Literary Mama Rewind: Friendship

Welcome to Literary Mama Rewind! Every few weeks we’ll round up some of our favorite essays, stories, poems, columns and reviews from the Literary Mama archives relating to a particular theme.  This week’s stories reflect on the relationships between long-time friends, our children’s friends, and the friends who come and go in our lives. We all need our friends, where would we be without them?

• Seven-year-olds by Char Makela in Poetry
  When little girls have playdates / They strip off their school uniforms

 

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  Embarrassment of Riches by Carol Cronin in Fiction
  I feel mean, small, ungrateful. Kate is my best and oldest friend. In my heart, she is my sister, and I owe her everything.

 

• Essential Reading: Friendship by Christina Marie Speed in Literary Reflections
  “A friend is one to whom one may pour out all the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.” — Arabian Proverb

 

• Baby’s No Friend of Mine by Gina Binole in Creative Nonfiction
  My good friend, Suzette, has just fallen asleep in the bathroom stall of our favorite beer and nachos bar while I’m trying desperately to wipe the sweat from my face without completely removing the make up I painstakingly applied a few hours earlier.

 

• Fair-Weather Friends by Heather Cori from the Column Perfectly Normal
  Ahna, my third-grade daughter, has one too. “Nivia” played Harry Potter at recess one day and then the next day played with another group and referred to the nerds who imagined they were wizards.

 

• A Hell of a Way to Make Friends by Carol Zapata-Whelan from the Column Finding Magic Mountain
  Suddenly, Prisco Ramirez was no stranger. The details of his family’s life might differ from mine, but I could recite his sorrows by heart: a child healthy at birth, a perfectly normal life, until one morning–a persistent pain, a mysterious swelling.

 

• Friends by Kate MacVean from the Column Mothering Abroad
  While my reclusive nature did make it easier to leave everything and come to Spain, it hasn’t served me as well since I’ve been here. When Pedro was born, I suddenly began to crave interaction with other moms.

 

• True Love: A Family of Friends by Rachel Sarah from the Column Single Mom Seeking
  After snacking, the girls, having long forgotten our breasts, toddled off to play in the sand. That’s when Siobhan told me she was in the middle of a divorce. “Men are scum,” she said. “I’m done.”