You’ve got a friend…still.

 

 

When Carole King’s iconic song about friendship first hit the radio waves, I was fresh out of high school and had just landed a job at a drop-in centre for the wave of teens thumbing their way across the country in the summer of 1971.  It was a heady time to be young and free, and the world seemed full of possibility and promise. I believed in Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, that the words to ‘All You Need is Love’ were true and that every day was the first day of the rest of my life, although in my rush to get to the next one, I missed the point altogether.

Sprung loose from the social confines of high school –where I figured somewhere near the bottom – I was happy to discover that my shyness there had been more to do with not fitting in, and that in my new life, friends—and one in particular—were more readily made. 

She was four years older, and for the nearly-17-year-old that I was, it could have felt like a bigger difference, but we clicked immediately. It was a bit like falling in love. We were amazed to discover how much we had in common and full of the delight of an intense connection. We spent as much together as we could and when our paltry paycheques would allow, went out for meals together at a funky restaurant downtown where we talked for hours about philosophy, psychology, love, politics, books, friendship, music, our place in the world and our dreams for the future. She was bright and funny, insightful and vulnerable.  I was honoured by her trust and confidence, and gave her mine.  We felt so familiar to each other that the only possible explanation seemed to be that we’d been friends in a previous life. 

Years went by and we stayed close. She got a degree and a husband, while my career path zig-zagged from one thing to another, and boyfriends came and went. She had children and became a full-time mother; I lived on my own and loved being free to travel whenever I could. When the funky restaurant closed its doors for good, we went suburban and Italian, still meeting nearly every week to talk until closing over lasagne and endless cups of coffee. Words and ideas were our mutual loves; our discussions sometimes so stimulating that electricity seemed to shoot from our fingertips.   

We finished each other’s sentences, shared a similar life perspective and sense of humour,  wore the same styles, and could almost have been taken for sisters. I respected her judgement and learned from her experience.  When later I had children of my own, she was my role model for motherhood. There were times when she faced problems so difficult that she retreated from the world, but even there she saved a place for me.  Our friendship survived a long separation and one early, major disagreement that we both were thankful had no long-lasting effect.  I never considered for a moment that it could be lost.

A certain ebb and flow in a friendship is natural, and often linked to geographical, professional or lifestyle changes. Some friendships are situational and don’t last once the kids stop playing soccer or going to the same school.  On a couple of occasions I’ve avoided getting in touch with someone after a long absence out of embarrassment over my own inattention, and worried that maybe that very tardy phone call or email will only make more obvious just how ‘out of mind’ they were.

There are 9 to 5 friendships that can’t always make the move outside the office.  Or sometimes, although there seems to be enough start-up interest for a lasting relationship, the common ground simply erodes, leaving you to later ponder, “gee, whatever happened to.....?”. But in the case of close friendships, in the absence of an obvious trigger, there is a need to understand why they falter and die.

My once-close friend of thirty-five years has been silent for three years now – for what reason, I have no idea. She might have been ill, or depressed, or didn’t have energy or desire to pursue a friendship that she might have felt had run its course. I tried to find out, but after a while I had to accept that her unspoken message in not replying to mine was clear.  A last attempt at reconnection—a letter I wrote to her in the hope that she would understand that her absence needed neither apology nor explanation—got no response.  I believe that I have to respect what appears to have been a decision made.  All I know for sure is that she’s still around, but I only ever see her in dreams from which I awaken feeling unsettled and sad.

It’s a bit naive to think that the book-ends of friendship should or could be announced, the way children often do. “I want to be friends with you”, a six-year-old might say—or the opposite! For an adult to confirm that a friendship term is up is potentially confrontational, almost certainly hurtful, and not really workable. When do you say it, and how? In some cases it’s unnecessary—everybody knows the score—but when it involves a friendship that felt like sisterhood, the lack of an explanation is a heavy weight.  Not knowing why or how compounds the loss.   

A very decent young fellow I know who had been happily involved for several months with someone he thought was ‘the most sincere girl I had ever met’ has found himself in this situation.  His girlfriend broke up with him by simply disappearing off his radar, not answering messages and deleting his plea to get in touch from her Facebook page. He was left to draw his own conclusion that no news meant bad news for him, and it has ripped him apart not only to have lost her, but to be treated with such apparent thoughtlessness.  

