On Friendship
My son broke my heart yesterday. Over dinner, he lamented the stay-at-home order because he would not be able to say goodbye to his friends before we move to North Dakota. The twins are just hitting that age where friends are important. The age where kids begin to discover that not everyone likes the same things, has the same opinions, or acts in the same way. It’s the beginning of discovering who they are and who they want to be within a social group.
From the age of six to the age of twelve, I had a different set of friends each year based on who was sorted into my class for the school year. These friends were often completely separate from the group of neighborhood kids of various ages that became like family during the summer. The true end of summer was always the posting of class lists on schoolroom doors, the annual ritual that foreshadowed happiness or despair depending on the number of allies listed in line with my name.
It wasn’t until ninth grade that I made the friends who would truly shape my life. Sitting in Honors English and Geometry, I discovered “my people.” People who laughed at Monty Python, had no interest in sports, and were willing to watch Audrey Hepburn movie marathons with me. People who would read Shakespeare in phony British accents and debate the merit of various 80’s bands. Honestly, those are still some of my criteria, though I’ve added more over the years, like “works in a library” or “loves Jane Austen.”
It’s so easy to make friends in adolescence because everything feels so important and new. That first year of what I think of as my “forever friends,” I was feeling rather morose as the holidays approached. We were living in an apartment that didn’t feel like home yet. We had barely any furniture — my sister and I split the bed of my childhood by one of us taking the mattress and the other the box spring every night. Our living room consisted of two kitchen chairs and a lamp perched on a stack of boxes for an end table. There would be no Christmas tree this year because we’d gotten rid of it when we had to move out of our house when we could no longer afford the mortgage. There would probably be little in the way of gifts because my parents were still struggling to pay for the apartment. And family gatherings were strained because my father wasn’t speaking to my mother’s mother because she’d kicked us out of her house after a year of awkward cohabitation that put a strain on all of us.
I will never forget opening the door to my friends, who had purchased a mini tree and decorated it with small ornaments. They had also pooled their money to get me a gift card so that I could join them for a weekend at Great Northern Mall. I usually avoided these crucial bonding times because I had no money and I hated that my friends were paying for drinks or food just so I could tag along. I think my friend Lindsay alone spent hundreds of dollars at KFC that year so we could walk there after school and talk before heading home.
My closest friend at this time was Lexie. We had so much in common and I admired her because she knew about art and wanted to go to plays, and she didn’t seem to care that other girls thought her style was weird or that her love of culture was pretentious. I loved art, too, but I hadn’t experienced it the way Lexie had by researching different periods and styles and visiting the art museum downtown. The Cleveland Museum of Art is one of the best in the world and free to the public, but I had never been there until Lexie introduced me to the galleries. I still have the necklace that Lexie made me for a graduation present, and we still call each other every November around our birthdays — exactly three weeks apart.
Lexie was later the source of another one of my long-term friends, much to her constant irritation. Doug was a year ahead of us, but there were a few juniors in our Chemistry class. Doug and I worked on a group project together with two other girls, and from then on we were friends. Thinking back now, both Doug and I admit that we were kind of interested in each other. But then, during another friend’s birthday party, Lexie told me she liked him. She asked him out, and from then on he was hers.
I don’t flirt. At least, not in the way that other girls flirt to get boys’ attention. With the very important exception of my current husband, I’ve never been interested in dating someone the first time I met them. (And in this case, he was friends with my sister first, so I knew he was a good guy. Major apologies to my sister for pouncing on and dating her friend after one night — this was a major fight with her for several months until she realized we were serious.) In most cases, if you were interested in dating me, you had to start out as my friend. Which meant that any guy in our group of friends was going to get crushed on at some point, and I pretty much treated every guy friend the same way as I treated people I was interested in. This resulted in a lot of confusion for everyone, and I ended up going on quite a few “dates,” without realizing that the other person wanted more than to just hang out. My bad.
I think Lexie sensed that Doug and I originally liked each other, and she has a jealous streak a mile wide. The whole time she and Doug were dating, I felt like she was cursing me behind my back for being nice to him. But I still loved my best friend, and I knew this was one of her faults. We never really argued about it, but I was very happy when their relationship ended and I could just be friends with Doug without worrying that I was hurting her.
