The Unexpected Heartbreak in Long-Distance Friendships
Plus: Life coach Amanda Baudier shares her best advice about nervous system hygiene, and Hannah's favorite <$50 Gap sandals are restocked for the season.
Issue no. 8 of the print magazine is edited and off to our creative director for design!
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The Piece They Don’t Know
Feeling your heart break from a four-year-old, across a thousand miles no less, is an odd experience. Words by Leah Melby Clinton
The pieces that made up my life fifteen years ago are scattered around the country, around the world, just as if they’d been blown apart by a rogue canon shot. I attended a Northeastern school that drew people from all around the country, and after graduation, the migration started, slowly at first. Careers and life began to draw people away and into slipstreams of their own. Some were pulled back into the orbits from whence they came, as surely as if there was a magnetic pull. Others chose a new galaxy, redirecting to an entirely different state and planting seeds that at the time, way back then, were just little seedlings.
Now they’ve grown into proper trees, with roots that twist and grab at the soil, not easily moved or disrupted.
I did the same, of course. I’m here, with a life I’ve built and love, and all I can typically summon is a peer over and around and across the miles. Life goes on, and we all get used to the new rhythms. When you’re lucky enough to get together, you laugh and pour wine and slip back into things, all of it eased by the magic dust that seems to sprinkle over friendships that were soldered during those moments when life was a shining new adventure.
The thing that stops me and makes an entire corridor of my heart ache are the children. These little faces I’ve seen grow up on screens in front of me, bone structure and attitude hinting at someone I knew so well.
I know, because I have my own: These small people have forged an entire new identity of the person who was mine at one point. There are new peaks and valleys and entire planes that emerge when you become a mother. Your identity has to change and morph, and even if you aren’t necessarily different than who you were before, back when life was a big board game with dice to roll, you are different.
You can never be the same again.
And so I see these sweet, adorable little faces, and a part of me feels so very sad. Sad that they represent someone I haven’t gotten to know—that because of distance and time and space and life, I don’t know their mother as a mother. And that their mother doesn’t know me as a mother.
When you’re in it every day, it’s a lot of autopilot. Not much thinking. But now I philosophically have a hard time squaring how someone could think they know me well if they’ve never seen how I interact with my children, watch how I bend and talk, cajole and soothe, redirect and readjust.
It’s not so much that I put “mother” at the top of my identity list, yet there’s also no role I wear that’s as permanent. If everything else is semi-permanent, potentially able to be washed away and wiped off, motherhood is ink needled under the skin.
It’s true for me just as it is them, and it’s why my heart breaks just a fraction when I see those tiny little faces on the screen. They know a woman I don’t, this new version of a woman who was my friend before she was their mother.
Some good, small things to improve your routines—skincare, bedtime, and otherwise.
When my first daughter was two, we had a soft spot for the book Edwina and read it nightly before bed. We just discovered this one from the same author, and it has already become a bedtime favorite. It’s funny and clever (for adults, too!), and has a sweet morale built in about the importance of being in the right story.
I spoke to Kate McLeod recently for a story coming in issue no. 8 and was thrilled to try the body stone her brand has become known for. Happy to report that it’s just as she promised. It feels luxurious and smells incredible, but most importantly, and more than any moisturizing ritual ever has, it feels like a total act of self-care.
This Dorsey Kate bracelet is a favorite—a piece I wear constantly not just because I adore
and her story, but because it pairs perfectly with a watch or looks chic on an-otherwise bare wrist. It’s elegant and feels timeless and contemporary all at once. I can’t say enough good things about it, including the price point and quality.I had a version of these sandals that lasted at least five years before I lost them in Hawaii last summer. I’m so happy they’re back. They’re exactly what I want to wear on a beach vacation, though I found myself wearing mine with dresses and jeans in the city, too. And I always loved the reaction when I told people they were actually from the Gap.
As a San Francisco local, I was an early-adopter when the Bay-area brand True Botanicals first came on the scene. Years later, I’m still all about the face oil. I’ve loved and used Goop’s often, but the smell of True Botanicals version is hard to beat, and putting it on before bed feels like a mini spa session (especially when I pair it with a quick microcurrent session with my NuFace). xHannah
Every good conversation starts with a single question. Whether it's wondering how, why, or what, it's the place we jump off from—and into the moments where all the good stuff happens.
Hannah asked , executive life coach and co-founder of Full Plate Full Cup, about navigating burnout in work and life, from the big picture to the tools you might put into practice each and every day.
Hannah: I’ve always had trouble with the idea that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. You’re likely driven and passionate about it, but it’s still work.
Everyone faces burnout to some degree—in work, parenting, all of it. How do you help clients navigate that and find relief?
Amanda Baudier: This is the ocean that I swim in. What's interesting is that I've noticed that there's a qualitative difference between entrepreneurial burnout—people that have more control and autonomy—and a career professional or executive, who’s working for someone else. When you're working for somebody else, when you feel to any degree that you don't have full control and full autonomy, [burnout] is more sustained. You feel it more often, but you might have more warning before it gets awful because you're feeling it. It's consistent and it gnaws at you. You might have more notice to be like, “Oh, shit, I should do something about this.”
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