We’ve all heard stories about wives who leave husbands (or the other way around) out of the blue—just pack up and go—leaving the other to grope in the dark for answers.  We might roll our eyes at the idea that anyone could be so oblivious, but the fact that these spouses missed all the warning signs does not make the agony of not knowing why any less awful. A fellow I knew from high school was left in this manner, and it took years of therapy for him to finally come to terms with the fact that he would never have any kind of explanation for his wife’s decision. He wasn’t trying to find an answer that would satisfy—he only wanted to hear a reason. Something. Anything that could help him half-way understand how the woman he had loved and lived with for fifteen years could put an end to their life together, just like that.  When I decided to end my marriage, his story was part of the reason I believed I owed my husband a complete explanation, and he got it, over many long and difficult conversations. It didn’t make him feel any better and I’m not sure he really understood the ‘why’, but it did give him, I hoped, something to hang his hat on.

In one of her excellent posts on the nature of humans, Bonnie of Original Art Studio writes about the torment of unanswered ‘whys’ and how asking different questions like ‘how did I contribute to..?’ or ‘what will I do next time?’ can be productive and bring understanding and peace of mind. Her excellent suggestions are well worth reading; they are based on sound principles and certainly effective for many situations.

But for the inexplicable rupture of a good friendship or established relationship, in the unanswered, “Why did you leave without saying anything?”  is the echo,  “How could you think you mattered so little to me?”

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Writing as an orgasmic experience

Oops, I hit ‘publish’ a little too soon and this post didn’t go where it was supposed to.  It’s now where it should be at http://friko-fridgesoup.blogspot.com/

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Do you consider your kids your friends?

 

One morning when I was about twenty-one, my mother called me up to say she’d been doing some thinking about the women she was close to and had realized that, of all of them, I was her best friend.  I remember feeling flattered to have confirmation of my adult status, and very pleased that she considered me a sort of peer-equivalent. My own best friend, when I told her about this, was sceptical. Although she had a good relationship with her mother, she didn’t believe it was really possible to be friends- let alone a best one - with your mom, no matter how well you got along. I didn’t want her to be right, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I suspected that she was.

As the years unfolded and we got older, we became a little different, too.  For various reasons and in unrelated ways, both friendships changed.  My mother went back to just being my mother, my best friend and I drifted apart, and I had children – two sons and a daughter in the middle.

In broad terms, my generation – the boomers – has taken a very different attitude towards parenting than the one our parents had. We are more involved in our children’s lives, less authoritarian, more approachable, and often opt to avoid top-down parenting in favour of nourishing what could be construed as a friendship with our children. I fall squarely into this category.

My twenty-one year old son, the youngest, believes that our relationship is unique among his friends and their parents. We’re so tight, he says, and sometimes wonders why this is so. My daughter would say that we get along well and are quite close, but wouldn’t go as far as her brother in defining the relationship as unusual. Their older brother, at twenty six, is a stand-alone guy insulated in his own world where I am not a frequent visitor. He freely acknowledges his love for his family, including me, but there is not quite the same degree of sharing – of experiences or confidences – that there is with the other two. I delight in the compatibility we all seem to have and I appreciate, no, I’m grateful that we have been spared, for the most part, the misunderstandings and resentment that can estrange children from their parents. 

But as my children matured into adulthood, I often thought about what my mother had said and have come to the conclusion that my once-best friend was right. My youngest son has entrusted me with some of his deepest feelings and loves the fact that we can talk cars and jam Radiohead together. My daughter and I laugh at the same ridiculous things, share a love of music, traveling and story-telling, and she is honest and authentic with me. My biggest son knows I’m his biggest fan and is mutually supportive of my efforts, and when he needs an ear, he trusts me to listen. But am I their friend?

Once a parent, always a figure of some kind of authority, the way I see it. Our parent-child relationships get more egalitarian all the time, certainly, but I could not stop taking a mother’s perspective any more than I could change my personality. Nor can my children ever completely get past the history of our first decade or so together, when I was the go-to person for nearly everything, the sun around which their world revolved, the final arbiter, and sometimes, the wicked witch. The essential difference between the relationship I have with friends of my own choosing, and the one I have with the beings I cherish most in the world is that my children and I did not come into our relationship as equals.

You might agree with the definition of friendship so gracefully phrased by Dinah Mulock Craik almost a century and a half ago, which says,

‘Friendship is the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring all right out just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful friendly hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping and, with a breath of comfort, blow the rest away.’

It’s an idealistic vision, in that ‘having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words’ has sunk more than a few friendships, but in principle this kind of trust and openness are what the strongest relationships have in common. For a child to feel this way about a parent means that the nuances of friendship are overlaid on the bedrock of parental love, but does it work the other way around?

Is it unrealistic to believe that the elemental role of a parent can be replaced with genuine friendship once children reach adulthood? For a while when I was a daughter, I had thought maybe it could.  Now that I’m a mother I’m sure it can’t.     

