In the months before I turned 60, an unanticipated perspective arrived: How grateful I am to my younger self for several decisions she made and maintained. Some were measured choices, others happenstance, chosen with a “might as well” approach. Like a painter picking certain colors before placing brush to canvas, these choices made decades ago became the palette of my life.
Calling my childhood tumultuous would be euphemistic. My parents and stepparents were too busy with debauchery to tend to the children found in their households. There were occasional visits from child welfare agencies and I had a brief stint in foster care, but mostly my siblings and I raised ourselves, ever eager for the day we could leave and forge our own paths.
Unlike my brilliant younger sister, who applied to only one college her senior year, was accepted, given a generous funding package and left four years later with a bachelor of fine arts degree, I roamed the country after high school. At 21, I settled in Columbus and, because it was the local university (happenstance), I enrolled (might as well) at Ohio State the same fall my sister started at University of Michigan. For five years, I consumed education like a starved person at a royal banquet, earning two bachelor’s degrees and a new life trajectory.
As an OSU student, I accessed free counseling services that helped me sort out my first two decades and the episodes of depression that started before I was a teenager and would return unannounced, throw open the door and settle in like a soldier from an army of occupation. Therapy, along with an abiding practice of Buddhist meditation, also begun while an OSU undergrad, have encouraged me to be honest, yet kind with myself.
Ten years after completing my bachelor’s degrees, I enrolled in graduate school and earned a master’s degree at Kent State. I continue to seek out therapy whenever the need arises, which it has many times. Meditation and my Buddhist communities have expanded my insight of and capacity for the human condition. College, therapy, meditation – all begun in my 20s – have done much to break the generational dysfunction into which I was born.
Equally important to the warp and weft of my life is something else that originated at OSU – my friendship with Jen Marvelous, who has appeared in this column numerous times, starting with a description of the 14-month trip around the world she took with her husband and four daughters. Bold and generous, she is to me what Oprah is to Gayle, what Lucille was to Vivian.
I have maintained friendships, all meaningful, that began in every decade of my life. The difference with Jen is she and I continued to meet up even though we’ve not lived in the same city since the early ’90s. She was at the birth of my first three sons – my kids call her Auntie Jen – and I helped care for her after the birth of her second daughter. My “where were you” moment for the 2005 London bombings was Ithaca, New York, where Jen and I had spent the afternoon playing in a shallow river with our young children.
The following year, I spent several days at a remote Buddhist monastery. When I drove back into cell range, my phone started vibrating like a jitterbug. Jen, who was eight months into her third pregnancy and planned to start nursing school a few weeks after the birth, had left several panicked voicemails. She had just discovered she was expecting twins. My heart hurt to think Jen felt ignored when I didn’t return her calls immediately. Today she has multiple nursing degrees and four delightful young adult daughters.
Jen and I have supported each other through all cycles of life – weddings, divorces, births and death. I’ve written about her dad, John Tressler, who was like the Tom Hanks’ character in the movie “A Man Called Otto,” gruff on the outside, but a big softy at heart. Mr. Tressler died of Alzheimer’s in 2023 when Jen and her girls were in Patagonia, Argentina. Using my phone, I live streamed the funeral for Jen.
Last month, my children and I celebrated Jen’s mom’s 85th birthday with the family at her sister’s countryside home in Ravenna. Everyone wore sequins and rhinestones as the theme was bling. Our kids gabbed while gorging on gooey waffles from a Cleveland Waffle Co. food truck hired to cater the event. And then, in the tradition Jen had with her dad, members of our combined families caravanned in three cars to Village Discount Outlet to pop some tags.
College, therapy, spiritual practice, close friendships – all require work, the last two continually. It’s not like breaking big rocks into little rocks. It’s simply showing up no matter the distance or inconvenience and leaning in to whatever needs to be learned or done. It’s work that pays dividends like nothing else.
Contact Holly Christensen at whoopsiepiggle@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Close friendships are worth nurturing over the decades | Christensen
Reporting by Holly Christensen, Special to the Akron Beacon Journal / Akron Beacon Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Holly Christensen, Special to the Akron Beacon Journal | USA TODAY Network
