So, a few days ago my husband and I were talking about one of my longstanding friendships. I expressed how glad I was that in the face of some unpleasant backlash I had chosen to maintain this friendship because it meant so much to me at the time. It still means a great deal to me today. Her beautiful and precocious daughter helped us name our little girl and even seemed to predict that she would be a little girl.
My husband asked me if we really are still friends. It's true. We haven't seen each other in a few years, and our lives are very busy. We don't talk as much as I would like, and I miss her terribly, because in my life, she is a real person. That may seem like a weird thing to say, but it's true. I am who I am, and she is who she is and we have valued each other for that honesty even when we haven't been able to spend time together. I think I could probably tell her that I am not perfect and she would understand and accept my worst flaws and errors in judgement better than just about anyone.
I hope she still feels the way I do, and that distance and time don't mean anything to her either.
Not all friendships are like that. Friendship is politeness and overlooking each other's foibles. But sometimes friendship is down and dirty, and it's being willing to work through misunderstandings and each other's individual hard times because we so value that other person in our lives that we aren't willing to let their bad behavior wreck something so hard to find or build.
We are all capable, in our worst moments, of wronging the people we most care about. We are all capable of becoming too comfortable in a relationship to realize that we have overstepped the bounds of that relationship. Sometimes that overstep is the result of believing that our friendship is built upon a much stronger foundation than it really is. It knocks the wind out of us when we realize that something we thought was so real was built on a politeness that we thought we were beyond.
I have written about our hard times--many times. I have written about taking responsibility for making a shambles of some friendships that were very important to me. Sometimes it feels easier to just let something that has become work just die and move on. After all, who needs or wants to rehash a thousand transgressions that can't be taken back? And are those transgressions proof of whom that person really is and therefore whom you no longer want in your life? You're probably justified in simply writing that person off, right?
I think I was able to buy into that up until fifteen months ago. Then it occurred to me that I owe a little girl better than that from myself, even if she never sees it in anyone else. It occurred to me that I want to raise her understanding that it is never too late to try to make a wrong right, even if you gain nothing in the process. She's too young to understand it, but I swallowed my ego and fear, and reached out to someone with whom I had been friends, but had wronged during my own hard times when I couldn't see passed my self. I can't say that we rekindled our broken friendship and that everything went back to the way it had been. It didn't. But I can look myself and my daughter in the eye and tell her that I owned my part of the break and that I took responsibility for my own actions.
In spite of the many mistakes I have made in friendships, I think that I can look back and say that I regained my integrity. It still hurts to lose the friendship, because with such loss, you always lose something of yourself, and you always question the ground beneath your feet going forward.
You start to wonder if friendship just follows a natural cycle like life, and if friendships are just destined to end no matter how much you value them. I don't know the answer to that. I know that distance makes it easier to let people you care about slip away. I know distance and diverging life directions make it more palatable to justify cutting ties with people over silliness.
I think losing friendships is bittersweet because cultivating friendships can be so difficult. As a stay at home introverted mom, I understand this difficulty now more than I ever did before. It's hard to meet new people in your living room, and it's hard to maintain friendships at a distance. And after screwing up so many friendships with personal drama and depression, it's hard sometimes not to feel like losing friendships and failing to develop new ones is your penance. You start to just accept that you are going to spend a lot more time on your own being quietly reflective about what you have lost and you are going to sink in your teeth more deeply to the things you have left.
I wish everything was different. I wish people who make you feel at home in their lives really meant it, and that when you are yourself with them as a result of that welcome they didn't revoke that welcome. I wish that when our friends behaved badly we were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt--even more so in times of trouble. If just one person had been willing to grab me and shake me during the worst of my depression and tell me that they cared enough to let me know I was screwing up, maybe I would still be holding many more friendships dearly. I wish that if there was a side of us that someone didn't like, that they would just say so instead of being polite while inwardly seething. I wish friends were as real as they often pretend to be in the guise of avoiding awkward confrontation and unfortunate, but sometimes inevitable dissolution.
I don't like losing. But I can better accept losing when I do so honestly. I know who I am, and while there are a thousand things about myself I would change, the wheels of that kind of progress and reconstruction turn so slowly that I am sure I could never in my lifetime be everything to myself that I want to be, let alone to my friends and loved ones. I am guessing that many of us feel that way--that we would like to always be the best version of ourselves that we can be, and that we will live our lives in the effort of raising that bar everyday. In recognizing that shared desire and struggle, I guess I would hope that in the name of friendship we could all be just a little kinder, a little more understanding and a little more willing to accept each other warts and all. Someday you may be in need of that benefit of the doubt and weary but accepting shoulder.
I hope that we are really still friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment