Me and Fanny McGee

Today’s Globe and Mail ran an article on friendship – female friendships – noting that “While the dissolution of a romantic relationship can be hard, the break-up between best friends can be even more difficult.” Perhaps more difficult still is not having the gift of friendship.

I’m not really sure why the subject of friendship is so preoccupying to me lately. If I scratch the surface to ferret out what may actually be troubling me, I suppose it is a few things: recent contact from high-school friends via Facebook; the increasing oppressive presence of my in-laws that has me dying to explode in a safe space with a venomous self-pity monologue about all the crazy ass things they are doing and saying; ageing.

I often chalk up my neglect of friendships to the huge extended family that I have – there are innumerable aunts and cousins about who I know I can turn to for help, advice, solace. They have known me forever, know my family dynamics, are trustworthy, and care. I don’t need to see them or speak to them all the time – but when the chips are down, we are all there for the other, no questions asked. It is the ultimate safety net. But it isn’t only that many of the personal needs friendships fill are for me filled by family…it is also me. I don’t particularly fare well in the demands of friendship. I suspect I internalize too much, feel too hard, empathize too intensely, and ultimately get burned out. I also suspect that the relationship with my extended family, where contact and check-ins are not part of the equation to love and support, means that I am a bad friend…I figure I am there if you need me full stop, but not so much for the casual chat. And the art of the casual chat, it seems to me, is the basis of many friendships.

I suppose too that I haven’t ever been comfortable in groups – circles of women who meet, share, support and have fun. I never was. Even doing gender studies in university and graduate school did not change my aversion to anything that smacked of “group sharing” – I seem to recoil from exposing myself in any meaningful and honest way at all to a group.

So why does the subject of friendship interest me so much lately? Surely it isn’t just because of a few voices from the past, the pressures of in-law cohabitation, or feeling mortal. Maybe it is being at a stage in my life where I am finally quite chuffed with life – I love (while also hating) my career, I have an amazing, funny, smart and drop-dead gorgeous husband who I adore, I am a Mom to the bestest little boys ever - and who ever thought THAT would happen! - my life has become what I never, ever thought it would be. So maybe it is simply that, when I managed through no planning or good management on my part to have everything I long thought was out of reach, I have relaxed enough to wonder how others, how those who long ago or not so long ago crossed my path and whom I remember kindly and fondly, are.

Or maybe, for the first time in my life, I am in sore need for a girls' night out and have no idea how to go about having a girls' night out, unless it is taking Fan the dog for her last walk of the day. Any ideas out there?

I wouldn't trade my boys for anything....so there!

It is odd what people remember of you, what footprint you have made in their memory. This struck me full in the face the other day when someone who had known me through elementary and high school heard that I had two boys…her comment was, “Oh, I’m so sorry. You always said you only wanted to have girls.” Now, this is someone that knew me well back in the day – very well – and whom I haven’t seen or had any contact with in a literal lifetime. And this is what she remembered about me – this casual, uninformed, youthful throw away comment that I wanted, if I had children, to have girls. And she held that opinion out to me as I had just uttered it yesterday. As though no time, growth, or maturing had occurred in the intervening years. And don’t get me started that her comment was one that tainted the joy I had felt in telling her that I had two beautiful, bright, engaging and unbelievably funny little boys.

This is the footprint that I had left. Not that we had spent hours at school, and later in the evening, on the phone, laughing and gossiping. Not the family camping trips I had been included on, or the insecurities and fears of adolescence that we had supported each other through. Not that we had managed to maintain a close friendship through a complete lack of shared interests, separations, different world views.

And that’s just the thing. What do friends we have fallen out of touch with over the years remember about us? And how is it that friends we had all throughout childhood and early adulthood can become people we don’t recognize, that we wouldn’t likely befriend now?

There are people from my past that I remember very fondly, whose footprints in my memory are warm, firm, and when taken out and looked at bring me back to a place where, even if I didn’t particularly like myself at the time, make me remember and reflect that there was someone else who did. But now I’m not sure that I want to re-encounter them, to reveal myself to them as I am now – for what if they too have captured a memory of me that rings false me, to who I am know, and who I know I really, truly was then.

What is friendship? How does it change over time, after years without contact, through different life circumstances? I’m not sure if these are the questions that have been nagging at me for a few weeks now, or if it isn’t more the question of what does age mean or matter? Either way, I am uncharacteristically uncertain and rocked.

I met up with a friend from high school recently. We hadn’t seen each other or been in contact since we were about 19 – except for one brief encounter at the train station over 10 years ago. We had shared an underage love of vodka, coffee and cigarettes, skipped classes together, gossiped together – she was who I wanted to be with when the urge to be naughty and risky struck me during my teenage years. She was vibrant, alive, with a cutting, intelligent wit and she was undeniably beautiful - with flashing dark eyes, high cheekbones, long, dark, dramatic hair and pale skin. The perfect foil for my anonymous Nordic blondness.

So arranging to see her after so many years was exciting and fun – I was full of anticipation of a new, yet familiar playmate to burn off some energy with, laugh about life with, be a bit naughty with – someone who knew me, but didn’t know me...

She is ill. Seriously ill. Her speech is difficult, halted, breathless, unable to support intonation. Her hands are locked in spasms. She walks with aid of a cane. Her children are almost a full generation older than my own ...her son old enough to have fathered my eldest. She feels her life has been lived. I feel like I am finally just getting started. My marriage is new, my children still babies. My career is still ascending, my household a state of perpetual confusion despite outsourcing about all aspects of its care and upkeep. She seems, and not just because of being ill, in her outlook, her experiences, her interests to be a generation older than I.

But we were friends. We know things about each other that go deep and are still true. Is this enough to support the renewal of a friendship? Can I be good enough, evolved enough, to see past who she was and accept who she is and befriend that woman? Can I admit in my heart that what really has rocked me was that she is a real, breathing reminder of my own mortality, of the fragility of my life, of my quickly ebbing youth? Can I come to terms with my fear that knowing her – this new her – does not mean that I have become old too?