parallel lives

At Chick-fil-A I just ran into a girl I played clarinet with in the band when I was in ninth grade. She married a boy from my neighborhood and we each thought the other was still living outside Utah, but we’re not, we’re living twenty minutes apart, an hour from our hometown.  She has four kids, I have four kids, though hers range in age from five to 8 months, and mine from ten to 14 months. She has three girls and a boy, I’ve got Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Our husbands were each working late tonight and in a hundred (or ten, we were only together for an hour) small ways our lives are so similar. She had a little girl coming to the door of the play place conscientiously to see if it was time to go (apparently last time she got in trouble for not being responsive to the call to leave). I had a little girl take a nosedive off the chair and bonk her head on the hard tile floor.

We sat and reminisced, and I explained to one of her daughters that I grew up by her grandma and grandpa. A random young father bringing a kid out of the play place, said, “Wait, your father-in-law is Art B. who teaches French? I teach Spanish three doors down from him.” As we crossed the parking lot it was almost eery as we made our ways to matching minivans. I said to Lucy (perenially my straggler), “Stay right by me.” A couple feet over came the echo, “Stay right be me.”

I feel like it should bother me that we’re so alike, that our lives are so alike. Yes, we played clarinet together twenty years ago (I am freaking old, dude), and we go to the same church and my sister was friends with one of her sisters and my friend Tracey had a crush on her older brother and there’s even a less-salubrious connection that we’ve never discussed (though I could be indignant on behalf of my side), and basically this girl could be me, or I could be her, or something, and shouldn’t that be a bother?

Instead it warms the cockles, tickles the funnies. I don’t want to be special, but I do want be different, I think. Most important, I want to believe I have the life I have, the kids, the husband with the respectable job, the being-a-mom-ness, the consumed-by-childhood-things, out of choice, purposefully, not that my demographics dictated it for me. I am probably wrong about that. And tonight it’s okay.