Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (24 page)

“You don’t have to use the sign,” I tell her.

“But I like the sign.” Francesca smiles. “The sign is the best part.”

Secretly, I agree.

And I’m proud.

What a kid.

And what a country.

The Four Seasons

By Lisa

I’ve joked about hot flashes and gray chin hairs, but I’ve never really talked about aging, straight-up.

Though I’ve been thinking about it, like most women, and I have opinions. Like most women.

God bless us.

So here’s what I think.

We begin not with winter, but with spring.

I walked the dogs today and saw my first crocus. Soon, lawns will be growing grass, tender and weak enough to be flattened by the cat’s paw. Trees will be budding with tiny specks of green, their color oddly bright, like Andes mint wrappers. Rosebushes, tight-fisted, will withhold their flowers until later, unfurling only after water, sunshine, and time give them life.

Everybody loves spring. You know why?

It’s young.

And people say they love the seasons.

Really? Do they love winter? I don’t mean winter when it’s easy to love. I don’t mean first-snow winter, with its homey blanket of confectioner’s sugar. Or snow-globe winter, with its oversized flakes filling the air, swirling around on picturesque gusts.

I’m talking freezing, wet, snowblower winter, with endless storms, plowing, and salting. Snow that clumps ugly on the shady side of the house. Snow days until even the kids want to go back to school. Until nobody wants to bake another chocolate chip cookie. At some point, every winter becomes the winter of our discontent.

Nasolabial-fold winter, if you follow.

What got me thinking about this was the umpteenth skin product that advertised itself as “age-defying.” They want to sell us creams, lotions, and magic potions to “defy” our age. They tell us that the way to be beautiful is to “erase our fine lines and wrinkles” and “Defy Father Time!”

Huh?

Who started the war?

Who said we have to fight?

Why do we have to take up arms against our flabby arms?

What’s up with all the age-defying handbooks and age-defying secrets?

And it’s not only the cosmetic companies. Certain foods are touted as “anti-aging,” drafting even avocados and broccoli into the war on aging.

But vegetables aren’t anti-aging. They’re not anti-anything.

And finally, neither am I.

Here’s my credo in life: Fight only the battles that matter, and after that, only the ones you can win.

And defying your age is a losing battle.

In other words:

Peace.

Acceptance. Tolerance. Appreciation. If you love the spring, you have to love the winter, and it’s all part of the same whole, no matter what Revlon says.

We can’t be young women forever.

We can’t even look like young women forever.

And we have to stop fighting.

Give peace a chance.

Now, don’t get all literal on me. To be clear, I have no problem with anybody who Botoxes and fills. To each her own. I fake my hair color and wear contacts. But ultimately, there’s a difference between wanting to look your best and denying who you are.

And that’s a question that each of us answers for herself. And answers only to herself.

I’m talking about the woman in the mirror.

I know that aging isn’t always easy to accept. It takes strength of character to look age in the face, to see all of its wrinkles and not-so-fine lines. It takes decades to build the kind of fortitude you need to get older.

Aging is not for the young.

If you follow.

For example, I used to eat everything and never gained weight. Now I eat nothing and gain weight. I gain weight when I even look at food. Inhaling Cinnabons puts on five pounds.

But now, I don’t worry so much about how I look. Because the truth is, fewer people are looking.

And you can see that as bad news, or good. For me, I’ll choose the good. It’s freeing. I worry less, and women are so good at worrying that we do it second nature, not realizing what a heavy burden it is until we set it down.

And now that I’m not so worried about how I look, I do more things in the time I have, and at the end of my life, I’d rather have done more, looking worse, than done less, looking better.

In fact, I want my tombstone to read:
SHE DID A TON. AND SHE DIDN’T BOTHER TO CHANGE OUT OF HER SWEATS.

Every woman writes her own story, and it’s the story of her own life.

And everything that happens to us, like the birth of a child or a grandchild, is a sentence.

A line, if you will.

And our job, as the author of our life story, is to live so that each one of our lines is fine. Beautiful, even.

So throw away your eraser.

And write well.

Better yet, write beautifully.

The Best Friends Part

By Lisa

A great thing about having a daughter is that she can introduce you to aspects of the “youth culture,” like hip and cool books, TV, and music. And you can teach her ancient history, like Steely Dan, Nancy Drew, and Ozzie & Harriet.

A band from the fifties, right?

For example, Daughter Francesca has introduced me to a lot of new music, like Rufus Wainright, who’s so hip he wrote a song entitled, “My Phone Is on Vibrate for You.”

It’s a love song. To a person, not a BlackBerry.

It’s not the kind of song that my generation could have had, since in those days, our phones had wires, and we didn’t have anything that vibrated. At least not that I remember. I myself haven’t vibrated in some time, but I’m straying from my point.

It’s cool to share stuff you love with your daughter, and sometimes you love the same thing, which is striking generational gold. Of course, this isn’t confined to mothers and daughters. I remember playing the Beach Boys’ album
Pet Sounds
for my father, and he loved it. In return, he played a Nina Simone record for me.

You may have to look up these arcane references, like “album” and “record.”

