The perimenopause table had no ceiling fans
On reunions, equity, and what we’re actually carrying
Yesterday, I did a major museum trip to New York, mostly to see the Raphael exhibit but with a planned swing by the Frick since I hadn’t been post-renovations. A friend who didn’t come to our 25th reunion last weekend and I were going to meet up for the first time in years and I was thrilled for the chance to museum hop, walk in the city on a beautiful day, catch-up on reunion gossip, and be back at my house for dinner.
My friend had heard about a Matisse exhibition happening between the Met and the Frick (it closes Friday but if you can go before then, you should!) and while we waited in line, I continued catching her up on our high school reunion. Suddenly the 60 or 70ish year old woman in front of us in line turns around and goes “Baldwin? In Bryn Mawr? I went there!”
I transferred to Baldwin for eight grade and high school for a host of reasons, some academic and some personal, but I never once regretted it. I regret losing touch with some of the friends I left behind — years of passive updates on social media have made me think I had a lot in common with them beyond sitting at the same lunch table for slightly nerdy girls in 7th grade. I certainly regretted the hours I spent on the school bus — although my dad did note that that school bus was really the only ROI he got on his school taxes so he was glad I got some use out of it.
To be clear, it was more than “some” use, my most conservative calculator estimates came to 1500+ hours over five years.
I truly felt it was worth it. I had wonderful teachers, I made great friends, and I had opportunities for leadership and participation I never had prior. My ninth grade English teacher was the first person who told me I could write (after having solidified my standing as a mathlete in my other school) and pushed me to enter contests and improve my skills.
So, last weekend, with the chance to return after 25 years, you’d think I would have done so with great enthusiasm.
I had enthusiasm for certain parts: driving through the gates and seeing the weeping cherry trees line the path pulls on all my nostalgia strings. Seeing the main building which was designed by Frank Furness in 1890 to be a railroad hotel makes me so happy (please don’t let “The Gilded Age” make you think that all great architects of the era were building Beaux Arts mansions and show some respect to a more industrial Victorian Gothic vibe). Noticing the many facility improvements that have happened in the intervening years is lightly disorienting while still comforting that things are being well cared for.
I actually wear my class ring on days I need to buckle down. Our school motto was disce verum laborem or “learn true labor.” Doesn’t that sound really motivating for a bunch of privileged teenage girls? On hard days, something about the weight of that ring on my finger serves as a reminder that is helpful to see when I’m typing and feel when I’m madly gesticulating. And the green on my finger when I take it off is also a motivator to work harder to continue to afford better jewelry.
I am a believer in what that place did for me and I think often about who I would have been if I’d stayed at my public school, where I was being bullied, and just plodded through. But I also know I was a strong presence at Baldwin: confident both by nature and affirmed by leadership positions. I’ve had to sit with the possibility that some people experienced me as something harder than that (someone last week said “I’m not sure if you bullied me or if I was just scared of everyone”). The school gives you that, too: the confidence to take up space, and then eventually the reckoning with how much space you were taking.
I am such a believer that I stayed involved after graduating in various alumnae positions which was very fulfilling until it stopped. Most of it was the result of being in charge of organizing regional events during Covid (Zoom happy hours are not my love language) and a lot of it was the result of not feeling appreciated for volunteer efforts that took up tremendous amounts of time that could have been spent elsewhere. Always one with a dramatic flair (perhaps cultivated in my star turn as Helga Queen of the Trolls in our middle school play “East of the Sun, West of the Moon?”), I actually vowed to never volunteer anywhere again. Helga doesn’t put up with shit.
All of which is to say: I walked into that reunion carrying something more complicated than pure nostalgia. And I was the weird one in the room, because everyone else was carrying 25-year-old baggage and mine is five years old. So there I was, listening to people work through dynamics from 1999, and I kept thinking: surely we’re past the Head of Middle School taking away all of our privileges for bad behavior on the 8th grade field trip?
Here’s the thing I’ve been turning over since: we’re not past it, and that’s not actually irrational. What we’re operating on isn’t history but rather, equity.
History is just time: the years, traditions, shared experiences, and the simple fact of having been in the same place at the same time. Relational equity is what you built with it — the showing up, the being counted on, the trust that accumulates quietly without anyone making a thing of it. They’re not the same, even if people confuse them constantly.
My best friend from high school has built so much equity with me over 25 years that her runway is essentially unlimited (not that she’d ever test it). And my relationship with the school itself was the inversion: decades of history, real love, and then a few years that drained the account faster than I’d built it.
The reunion room was full of people whose equity ledgers had frozen in place the last time they were in that Frank Furness building. I extended warmth instinctively to the people I’d been close to. I was still a little guarded around the ones who’d made me feel small. Not because of anything that happened last weekend, but because of what was already on the books.
And then there was the friend I hadn’t been close to in years. I wasn’t sure how it would feel to see her at our old stomping grounds with so many memories. It was easier than I expected — not because enough time had passed, but because enough equity had. The falling out made a withdrawal but it didn’t close the account. We picked up the way you can only pick up with someone when there’s still something there to draw on.
That moment is what made the next one hit differently. I sat in our old cafeteria — at the perimenopause table, inexplicably located in the section with no working ceiling fans, although don’t worry I got the windows open — and realized I was sitting in judgment of my peers for not being over their grievances with the school, while I was quietly nursing one of my own. They couldn’t let go of what the school couldn’t give them as teenagers. I couldn’t let go of some bumpiness during Covid with a person who didn’t even work there anymore.
The hypocrisy landed hard enough that I vowed to reengage. We’re not given too many chances to give back to the places that shaped us. I don’t want to miss that one.
