it was happening — with sadness, but never feeling like it had to mean the end of their own. In other circumstances, she says, it might have been different.
All friendship breakups are complicated, and when they involve parents who are also friends, the waters get even muddier. But here’s the thing: “Your parents have lives too,” my mom says. “Our friendships don’t always necessarily coincide with the friendships that our children have.”
An essential part of growing up is realizing that you and your parents are different people, and that your lives are intertwined but not inseparable. Another essential part is realizing that you’ll never understand the full complexity of someone else’s life: not your mom’s, not your best friend’s. Sometimes you learn that you had a situation all wrong. Sometimes what you thought was the whole picture was only a tiny corner of the frame.