Photo by Jennifer Mowery Marsh
I have been trying to decide what to tell you about my trip to Vermont with the girlfriends last weekend. It was so tempting to take this awkwardly snapped backseat photo of our run-in with Officer Morrison, tales from the newly downloaded Truth or Dare iPhone app, and the fact that we had chosen a signature cocktail for this getaway to spin this story into a hyperbolic Moms Gone Wild tale of mischief.
But I think it serves me better to stay closer to the truth. Let me begin at the beginning.
Just over five years ago a group of new mothers organized ourselves in miraculous ways in order to gather—babies, burp clothes, and every manner of diaper in tow—at a local coffee shop for lunch. The babies, and our motherhood, were six-weeks-old. We were strangers, the four of us. The bags under our eyes and the nursing tanks under our hoodies, however, were enough common ground on which to stand. Lunch came and plates were eventually taken away. Coffee and milkshakes followed. Water refills and water refills and water refills and suddenly it was dinnertime and a friendship had been formed.
I suppose it is excessive to say, well over a hundred playgroup sessions later, that meeting these women saved my life but I know that there are ways in which it saved my mind and perhaps even my heart. Mothering is isolating work and I am thankful that I have spent only a rare moment of this journey in isolation.
It took five years of dreaming for us to gather in this newly miraculous manner: four women piling together into a car with a trunk full of warm layers and snacks, music and reading material, and not a few bottles of wine. Moms-Only Weekend Trip to Vermont.
Without exaggerating, I do not have much of a story to tell. What did we do all weekend? We talked. We talked through NYC Friday evening traffic, over diner fries, and along windy country roads. In conversation we migrated from the cottage’s couches to the kitchen table and back again. We talked over coffee, tea, wine, scones, chili, cookies, tapas, and gluten-free crackerbread. We talked while climbing up a mountain and while wandering back down. It wasn’t until well into the drive home that there was a brief lull in the conversation. Brief.
Photo by Jennifer Mowery Marsh
We drove five plus hours away from our husbands and children and careers, but we did not really leave any of it behind. Out of cell phone range but still ourselves, we did not exactly escape.
In my church there is a phrase that echoes among the congregation. We hope together that our community is a place where people may come to multiply their joys and divide their sorrows. In Vermont last weekend we multiplied and divided: our husbands’ habits and children’s quirks, our grief and struggles to adjust, health concerns and medical investigations, the highs and lows of vocation, families falling apart and coming back together. Each of us gave over a little of what burdens us and traded it for the burdens of the others. Speaking for myself, I can say that in these few short hours my heart breathed a sigh of relief. Nourished by the listening ears and compassion of these friends, I am like a broken bone healed, I feel strong in places where I had been weak.
What happens in Vermont, stays in Vermont, we joked with irony, barely finishing a second bottle of wine. But the truth is none of it stayed in Vermont. Multiplied and divided in perfect equation, I carry it all.
