Old Friends

It's been a rough year.  And on this Thanksgiving Eve, I know that I have an awful lot to be thankful for, that's for damn sure.  Last April, I was in the midst of all sorts of chaos, but I had the amazing and wonderful fortune to have recently reconnected with some old friends.  I wrote this then and would like to publish it now.... thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to those wonderful women.  They know who they are...

We start out in the living room, or kitchen maybe.  Pots and pans strewn about, playing dress-up with a sibling or two, if we have any.  Eventually, we migrate to the playground or park.  Our parents say things like, go talk to that nice little girl over there, she can be your friend.  Eventually we take the lead.  Mom, can I go play with my friend?  Can my friend come over?  I want to have a birthday party and invite all my FRIENDS!

The teen years are difficult.  We love our friends.  We hate them.  They make us so mad!  They have an easier life than we do.  They sleep with our boyfriends.  They like someone else more.  They have better hair.  They have boyfriends who take them away from us.  They have a car!  We worry that they have an eating disorder.  We are embarrassed of our home life and don’t want our friends to see it.  We wish our parents were more like their parents.  

Eventually, off we all go, anxious to get on with our lives.  We have no idea what these lives will bring.  We don’t realize how hard it is going to be.  But on we go, leaving it all behind.  For some of us, that somewhere is a quick family and marriage.  Maybe dreams will wait until later.  Maybe dreams will change.  For others, that somewhere is anywhere but where we were.  Get out, start living!  The more the better.  Drama? Bring it!  We can handle anything.  Our parents are alcoholics!  Our siblings are a mess!!  We will do better.  Won’t we?

Once in a while, we get together, but less and less as the years go on.  We sometimes think of the old days together, but over time it is really just a fleeting memory here and there.  Yes, we get together for a class reunion once or twice.  But, nobody talks about the real stuff.  We are busy trying to be what we think we should be.  What we thought we WOULD be.  Maybe we don’t want to think so much about the past anymore.  We’re moving on!  Life changes, damn it!  

Babies are born.  Weddings are planned.  Degrees are obtained.  Job interviews are had.  On we go, hoping it’ll all work out just the way we’d wanted.

But it doesn’t, does it?

Marriages have ended.  Children have gotten sick.  Loved ones have died.  Hearts have been broken.  Jobs have been lost.  Dreams are uncertain.... We wanted to give up sometimes.  We gave up sometimes.  But in the end, we kept on keeping on.  We picked up the pieces when were weren’t sure we’d live another day.  We cleaned up vomit and urine and shit when we didn’t feel like it.  We smiled and said I love you, even when we weren’t sure if we did.  We got dressed and went to work, even when all we wanted to do was crawl right back in bed and have somebody hold us and say it would be OK.  There wasn’t always somebody to hold us, and it wasn’t always going to be OK.

So now, here we are.  Middle aged.  Middle aged!!!  We are strong.  We are beautiful.  We have sagging bodies.  Aches and pains that we never imagined we’d have at this point.  We worry.  Our mental health is fragile at times.  We have disappointed people and we’ve been disappointed.  We are more realistic.  We are confident enough to not give a shit about the little things as much anymore.  We’ve all spent so much of our lives trying to figure out who the hell we were supposed to be, or regretting not becoming who we thought we SHOULD have been.  

In so many ways, our lives are so much bigger.  And yet with each passing day, don’t they get just a little smaller?  The number of people we can really trust.  Smaller.  The number of things that REALLY matter.  Smaller.  

The older I get, the more time I spend in my head.  This is saying a lot for an extrovert like me.  Oh sure, at a party, I’m the loudest.  Big mouth, funny girl, jokes galore.  But truly, all I ever wanted was to feel safe.  To feel loved.  To have real friends and real people in my life who I could trust.

So I sit today, reconnecting with those ghosts from the past.  Those girls have become women.  They’ve been to hell and back, just like me.  They’ve succeeded, but they are still broken and they are not afraid to admit it.  I don’t have to be somebody else with them.  They will love me.  Years can pass.  They will still love me.  I can disappoint them.  Still, they love me.  I know that I can tell them my deepest, darkest secrets and sins and regrets and hopes and dreams and unrealistic expectations.  Still they will love me.

Today, my friends make me the luckiest woman I know.