On Friendship

As a teenager and a young woman, I longed for the kind of friendships I had before our move overseas broke most of my relationships irrevocably.

My new school overwhelmed me, and I cultivated the aura of a cynical outsider in what I suspect was a very poor attempt to mask my throbbing, hurt feelings. College was much the same, with a healthy dose of cultural disconnect adding to my troubles. Spending just shy of three years in a foreign country left me bereft of the pop references upon which strangers can find common ground.

Witness the second week of my freshman year, when, bewildered by talk of something called the “New Kids” and horrified by my new roommate’s immediate, irrational and visceral hatred for me, I sat on the floor in my closet weeping and begging my parents over the phone to come and get me.

Eventually I found my path, albeit a lonely one. But, as a wise man once wrote, I had my books and my poetry to protect me. I worked and I wrote and I eventually made it out of college – only to wind back up at home again.

Only it wasn’t home. It was the place where I once lived, a place that held echoes of a girl who no longer existed. My friends and I searched for and failed to find a comfortable place to meet. I was different, and they seemed to me to be the same.

Years and years I wandered, looking for kinship among women that always eluded me.

When we moved to Chambana, I had only just begun to tentatively reach out to other young mothers. It was no longer a matter of wanting – I needed to find someone, anyone, with whom I could share the terrors and triumphs of new parenthood.

I dreaded coming to a new place, dreaded reaching out to absolute strangers. In the past, that only netted me painful humiliation.

But something changed. Maybe it is the common currency of children, a topic upon which we mothers are always eager to expound.

This one only eats cheese, you say.

Oh, I know! We are on a chicken fingers kick, she replies.

I’ve been lucky, dare I say blessed, even, to have found here in the wilds of the middle west some women with whom I feel a real connection. Women whose intellect and warmth never fail to engage me.

Women who I can call my friends.

Today I made a very embarrassing blunder, one I’d like to chalk up to the baby who ate my brain, but closer to the truth is that sometimes I am just disorganized and stupid.

I showed up to a birthday party nearly five hours late, and rang the doorbell while the birthday girl napped. Her mother answered the door with a “shhhhhh” and ushered us in the house.

“We missed it,” I said.

“I was worried about you guys!’ she said.

And then we sat down at her table, she fed my daughter cake and gave her balloons, and made us feel at home with her in-laws.

Cheeks burning, I apologized over and over and over, and yet again as we left an hour later.

“Listen,” my friend said, brown eyes smiling. “I know you are embarrassed, but it is really OK. We got to have our own party, and I got to spend a lot more time with you than I would have if you’d been here this morning.”

She handed me a plate full of cake and waved as we walked out the door.

Long ago I resigned myself to a life devoid of real feminine friendship. But here, on this windy prairie, I found it in the most unexpected of places.