Lisa and Francesca, best friends

There are many TV shows, movies, and books that Francesca and I both love, but there is nothing we love quite as much as one TV show in particular. I’m talking, of course, about
Sex and the City.

OMG!!!!!

We became fangirls at the very mention of the title, and we love every episode, which we have memorized. We love the movies, too, and we hope they make more sequels, so we can have more
Sex and the City
to see, talk about, cry and laugh over. We love the actresses who play the girls, especially Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie and Cynthia Nixon as Miranda, and we love the friendship between the girls, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha.

So it’s easy to understand why, when I heard that Cynthia Nixon occasionally records audiobooks, I asked my publisher if we could get her to record the audiobook of my next novel, entitled
Save Me
. The planets aligned, and so it came to pass that Francesca and I were in a recording studio in New York, and sitting on the other side of the room, behind the glass like some rare and beautiful jewel, was Cynthia Nixon.

Cue angels.

We listened, rapt, as she performed my novel, and she made even my writing sound good.

Now
that’s
talent!

Francesca and I had recorded the audiobooks for these books, and how difficult it was, and all I had to do was be me. It took my total concentration and three days to read every word of a book aloud, not counting the effort to downplay my Philadelphia accent.

Yo!

But the recording of a novel is something different altogether.
Save Me
has an array of characters, female and male, and its co-star is an eight-year-old girl. With a sore throat.

No joke.

And Cynthia Nixon had to do all of these voices, including the sore throat, acting out not only everybody in the novel, but characterizing them more deeply, using only the nuances of voice, inflection, and intonation. She was amazing, and more than that, I was reminded of how great an audiobook is, probably the closest we get, in our technological age, to being told a story around a fire.

During the lunch break, we got to eat with Cynthia, the sound engineer from the studio, and Laura Wilson, the audio genius from my publisher. The whole time, Cynthia was a down-to-earth, incredibly nice person, and she didn’t act like the goddess she is or could be. Francesca was adorable and charming, and I prayed there was no food in my teeth.

After lunch, we went back to the recording studio, listened to Cynthia work her magic, then left before we embarrassed ourselves any further. We talked all the way home, when our conversation morphed from Miranda to the mother in the novel, then to motherhood in general, and finally, to mothers and daughters.

It was one of our best talks ever.

Which is, after all, the purpose of the arts. Books, music, movies, opera, plays, paintings, they’re all of a piece. To me, their highest and best purpose is to bring people closer, to connect them one to the other.

Even people who were already close, like Francesca and me.

Peace and love
(Photograph by April Narby)

We’re best friends, after all.

And our relationship is made every day, in fights over green jackets, as well as in much sweeter moments like the ones we shared that afternoon, when we were two girlfriends, adoring our favorite girlfriend. Francesca and I make the good and the bad moments, all the time, every day, and it forms the very stuff of our bond.

I know there are lots of mothers and daughters in the world who are also best friends, and we’re all of us very lucky in each other.

And for those of you who aren’t there yet, may I just say that that can always be changed?

Fixed, in a New York minute.

Because when Francesca and I fuss, I can feel the power I have as her mother. We, all of us moms, have that power. So if you’re a mother fussing with your daughter right now, or even for the past year or years, you can change that. Don’t wait for her to come around.

Go first.

You’re the mother, right? And the alleged adult.

So say you’re sorry. Set it right. Do what it takes.

It’s not hard to make that first step when you remember how much you love her. How lucky you are to have her. Keep in mind, always, that you love her, and she loves you.

Love really is the answer.

And no one loves better, stronger, or harder than a mother.

So be her best friend.

And you’ll get a best friend.

For life.

Acknowledgments

By Lisa and Francesca

We’re both big fans of thanks and love, so thank you so much and love to everyone at St. Martin’s Press for supporting this book and its predecessors. First and foremost, thanks to Coach Jen Enderlin, our terrific editor, as well as to the brilliant John Sargent, Sally Richardson, Matthew Shear, George Witte, Matt Baldacci, Brian Keller, Jeff Capshew, Steve Cohen, Alison Lazarus, Steve Kleckner, Ken Holland, Merrill Bergenfeld, John Edwards, Martin Quinn, Tom Siino, Christine Jaeger, Rob Renzler, Talia Sherer, Jaime Ariza, Astra Berzinskas, Michael Storrings, John Murphy, Dori Weintraub, John Karle, Monica Katz, Nancy Trypuc, Kim Ludlum, Anne Marie Tallberg, Joe Goldschein, and Sara Goodman. We appreciate so much your enthusiasm for these books, and we thank you for everything.

Thanks so much and love to Mary Beth Roche, Laura Wilson, Anne Gardner, and the other great people at St. Martin’s audiobook division. Stories are meant to be told, not read, which is why we love audiobooks. And thanks for giving us the chance to record our own audiobooks, for which we even won two “Earphones” Awards, given by the prestigious
AudioFile Magazine
. We’re two for two, and that doesn’t happen without great direction and production. Yay, team!

Thanks and love to our amazing agents, Molly Friedrich, Paul Cirone, and Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency. They’re the smartest, funniest, and most loyal bunch you’ll ever meet. God bless them for their hard work and great hearts.