When Home is Where Your Girls Are

 

“I know I have a key under a mat at nine different homes. I know I do,” Mollie says. She imagines a future with more travel now that her youngest is off to college. And as the one of her number who lives farthest away, any trip east lands her right in the thick of the others. “That gives me hope and excitement about the future.”

 

Decades before marriages and children, loss and prosperity, those keys were cut in love at Saint Mary’s. Moira Scully Papp, one of the mighty pack of 10 friends from the Class of 1990 of which Mollie is a part, would agree. Just a week before, her family had been reorganizing downstairs, moving things out of the workout room in their Chicago home to make space for “Mollie’s bedroom,” for whenever her Los Angeles-based friend can make the trip back. 

 

I went to a very big high school, and I feel like I have a wide net of friends, and no one has friends like my college friends,” Moira reflects, repeating, “no one. And they all know it, too! They’re always saying, ‘Oh, your Smick friends, your Smick friends. You’re so lucky.”

 

But to find each other and the other eight— the dear companions who keep watch with them and hold their victories and losses with equal care to this day—they first had to find their way to Saint Mary’s.

 

 

For Moira, it was a direct path to Notre Dame, Indiana from Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School in Chicago. She arrived at Saint Mary’s with something of a community already in place. She learned about the College from families who vacationed with hers at their lake house: Christine Cronin Falkenberg (siblings had introduced the girls when they were 7) and Tracey Hayes Uruba (Moira’s parents had been friends with Tracey’s grandparents, the younger set connecting at age 14). In the fall of ’86, Moira would turn out to be one of three young women across several families who’d spent time in their house enrolled at the College. And Saint Mary’s had the additional appeal for her parents of being closer than John Carroll University outside of Cleveland, which four of Moira’s siblings had attended.

 

There were other relationships that arrived on campus fully formed, too, ready to be interwoven into the fabric of what was to be the larger collective. Karen Comerford Keating and Kelly McGowan Chestnut met as fourth graders when they lived across the street from one another in Fayetteville, N.Y. Though Kelly’s family moved away after several years, the time the two spent together skiing in winter and searching for salamanders when the weather was warm cemented a friendship that endured. They exchanged letters and spoke on occasion. Then, in spring of senior year, Karen came across an old letter of Kelly’s in her dresser. She found Kelly’s number and reached out, learning that each one of them had committed to Saint Mary’s independent of the other. It was too late for them to room together that fall, but the two remedied that the following year and remained roommates throughout the rest of their time at the College.

 

Mollie came from farther away. She’d grown up in California, the daughter of a man with enough room in his heart for two of the Midwest’s great football dynasties: the Ohio State Buckeyes and, more specifically, the rivalry between the University of Notre Dame and the University of Southern California. Before one of his trips east to watch the Irish take on the Trojans, Mollie told him that she’d heard there was a school across the street from Notre Dame. An older girl at her high school in Torrance was attending there. Would he look at it for her and report back?

 

He took his assignment seriously. He walked around campus and found his way to the admission office, making sure to mention Mollie’s affinity for soccer while he was there. Soon, literature from the College was arriving at her home, along with an invitation to scrimmage with the soccer team. After she visited Saint Mary’s in April of her senior year, Mollie felt a connection to the place.

 

“I wanted to get out of California,” Mollie remembers. “I wanted to try something else. It seemed like a lovely, safe place to do that: not too intimidating. I knew from playing soccer my whole life I would have 10 friends, all of a sudden, at the first practice.”

 

So the young women who would knit together tightly to become the band of 10 they are today began to orbit one another on campus from various distances for the first three years: Moira and Mollie, Kelly McGowan Chestnut, Donna Ryan Coffey, Deirdre Lyne Churchill, Christine Cronin Falkenberg, Jane Soroka Husnik, Karen Comerford Keating, Erin McCarthy Sheridan, and Tracey Hayes Uruba. Moira and Mollie were in McCandless Hall as first years, “so we knew of each other,” the former recalls. There were classes together—Spanish for certain, Moira remembers—and then there was just “the way that Saint Mary’s works,” how the College culture of welcome and greeting ensured each young woman found themselves saying ‘hi’ to another over and over again.

 

Spring of junior year was when the loose, on-campus affiliation of acquaintances solidified into a sisterhood that would span decades. In class with a group of education majors one day, Mollie sat just outside the circle of their conversation. The students had just discovered that the fifth roommate for the off-campus house they’d committed to for fall would be transferring to Villanova University. As they discussed possible candidates to fill the unexpected vacancy, a head turned in Mollie’s direction.

 

“Someone came up for air and looked at me and was like, ‘You might be good,’” Mollie recalls. “So when I came in senior year, it was a whirlwind of, ‘Whew, look at these fun people. Where do I belong?’ And then, there we were: the girl house on the boy block.” 

 

That fall, the friends found themselves evenly divided along residential lines: four lived on campus (some parents wouldn’t even have entertained the alternative), and five lived off in a house at 111 East Navarre. One lived in Turtle Creek.The arrangement proved beneficial to all concerned.

 

After graduation, each wedding and the occasional girls’ trip (Myrtle Beach and Mackinac Island were among the earliest) offered the tribe opportunities to reconnect. And there was always the fall, the ritual of football, and the group’s faithful return for all of its attendant rites and ceremonies. It was the arrival of the babies that upended those beloved patterns. Friends had to decline some invitations because they were pregnant—sometimes because they conflicted with plans to try and become pregnant—and the frequency of their reunions slowed.  

