Friendship

Friends:  Everyone has them.  They run the spectrum from casual acquaintances, to family.  Some beloved childhood friends we haven’t seen or heard from in 20 years, some brand new friends we’re still testing the waters with.  But our friends are the threads that make up the tapestry of our lives.

Each one is inextricably interwoven with a different part of our life.  If we’re lucky, maybe their thread meanders through more than just their initial appearance.  But more often, our friends are linked with a certain phase of our lives.  Like baby food, we have different friends for different stages.  We remember the innocent happiness of childhood play, the awkward discomfort of navigating the teenage years, the heady exhilaration of living on our own for the first time, and friends we shared pregnancy and raising our children with. 

If we’re lucky, we’ll get to reconnect with our childhood friends later in life.  We carry unique memories of them, and wonder if they hold a piece of our past in their recollections.  We feel the urge to see them again, reminiscence together and share our treasure chest of memories, both becoming richer for the experience. 

With some friends we pick up right where we left off.  We may not have seen them in months or even years, our life situations may even be drastically different, but we instantly remember why we were such good friends to begin with.  Others we see again, and discover all that we share now is a friendship from the past.  We may want to explore these new people we are, see if we still want to have a relationship, or simply say thanks for the memories and move on with quiet sadness. 

Then there are those friendships marked by such intensity that we can never completely leave them in the past.  They shared such a vital piece of our lives that allowing them to fade away would be like ripping out part of ourselves.  Sure, these tend to be our romantic relationships, but not necessarily.  It could simply be someone we shared an intense experience with, or who supported us in navigating a rocky part of our lives.  But quite truthfully, we can’t map our journey to who we are today without including this person in the directions.

In our children’s early years their social life is dictated by ours: we make mommy (or daddy) friends whose children then make friends with ours.  But then our children start making friends of their own, without consulting us first, and it’s a bit disconcerting to realize that you now have to arrange playdates  for your child with someone you may not have ever talked to of your own accord.  If you’re lucky, the parents hit it off as well as the children do.  If not, well, it’s a good lesson in politeness.