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Well, there’s always the men’s department

 
When I need a break from writing my best-selling novel, the internet is the place I go – it’s  so much less stressful than trying to move that pivotal sex scene forward with dialogue. I take a look at the news for the umpteenth time,  re-read my sent emails and sometimes do a little online shopping.  I prefer that to the real thing for several reason; for starters, there’s the phenomenal choice minus the pressure to buy, and there’s no clerk eyeing your every move when you say you’re ‘only looking’.  

(According to the French newsmagazine l’Express, only 2% of online browsers actually make a purchase from sites they visit, compared to 55% of walk-in shoppers in the real world.  This is no surprise, but the French love a challenge and have set up a sort of  bureau for the Conversion of the Reluctant E-Shopper.  Just imagine what the Russians could do with that.)

Generally I only ever shop online for two things – cheap airline tickets and big shoes.  Like 4 out of 5 women, I have a thing for footwear, but by an accident of genetics I have been denied the thrill of investing in the money pit that is a closet full of shoes.  On my first visit to the UK in 1969 – when Buying British was still a bargain – my right foot was measured by a weedy shoe shop clerk who was so astonished by the result that he blurted, ‘Good Lord, Miss, your feet are enormous!!’  Fourteen-year-old girls do not handle news like this well, especially when it makes other people’s heads turn.   

That traumatic experience has haunted me since.  When I want  new footwear (as opposed to needing any)  I either go online or to the one out-of-the-way store in Canada where asking for my size doesn’t get a blank look or a giggle.  Sometimes I forget myself when I’m in a shopping centre, overcome by a yearning desire to have a pair of lovely shoes like the ones in the window. There’s a special tone I use for these occasions – casual, not obviously hopeful, an I’m-a-big-girl-and-I-can-take-rejection  – because I already know perfectly well that I’m wasting my time and no they won’t have those Manolo Blahnik knock-offs in a size 12US/10UK/43.5EU.    

So yesterday I wandered over to the Clarks UK website because the  ugly, cloggy, incredibly comfortable  things currently on my feet are starting to wear out.  Clarks has always been faithful to my particular needs, even if their stuff is not exactly what you want to wear to the opera.   I ticked the option to sort results by size and came up with…exactly nothing.  Never mind the style, there was not a single pair of shoes my size to be found on the entire website! 

Dear Clarks, I emailed, please tell me there’s some mistake.

The answer came back within the hour, assuring me that Clarks and Co understood my distress, but that, ‘regrettably, due to a drop in popularity of size 10s’ they had taken the difficult decision to discontinue this size. 

A DROP in POPULARITY??   What, size 10s just aren’t trendy any more? Or maybe I've been missing out on the whole optional part of shoe sizing, in which case I want to be a 7!  

Are big-footed women abandoning shoe-wearing altogether, or have they become an endangered species? Gad, maybe it’s an age-related thing and we’re dying out.  Get me some duct tape. I’m going to have to keep these things going for a while yet.

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Not Bad, eh???

  Photo:  Facebook Wall, Vancouver 2010 Olympics

Any Canadian worth their mukluks was either in Vancouver or in front of their TV set last night to take in the showdown between the two best teams in Olympic hockey.  All across the nation we chewed our nails, sucked in our collective breaths, groaned in disappointment and roared our approval for what seemed like the longest 67 minutes and forty seconds of play the game has ever known. 

In the grandstands, thousands of  Maple Leafs waved and fluttered in a sea of red and white, declaring our love for our country and our game.   Not only was the prettiest medal at stake, but so was an Olympic record for the most gold medals ever won by a single country in the history of the Games.  And what’s more, it was all happening on our home turf!  We were swept up by a utterly unprecedented patriotic fervour, throwing off our usual self-effacement to openly revel in how far we had come.   

A French commentator said of Olympic contenders that ‘it is the marriage of their athleticism and our emotion’ that makes the Games so magical.  Heartbreak, pride, bitter disappointment and ecstasy were writ large across these last two weeks and it is all athletes  of whom the world is rightly proud.  In quintessentially Canadian fashion, although we wanted to think we could do it, and went into the games with uncharacteristic braggadocio, had we not been able to pull the whole thing off – including beating Mother Nature at her own game – we wouldn’t really have been surprised.    

When the men of hockey clinched the deal, the country erupted in an explosion of joy.  There has never before been, in the history of Canada, an event that has brought the entire nation to its feet and pouring into the streets, from coast to coast to coast.   For us, Sidney Crosby fired the shot heard ‘round the world.  But his winning goal was more than just the icing on the cake – it was a seminal moment for the Canadian psyche.  We took on the world and we won, and we might never be quite the same again.  

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