 

Their experience is common. In the introduction to his 2009 book, The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a 40-year Friendship, the late writer Jeffrey Zaslow identifies the years between 25 and 40 as those when women’s friendships “are most at risk,” as they become fully engaged in the work of building their personal and professional lives.

 

“Everyone took a break,” Mollie says, “because we were knee-deep in motherhood.”

 

At a Notre Dame tailgate in the fall of 2018, the friends found themselves connecting in an old, familiar way but from a new place in each of their lives. Many of their children were attending universities now, and they themselves had become established in the lives they had stumblingly set out to make after graduation. The moment seemed abundant with potential: maybe this was the perfect time to reconnect in earnest, Mollie reflected. She told Erin that she would be willing to host everyone in Cabo San Lucas. If she sent out an invitation to the group, would Erin be willing to respond first to build momentum within the group for the idea? Erin agreed, and when Mollie reached out to her Saint Mary’s sisters with the offer to host a gathering in Mexico and the proposed dates, Erin immediately texted into the group with her flight information. “It lit a fire,” Moira remembers.

 

That trip was different. Confidences were exchanged this time about how child-rearing was challenging them rather than whose child was reading first. There was frank talk about which family members were putting them through their paces. “We finally got real and got vulnerable,” Mollie says, “and it was a great trip.”

 

It proved to be the first of many. The women have been back to Cabo more than once since, but they also made a point of returning to Saint Mary’s for their small, make-up reunion after the pandemic. Mollie laughingly recalls their pack of 10 as making up most of what she estimates were a dozen from the Class of 1990 who came together on campus for Reunion as the world continued to reopen. The group pedaled to the picnic on bicycles and met College President Katie Conboy under a tent.

 

Today, their shared text thread—readily identifiable by its bell icon— is about everything, Mollie says. Together even when they’re apart, the group celebrates their victories and mourns each other’s losses. Prayer requests are shared, but so are funny remembrances of one another’s parents. The virtual lines of communication connecting them mirror the real-life. They are interconnected in more ways than they can count, serving as godmothers and confirmation sponsors to one another’s children and proud concierges to the tri-campus experience to those members of the next generation who choose to attend their alma mater. Before enrolling at Saint Mary’s, Moira’s daughter Annie was shepherded down The Avenue and around campus by her mother’s friend, made to feel welcome with each personal introduction.

 

Many of the group have lost parents and in-laws, and the occasion of any funeral or wake demands they congregate for support and consolation. Moira remembers her parents as the first. When her father died, Mollie flew in to help her write his eulogy, but “every single person was there.” When one of their 10 experiences such a loss, the others act. They celebrated a lot as young graduates, Mollie reflects, grateful for that time, but says they are now “in the thick of that other arc of life”: losing parents, dealing with health struggles, going through difficult times with marriages.

 

“I think we hold each other up, and the muscle we’re using is the Catholic faith,” Mollie believes.

 

It is known to her friends that Moira leaves a reunion in any given year to drive by her parents’ cemetery on Chicago’s South Side to thank them for sending her to Saint Mary’s. These pilgrimages are just one example of the sense of shared values and priorities that also plays a part in the women’s enduring connection. Separated by two time zones, Moira has still managed to become a part of Mollie’s Tuesday prayer group. She attends by way of FaceTime, present on the phone Mollie holds in her hand. And an impromptu trip to a roadside shrine in Mexico to Our Lady of Guadalupe to pray for a family member’s illness will bring them together for a recitation of a Hail Mary, no matter how rusty some of their memory of the rhythm of the words may be.

 

“You can hide with your pain, or you can come out with it,” Mollie offers. “And when you come out with it, and everyone comes out of the woodwork, I always say this: if you’re vulnerable, and you let them in, we’re allowing each other to live the gospel by how we tend to each other and how we take care of each other.”

 

While the roots of their collective relationship stretch back more than 30 years, the women credit the longevity of the connection born at Saint Mary’s not with the past and the memories they share but with the women’s ability to appreciate and respect each other’s development as individuals.

 

“It’s past, present, and future,” Moira affirms. “We are not stuck in the past, and all we can talk about is what we used to do when we were 18, 19, and 20. It is that we have grown up—and grown into—these lovely and beautiful friendships. And we respect each other, and we check on each other, and we love each other.”

 

Mollie concedes the pack seeks warmth when they gather now: sunny destinations where they can reconnect. Plans are being concocted now for a reunion in Utah sometime in July. But she insists that place only serves as a backdrop for the meaning that the friends find when they’re together, that these 10 could have “fun at an insurance seminar.” 

 

“And if we bottled up the joy that we experienced with each other and sold it?” she asked. “I mean, come on! Forget it.” 

 

The story of this extraordinary friend group from the Class of 1990 is the first in a new storytelling series.

We want to know more about the lives our alumnae share in friendship with one another.  

Who belongs to the family of friends you made at Saint Mary’s? 

How are you maintaining those relationships? 

And how have these friends sustained you during a challenging time?

Submit the stories of your Saint Mary’s friend group for the opportunity to have it shared with the College community on our website or social media platforms. We know the friends you make at Saint Mary’s stay with you for a lifetime. Help us tell that story by sharing the adventures and experiences you continue to have with yours.

 

Click here to share your #BestBelles story us.