I met two of my other best friends, Greg and Sara, that all important freshman year, but they didn’t become important to me until much later. Greg was the nice boy who sat in front of me in Honors English. The night of open house, my mother came home and announced that she had recognized the father who sat in front of her in that classroom. Apparently, our parents had gone to school together. We struck up a conversation that would lead to a Homecoming date, a lot of college correspondence, and the only non-family member that has attended both of my weddings. He has helped me move three times (twice when I wasn’t even there due to working at the library on a Saturday), including one horrible winter move during a blizzard as I battled a fever and had only four hours to get all of my worldly belongings from the house of my soon-to-be ex-husband. True friendship is putting together a toddler bed while the mother of said toddler takes a nap on the couch delirious with the flu.
Sara sat next to me in Geometry, and we ate lunch together after Honors English. I have to be honest, in the beginning she drove me crazy. I drove her crazy, too, so we had that in common from the start. I think both of us were struggling with family issues during our adolescent years, and both of us were ready to be independent and running our own lives. As adults, we are both strong-willed, take-charge women. And that is why she remains my best friend today. When things go wrong in life, Sara is the person I call to listen to me vent and help me come up with a solution. But the venting comes first — we love nothing more than a good bitch fest over drinks and dinner!
I’m so lucky to have Sara because we remember those times when we weren’t really friends and we can remind each other how important it is to grow into your relationships. Sara’s the one I want to room with in the old age home when my kids are grown and tired of me. Our husbands will be welcome as well, but by that point we may just make it a permanent sleepover.
Sophomore year, while Lexie and Doug were pairing up, I was enjoying my first year of Mustang Express, the high school show choir. I never really felt like I fit in with the choir kids. My voice wasn’t as good as most of the girls singing around me, and most of them were popular and beautiful. I remember one night after an invitational performance, all of us were invited to dance to some music with the other choirs. I was fine until a slow song came on. Suddenly, everyone paired off and I made a beeline for the drinks.
The show choir had a band that traveled with us and performed our music. About halfway through the year, a brand new guitarist, John, came in, and during our free time before a performance, he struck up “Bruce’s Philosopher’s Song.” I knew most of the words, and sang along. A brilliant friendship was forged over Monty Python.
Lexie, Sara, Greg, Doug, and John are the friends that got me through my divorce. Leaving my first husband and taking my toddler son to live in a two bedroom apartment with my parents is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I had no job. I had not finished my Master’s Degree, so I was not yet a librarian. I had almost nothing in my name aside from my Honda Civic and a bunch of credit cards carrying immense debt. I was going to have student loans. I was broken in so many ways and I didn’t know how to fix anything.
There were other friends helping me with the fight. Ashlie, who paid for a lawyer visit, helped Greg move me out during the snow storm, and stored a ton of my stuff until I had a place of my own. Tracie, who was my very first “library friend” as well as my first “mommy friend,” gave me a place to run to when my house was unbearable, with the excuse that I was taking my young son to see Tracie’s son. Countless others were there for support.
But John and Lexie were the only ones getting calls at midnight with me sobbing about how miserable I was and confessing how afraid I was to get out. Sara and Doug were the ones providing laughter and encouraging me to do more than I thought I could in career and life. I will always be grateful to Doug for providing a place to stay so I could get away for a weekend — I was so terrified to drive to Philadelphia by myself, but he believed I could do it, so I did. Sara, one of the only friends who regularly saw my husband and I together during our marriage, watched it all crumble and reminded me that I was better than the mess I was in.
And Greg was there the night I almost got thrown out of my house. The night my husband found a diary I had been keeping and discovered just how long I’d been planning on leaving. The night I finally told him the reason I couldn’t stay. The night that horrible threats were made.
As I rode the wave that carried me out of my divorce and into independence, I met Jill. Jill and I are friends because our sons were best friends in preschool. We are friends because we both went through divorces while our children were small. We are friends because we genuinely like each other and we get along amazingly well. You can’t keep all of your “mommy friends” once your children are no longer friends. The ones you keep are precious.
