tales from the jogger

It dawned on me this morning, while panting uncontrollably behind the sweaty handle of our pre-school bound jogger, that Ossian could write a tell-all memoir or publish a toddler-sized enquirer filled with the confidential information she’s privvy to. Nola is no less innocent, though her goo goo ga ga looks might lull you into thinking otherwise.

When I load my girls into the jogger to run with friends, I look forward to their contented containment and the “freedom” it affords me to sweat and listen and talk. Once we get rolling with physical and verbal momentum, Ossian gets silent with focus. She doesn’t miss a word. She hears everything. It makes me blush and cringe ever so slightly to think about all the jogger talk she’s been exposed to. When she’s not in the jogger, I’m quite careful about what I say in front of her. But when she’s in the jogger, I quickly forget that she is listening. Maybe because she is atypically out of sight, out of center stage, and out of danger. My vigilance collapses and my mom self relaxes a little. What a delusion it has been for the past 25 months that she’s been a jogger jockey. My nascent panic about this subsides a bit when I remind myself that I rarely ran with friends when we lived in Seattle… but since we’ve been in Petrolia, it’s a whole different story.

It’s not that she’s heard anything evil or damaging, just private and juicy woman-to-woman talk about partners, friends, work, health, doubts, dreams, and day to day dishy drama. On the positive side, maybe she’s learning about the deep trust of friendship. Maybe she’ll feel more comfortable listening to another person’s worries and listening through a pal’s sobs to be their loving friend. Hopefully, she’ll lean into the trust she builds with her future friends to share all parts of herself and find the support, understanding, and love that she’s seen me rely on with my friends.

I think she’s learning about the world of women, too. I never thought I’d find myself making such a gendered statement but here I go… I think friendships between women are often different than those between most men. I know this is not a new idea and to say there are exceptions to this would be a cavernous understatement. I’m only suggesting a tendency that seems to be present, more often, in womens’ friendships. Is that diplomatic enough? That tendency is to talk often and openly about our inner-workings, our dissatisfactions and fears, our intentions and our secret dreams, our love lives and the nitty-gritty of our relationships. Men do this, too – maybe just to a far lesser degree.

Blase will get off the phone or return from a night out with a male friend, for example, and I’ll ask him for an update..how their situation at work is, how their health problems are faring, how their rocky relationship is going or how their dying relative is feeling, etc. Usually, his response is, “we didn’t talk about that”. “How did you not talk about that?”, I’ll wonder aloud. “It just didn’t come up”, he’ll often say. “How did it not come up during five hours together?”, I’ll respond with predictable shock… “Um, it just didn’t,” he’ll say. This always amazes me. When I get with women friends, generally within minutes, we get right to it; down and dirty with what’s really going on.

Blase has lots of close male friends and is an exceptionally evolved man in many departments that were foreign to most men in our fathers’ generations. He listens and cries and cares and soothes babies and tells friends he loves them and checks in on friends who are down. If even he’s not talking about these things as the core substance of his exchanges with male friends, it begs the question of whether there is a bit of a gendered style of friendship – even among Blase’s league of cutting edge men.

Or maybe he is just really good at keeping his friends’ secrets…

Thoughts?