I need to clear my conscience before the end of the year because what happened has been weighing on me, and the others, for almost all of December.

On the first Saturday of December my friends and I hogged a table at Café Besalu and the owner, James Miller, had to personally stop working butter into the dough that would become perfect, flaky croissants and speak to us. I can’t recall the exact words other than, “We need the table.” He was extremely pleasant. And yet, almost four weeks later there are five women over the age of 50 who feel like they were recently sent to the principal’s office. I’d also wager that not one of us ever did get sent to the principal’s office ‘in the day.'

We were in the wrong. We had stayed too long, past the lines of customers who were mostly transporting their brioches and lattes elsewhere, into the territory of three generations wanting to sit together in the warmth and smell of Seattle’s undisputedly finest-outside-of-France croissants.

The occasion was either the 8th or 9th anniversary of our first meeting, back when we coined ourselves Club Besalu (clearly we’re not good with dates either). We’d pushed together two small tables in the front window and lost track of the time. After the reprimand we realized we had been there two hours. It was the first time that we had all been at the table together in over a year. Our conversation that morning felt as urgent as though we were trying to staunch a wound: none of dared to be the one to stop.

Club Besalu was an offshoot of a mother-daughter book club. Originally four of us would meet at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning because we could slip away from the house while our children were still asleep and we could still get a seat at Besalu, always recognizing that we would not have left our beds to meet with the lure of the pain au chocolat.

In the beginning we could still count on leaving our daughters safe in their beds, reading age appropriate books, their sheets tangled around never-shaven legs and skin untouched by make-up. More a child than a woman. It’s true that already some of us had lost one or more parents, while other parents were becoming more fragile. Middle School was looming, but it hadn’t yet arrived.

Those little girls are all turning 20 this year and they are no longer home safe in their beds when we meet. But our girls are all still alive - and at various times over the last few years that’s not something we could take for granted. As one woman quoted Michelle Obama, in turn quoting another on that last morning at Besalu, “I am only as happy as my saddest child.”

Over the years we have shed plenty of tears together, pretending to be clearing steamed glasses as we collectively wiped our eyes. Our daughters did not stay friends; they have made good choices and bad. They have “come out” and blown last chances. They have traveled to dangerous countries and into their own dark corners. Their paths to adulthood have strained marriages and friendships. We each learned that we could not protect our children no matter how much we loved them and wanted to keep them safe.

We members of Club Besalu don’t see each other that frequently. We’re not neighbors; we’re no longer on the soccer sidelines or reading the same book. But we know that we can always call one another as needed – to sit together in the lawyer’s office or prepare a house to go on the market. One phone call and at least one person could be pulling up beside you in a parking lot within a half an hour.

That very first Saturday we didn’t have a plan beyond a shared passion for a warehouse sale and Besalu. Over pastries we’ve treated political discussions with the same passion as complaining about our teenagers. We charted our changing bodies and our aging parents. We collectively feel so shamed by needing to be prompted to leave the table. In the grand scheme of things we have probably done so much worse in the last nine years. We’ve reacted the wrong way to our children. We haven’t done enough for social justice. We were in the wrong that day at the intersection. How do we live with ourselves sometimes? Yet in the face of our faults we just want to be forgiven at Besalu.

In the early years we were still just thrilled to be in the company of adults, other mothers of same age daughters, as we all drank from big cups and had chocolate croissants directly from the oven. We were ignorant to the varied forms of future heartbreaks that would come not with one dramatic strike but in slow waves. Having looked down on our beautiful sleeping babies since birth we hadn’t realized all the ways in which we could lose them.

We know that Café Besalu is successful and doesn’t need us, but we have always needed Besalu. So on behalf of five women, please accept our apology. It’s just that as long as we sat together over our empty cups we still felt safe and could almost pretend that our children were too. Can we make a fresh start?