It’s funny how one event can be the dividing line in your life. Because of my divorce, I got a new job and a career that I loved. Because I had a career, I met wonderful new people. Because I met these people, I have new “forever friends.”
I once read that “work friends are not real friends.” Which is true. As you move on to new positions and new jobs, the every day ties that held you together will most likely break. Work friends are not real friends. Until they are.
My first forever work friend was Sharon. She is old enough to be my grandmother, and as a teenager working at Sears, she often seemed like a third grandmother that I always looked forward to seeing at the cash register. After I graduated and went off to college, I would still stop in to see her when I headed to the mall to shop. When I learned that I had Crohn’s disease, she told me the story of her colectomy from colon cancer. She needed to walk to keep her bones healthy, so I started to join her in the summer when I was home from school.
Over those walks, I began to admire Sharon more as she told me about being a teacher, getting through college, and getting a divorce. When I got married for the first time, she made me a quilt. A second one arrived when my first son was born. Sharon now lives in Florida with her son and his family, but she never fails to send me a birthday card and a Christmas card every year. I’m so lucky to have this woman in my life as an example of how to get through life’s bumps with grace and dignity.
I said that Tracie was my first “library” friend because we were both paraprofessionals at the Lakewood Public Library. Tracie didn’t continue to work in libraries after her son was born, but we still try to keep up with each other even though we live in different states.
The list of the wonderful people who have touched my life in libraries is too long to write, but there are some friends that I know will follow me beyond the work that held us together.
Megan and I met in library school, and we were good enough friends at that time that she found me two cats to adopt and I invited her to my baby shower for my first born. When, many years later, an opening came up at my library, I remembered her interest in working with teens and recommended she apply for the job even though we’d only been professional acquaintances for quite some time.
Poor Megan. I thought I was helping her find a place where she could move up to a management position and where she could grow professionally. Instead, our vindictive Assistant Director blacklisted her and made her life a living hell for most of her time at my library. But, oh, did I love having her there. It was so good to have someone to confide in when I just needed to vent. And a partner in crime when I was trying to stretch the boundaries of what our library could do. And we laughed. Every day. In urban libraries, you need to laugh or you will spend your life crying over all the things you cannot fix in the world.
I met Marisa at a meeting for librarians across the state trying to get other librarians to understand the science behind early literacy learning. We sat next to each other, learned we were the only non-managers in the meeting, and instantly bonded. Both of us were thinking the same thing. “I hope this girl likes me, because I SO want to be friends with her.” And we were.
People, it is a miracle to make such close friends instantly as an adult. (And as I typed that sentence, I heard Marisa’s voice saying it in my head.) It is hard to know who to trust and who will be worth the effort of opening your heart and spending the emotional currency to keep the friendship going. Hang on to these people like the social life rafts they are.
Janet and I were cleaning up after a training session in Southeastern Ohio when I got a nasty text from my ex. We were just officially divorced, and feelings were still raw. Right there in the parking lot I had a bit of a breakdown, but Janet kept me tethered. When she invited me to room with her at a library meeting in Hershey, PA, I was surprised and excited that she thought enough of me to want me to come. She’s been an inspiration to me, and I marvel that she chose me to be her friend.
At another library meeting, this time in Newport, RI, I met Cathy. It was another one of those almost instant friendships. I sat behind her during the long sessions, and joked with her, trying to explain the rivalry between Michigan and Ohio (not just the sports battles, but the actual states) and how it all started with Toledo. One very long hike across the bluffs in front of the Gilded Age mansions, and that was it.
There are so many good friends who have come and gone in my life, and these are just a few that have stood the test of time. This doesn’t count the family that are now also friends — my sister, my cousins, my cousins-in-law.
As I listen to my kids lament the loss of their school friends this year, I am thinking about my own friends and how I’m going to work to keep them once we’ve gone. Facebook helps, but it’s not enough. As all of us are going through this social distancing dance, we’re falling back on email and text and phone calls for the words we’d normally say in person. I may not get to see my friends to say goodbye.
It’s such a small thing, but I’m starting to feel how short life really is and how much people really mean to me. So, I’m embracing the sap and saying something I don’t say enough — I love you all, and thank you for being my friend.
