****Happy Birthday, to my blue-eyed (yes, they’re blue!) baby. Your intelligence, truthfulness, humor, and resilience has me in awe, always. I’m so proud of you and excited for your next big steps! Your mama always has your back.****
“a sitcom about a friend group where not everyone is in every episode because they have other friends they like to hang out with sometimes” – @Dave_Horwitz
“We need to start talking about abusive friendships where there’s shaming, jealousy, or different levels of emotional manipulation. Abuse isn’t something that only happens in romantic relationships.” – Dr. Nicole LaPera
I had a fascinating text exchange with good friends of mine yesterday. One friend was lamenting as to whether she wanted to go to a neighborhood Christmas party or not, because a “frenemy” in that group recently posted a picture of a more exclusive holiday experience with just a few people in their long-standing neighborhood friend group. There was a lot more to this story, and it’s not my story to tell, but it brought up a broader, interesting conversation about friendships, in general.
Who hasn’t been in situations like these? When our children were little we lived in a huge neighborhood in North Carolina with a neighborhood pool club, which served as ‘neighborhood central’. Our local elementary school was primarily just for our neighborhood. Our friendships were mostly created by having children in the same age groups. It was honestly a wonderful, love-filled experience for us, and for our children, and we all have fond memories of living there. But, of course, no friend groups exist without drama. There were inevitable cliques, and underhanded, toxic situations that demanded that people “take sides”. There were brutal betrayals, and as children grew up and many of us moved on to different pastures, “what was” is now just a fond memory, with the hazy edges of letting the bad stuff fall off, and the good stuff still be at the heart of the memories.
In our discussion about friendships, one friend noted that she has been burned enough in friendships, that she finds that she experiences more social anxiety than she ever has before. Even with us all being in our fifties and older, and being older and wiser, we still worry about what people think about us, even though logically, we all know better than to do so. As the wisdom is often said – “What someone thinks of me, is none of my business.”
My own experience in my friendships, since I was a kid, was to stay in my comfort zone, i.e. “on the peripheral.” I’ve always been a wanderer. I’ve been included in a lot of different groups throughout my life. My nerdy book club friends have always been every bit as important to me as my fun, party friends, and my longtime, “I knew you when” friends, and my intimate soul sisters, who got together in an organic fashion to understand how to help each other to feel better. Thankfully, I am married to my best friend, so I’ve never felt a need to find “a bestie” outside of our relationship. I’ve always been welcomed by a lot of different kinds of people, but I’ve never been anyone’s “maid of honor.” And I’m cool with that fact. I feel safe and free and less committal on the periphery. I find that there are less expectations, less drama, and less likelihood of really angering someone, when you are on the periphery. It helps that I like being by myself a lot, too. Perhaps I am my own best bestie? I don’t know how to armchair psycholize myself in regards to my friendships, other than to say, I am mostly pleased and satisfied with my friendships in my life and my place in them. Do my feelings occasionally get hurt when I am not included in something? Of course. I’m human. But ultimately, I’m satisfied with the relationships in my life. Being a satellite sister is the right place for me.
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.