Friendship

One reason that my husband and I returned to Scotland was to be closer to our childhood friends. His best man and my maid of honour live (not together) within 20 miles of where we all went to school. Now, we do too. Bright lights, pride parades and many different accents lured us away from rural-ish Scotland and our Doric twang made us something special. We’re not special anymore. We open our mouths and the only surprise is that we don’t work in oil and gas (yet). Who knows if it was the pandemic or parenthood that took us home. Or was it as simple as friendship? Friends to us and uncles, aunties, grandparents and cousins to our son. Some of whom we are related to.

Motherhood is often described as a lonely place but I find it easy to make new friends. I change my spots to fit in. My husband knows himself better than me and he recently described himself as shy. I realised that “shy” isn’t a thing I understand. I know what the word means but that’s not the same as understanding it and so it led us to a conversation about making friends. As Atticus is my first child, I don’t know how much of his behaviour is just standard 15-month-old shenanigans or how much is his personality. Inherited from neither me nor his dad and just plain old Atticus. I do know he will quite comfortably hug a stranger at soft play in a way that I don’t often see other children do. He crawled up to our best man’s wife and sucked her toe in the Summer. Now, I’d never suck a toe but that felt like more of a me trait than a Brad trait. So, although I haven’t experienced the loneliness of motherhood, I have been acutely aware of how important friendship has been to it. I’ve needed, quite literally needed different friends for different things in the past 15 months. Someone whose been there to offload my motherhood worries to, or someone who hasn’t to remind me of life before. I have needed so much from my friends and I’ve not had the mental capacity to give them the same back. I’ve been too tired or too consumed to be the friend that I was before motherhood. Sometimes I’ve not even been polite. Some friendships will survive that and there are others that won’t. You’re just not going to get the best out of someone all the time but is it OK to have a clear out now and again?

Adult friendships are transactional. Perhaps childhood friendships are as well but I was too wrapped up in slammer battles and pog wars to notice. Whilst adults are juggling work, family and health, friendship is often just on the peripheral of priority. But if you neglect friendship, there’s a domino effect that will affect all of the previous. Your mental health might go through the floor but your bank balance will soar as no one wants to make plans with you anymore. Without the same constraints on their resources, children are quite adept at friendships. They all own a t-shirt that says “Be Kind” after all. I remember standing in the playground and participating in a vote over whether the other Emma could still hang out with us. She couldn’t and it wasn’t kind. I am not proud of being a part of that vote but it leaves me to wonder if we’d all be a little happier if adults put as much effort into ending friendships as they do to try and keep them going?

Have you ever attended an event with or for someone you don’t really like? History or common ground or just plain old FOMO stops you from uttering the words, I think they’re a complete bell-end. I’ve found myself sipping strawberry daiquiris with a woman who is by all accounts my arch enemy. She hates me and I’m terrified of her level of psycho. We’ve told each other as much on numerous occasions and yet there we were talking gel nails and tan lines over a quite delicious Paella. It isn’t all together unrealistic to imagine that one day my kid and her kid could have fallen asleep under a table in that partied out fog of exhaustion that toddlers get at weddings. Thankfully, we’ve done all the first weddings now so it could only have occurred at a divorce party and truth be told, I’d probably go to her husband’s divorce party over hers.

That’s the thing in friendships that I don’t think adults have really nailed. When a relationship goes wrong or was wrong to start with, people comment. They take sides and they move on with the rest of their lives. You enter a relationship with a sort of trial period but in friendships no-one ever says, “we’re just taking it slowly”, “we don’t want the same things anymore” or “I’ve changed/you’ve changed/my post code has changed”. Unless there’s some sort of situation, friendships sort of peter out and that inevitably leaves someone feeling hard done by or worse – confused as to what went wrong.

Losing friends is hard but sometimes it is the best thing to happen. I look at my friendships now, the names that are on the first scroll of Whatsapp or who have cheered on my tiling with reckless abandon in lieu of stimulating conversation. There are the ones I can’t seem to shake, the brand ones, mostly virtual ones and new ones that are also old ones. People who share the same accent and none of my opinions and others who would turn heads on the buses saying “Cheers Drive". My echo chamber has been well and truly smashed to smithereens this year. My son hears things like “oh, he’s just a boy’s boy” and it’s not said ironically and I’m flabbergasted every time. But he also hears I love you, over and over again. From people who loved him before they knew him, just because he was a part of me. And now they love him and know him, and they know he is a total legend. I hope he makes friends easily. With boys and girls and the people who are neither. I hope that if he has to end a friendship, he does it gently and I hope if anyone ends a friendship with him, they know that I will hunt them down and I will end them. Because being someone’s friend is a great privilege. It is a great responsibility and it is an investment. I think what I’m saying is that being a friend and having a friend is just lush. And I’m really grateful for mine.