GirlTalk

In the Dear Abby column today, it talks about friendship among women.

It’s a subject I have pondered often. On my own and as a mother to my 23-year-old daughter, who is in college in Florida.

I was always able to make friends easily. I think I still do. My daughter has not had as much luck. From my vantage point, it’s because Lindsay is a much more guarded person.

“People judge you,“ she tells me.
“It’s the human condition,“ I explain to her. It’s what makes us human; it’s part of being human among other things.

Not that it’s going to help her have more friends. That’s something that she’s going to have to decide to do on her own - trust people - enough to give them a chance.

Not that all friends are your best friends. Not that all friends can be trusted with 100 percent of your innermost secrets. But on the opposite side of the coin, not all friends turn out to be enemies. Not all friends turn out to be someone you can’t trust.

You live and you learn is the old adage. You learn by trial and error. You learn by making mistakes.

So it is with friends. There is good and bad in every crowd, I tell her.

It’s part of living. We take a chance and make ourselves vulnerable. It’s a gamble. Sometimes we win and sometimes we don’t.

But the wins definitely make the gamble worth it.

And when we sometimes have to move on from a friendship, it can be there as a pleasant memory, serving to remind us that it’s ok to try again.

I don’t have any regular friends right now. And it’s ok, because my life has become so hectic and I feel it wouldn’t be fair to a friendship. A friendship is like a plant. If you water it, and feed it, and love it, it will bloom for you. But if you don’t have time for it, don’t tend it, it withers and dies.

So as a mom, I try to be a kind of friend to my daughter. The kind of friend my own mother had a hard time being. The kind of mothering friend or friendly mother I’d wished I’d had for a long time. Someone who I could tell all too… no matter how outlandish or different. Someone who no matter how different we were, respected our differences and could even cherish them from time to time in their own splendid way.

There are times though when I have to pull back and be the mom (less so as she matures). And when I do, I always let her know that it’s just mom talking.

I don’t know if she always appreciates my friendliness. But she still calls me and we chat a bit almost every day.

But if I can pass on - even a little bit - of the nurturing friendship I’ve experienced along the way, I will. And definitely the love of many a good friend as well.