Friends Replace Family as Sources of Advice

Every weekday at 8:15 a.m., the group of four meets for coffee and conversation at a small cafe in Chatsworth. It’s become a ritual to them, just like chatting over coffee at the neighbor’s Formica kitchen table used to be. Today, it’s drop off the kids at school and then get a caffeine charge for the workday ahead.

For these parents, the conversation invariably drifts back to children and parenting issues: homework not done again, notes from the teacher, birthday party coming up. It’s all fair talk for Pat, Sue, Dennis and Jeff, who share both mothering and fathering insights over steaming lattes and homemade English muffins. The old coffee klatch has picked up and moved to a new time and place.

Not so many years ago, families lived in close proximity to one another. My entire family lived within walking distance of each other’s homes, and I knew I was welcome anywhere.

We were like the family in the movie “Avalon,” where “extended” meant those living more than three blocks away. Everyone ate meals together, shared holidays and carried life’s joys and tragedies on each other’s shoulders.

Nowhere is the absence of that family prototype more obvious than here in Southern California, where everybody seems to be from somewhere else. New York. Ohio. Wisconsin. Leaving family members and structure 3,000 miles behind has forced many transplants, like me, to find their own family or to manufacture one.

That’s what the Chatsworth group has done.

Collectively, they represent eight children, ages 2 to 11. One mother has an only child; another has three kids. Both fathers have two children each. The parents are all married and work full time. And each relishes the idea of a group where they can learn more about the finer points of parenting and share the life lessons they’ve backed into on the way. If a parent has an argument with a child heading off to school, it’s put on the table with the morning coffee and dealt with, so it’s not a distraction all day long.

It’s amazing, but sometimes simply sharing knowledge about normal (but irritating) stages of child development keeps a parent sane. Pat, the mother of Lauren, 11, and Jane, 7, and Sue, the mother of Melissa, 7, have done just that for a long time.

“Pat is my guidebook on what comes next,” said Sue.

Being a good parent requires both love and common sense. The love seems to come naturally. Sometimes the common sense is a gift from another parent who seems wiser but who has merely tackled more.

Pat and Sue found that Jeff and Dennis represent one of the best changes in the ‘90s family--men who are very involved in their children’s lives and who strive to be the best parents they can be. “Men do have a different way of looking at some issues,” Pat said.

The dads drink in more than coffee too. “I have learned a lot from these women,” Jeff said. “And I have a whole new appreciation for how hard it is to be a mother and be totally dedicated to her children.”

Many of the lessons I learned about life and motherhood were also delivered with hot liquid and good humor, but for me it was in 1960s New Jersey. My British grandmother, Molly, and her sisters, Essie, Bessie and Lee, and my mother, Joanne, ended each day by fixing their tea in china cups (pass the milk, please) and sharing insights about children, marriage, love and family. (Men were never invited and I suspect, they liked it that way.) As a girl, I got to hear it all at my own “How to Make An American Quilt” . . . with a British accent.

I only wish I had taken copious notes back then. When I moved to California more than 20 years ago, I missed the camaraderie of the nightly tea party. Then nearly 17 years ago, when I gave birth to my daughter, I missed even more than the hot brew and chatter. I realized that I had come to need their collective motherly advice.

Lucky for me this Mother’s Day (and every day), my grandmother is still around and sharp as a tack. She’s wise and loving, and she cherishes the great-granddaughter I gave her. Although I have counted on my grandmother, via long-distance, to help guide me as a parent, I also recognize that times have changed.

I divorced and opened my own business. My life as a working mother of one was more stressful and more complex than her life had been as a mother of two, many years before.

Somehow, the mothers and fathers at that Chatsworth cafe have perfectly blended the best parts of old and new. These four live with the stresses of parenting every day. Finding time for children, spouse and self is a never-ending riddle. But they stop, each morning, to nourish their souls through friendship and advice.

The setting, the drink and the issues may be different from 1960s New Jersey. But on this Mother’s Day 1996, some things have stayed the same.

“The world around us has changed,” concludes Pat, “but after all, parents are parents.”