CATHY'S SIP: The skinny bitch.
How did this friendship begin?
Let’s just say it was a HATE-LOVE relationship.
It was 2005, and my four-year old daughter Isabella and I had just returned from a five week stay in Greece with my parents. My husband Joe was unable to make the trip due to work obligations so needless to say, upon my return home, there was quite a bit of marathon “alone time” being had.
By Thanksgiving, I found out I was a few weeks pregnant.
Around the same time, Isabella had expressed interest in taking ballet lessons, and as luck would have it, a new studio opened up not too far from our house. Joe discovered it and began taking Isabella around the spring of 2006. I, at this point, was about five months pregnant, so I enjoyed my alone time while Joe took Isabella to her lessons. He would come back and say how great everybody was and about the new people he was meeting. “I met this really nice Argentinian woman there,” he would tell me. I didn’t think anything of it.
One Saturday, I decided I was feeling up to going to see my little girl take her ballet lesson. I grudgingly pulled on a pair of velour track pants – my go-to wardrobe as of late for its forgiving waistband and huggable comfort, with an equally expandable sweater – never mind that it was pilled; it was comfy and went with my arsenal of velour track pants.
As I sat crouched on the low window ledge of the noisy studio, half-asleep, grumpy, hormonal, and going through caffeine withdrawl, the door of the ballet studio swung open. In breezes this perky, fashionable woman with a harried child in tow, late for her lesson. “Hola!” she chirped, as she gave my husband a peck on the cheek and proceeded to take a swig of her Starbucks Venti skinny (of course) vanilla latte. She was tall and skinny, had an easy, happy attitude despite her tardiness, was wearing a beautiful, black, belted coat (which she just bought on a recent trip to Spain, as she matter-of-factly announced later) and she was talking to my husband.
Joe introduced us and told me that this was the woman he told me about. I reluctantly got up to kiss her hello. Damn. She smelled good, too. I was hating her more by the minute. Actually, she was really quite annoying me at this point. So I sat my pregnant ass back down on the window ledge and let them talk up a storm in Spanish. “I’m not coming back here any more,” I decided at that moment.
Well, not only did I GO back, I ended up becoming friends with that Argentinian woman (a.k.a. Patti) and came to look forward to our Saturday mornings together. There was no way you could NOT like her; she was hysterically funny and gave away a lot about herself through the uninhibited stories she would willingly share about her child, her husband and her marriage. She never came across as fake and I found that incredibly refreshing. We found we had a similar sense of humor, family life, culture, thoughts, opinions and love of fashion. We were both scatterbrained and we both loved our daughters to death. Oh, and about those daughters…they could pass for SISTERS. To this day, they are the best of friends. As are their mommies.
These are our stories. So grab a glass of wine, sit back and get ready to laugh, cry, sigh and experience them with us.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~PATTI'S SIP: It’s kind of hard for me to begin at the beginning, because for me, there was no real beginning. Our friendship wasn’t one of those “just add water” friendships; it was a process – like a good wine that simply needed time to breathe and mature.
S had been in ballet for some time, and every Saturday I enjoyed the camaraderie that was forming between the other moms. As our little ones danced, we would sit on the other side of the heavy red curtain, talking about everything from preschool to sex.
I had been on a vacation – yes, in Spain – and was bringing S back to ballet classes after a 2-week absence. I was really excited to see my “ballet friends” again, and was surprised to find a couple of new people in the group, including one man. I learned his name was Joe, he spoke Spanish, and that he was the one bringing his daughter to class because his wife was pregnant and enjoyed the alone-time.
After a couple of weeks, Joe did bring his wife. That wife? Was Cathy. That morning I breezed in, late as usual, half-washed kid in tow, and after seeing S and her lopsided ballet bun off to her class, turned to greet all of the moms and Joe. “Hola Joe!” I sang, and gave him a small “Latin hello” peck on the cheek. Cathy was behind him, eyeing me with, I don’t know, curiosity? Joe introduced us and I’m sure I greeted her in my usual cheery manner. “I love your coat,” she said, “where did you get it?” I looked down at myself, as if I didn’t know what I was wearing. “Thank you! I got it in Spain…."
At that moment, I didn’t think much of it. It was just a compliment, right? I only found out much later, after our friendship had blossomed, that she kind of hated me at that moment. I had kissed her husband, I was “too perky”, I had a waist, and I had just jetted home from Spain(!). She, meanwhile, was in that stage of pregnancy where you’re not really showing yet, but your torso has turned into a puffy square and you walk around with your pants unbuttoned. She was wearing brown velour sweatpants and a shapeless, pilled sweater, and those flats that look like tennis shoes but aren’t really tennis shoes – an outfit that was to be her go-to getup for months to come. I’m sure, upon meeting me, she gave herself one of those instant mental self-once-overs and, when comparing that image to my jet-setting cinched waist, skinny jeans, and high heel leather boots, she instantly loathed me. Even I would have loathed me.
But time heals all wounds, and sometimes even first impressions. And I am thankful that as her waist expanded even more, so did our friendship -- and that of our daughters’. We found out over time that we have many things in common: we were both born to and raised by immigrants, we are both married to Latin men with minds of their own, we both have daughters the same age, we are both always late, always harried, always frazzled, we both have purses that swallow up cell phones and debit cards, yet manage to produce random objects (rubber insole, anyone?), and we are both totally nuts.
Five years and lots of laughter, tears and wine later, we are a collective walking library of drama, comedy and tragedy, and here, we share those stories.
