Old Friends Are the Best
In The Lies Our Children Tell, I write about two friends who have known each other since university. Exploring the dynamics of a decades-old friendship appealed to me because I am fortunate enough to still have friends from school and from university and, like Nicky and Sabine in the book, these old friends are like family to me. Maybe that’s easier for me to say, since I am adopted, and so the only people I know who are related to me by blood are my own children, but many of my friends say they feel the same way.
If I’m honest, my female friends have become even more important to me as we’ve grown older. This is because they have gone through many of the same experiences I have, and emerged wiser, fiercer and stronger than ever. But these relationships have not always been simple. Friendships go through phases, and negotiating platonic relationships can be as complex as maintaining romantic ones.
In my teens, my female friends felt like they were everything, but teenage girls can be disloyal, and I was no different as I struggled to claim my place in the pack and secure the attentions of my latest crush. I loved my friends fiercely, but didn’t have the maturity to prioritise them above what my hormones screamed for. I still intermittently apologise to one of my dearest old friends for kissing a boy I knew she liked. She says she still hasn’t forgiven me, but she says it with a smile on her face, whilst pouring me another glass of wine.
In our twenties, my friends and I were busy building careers, homes and relationships. Friendships often took a back seat to partners and jobs. Nights out were replaced by cosy evenings a deux, or endless hours with our inboxes.
Then, for many of us, our thirties were a jangling mess of kids. During this period, I saw more of other local mums than of my old friends. They were always a reassuring background force, but they lived too far away to see regularly, especially considering the organisation that went into a trip to the supermarket, never mind a weekend in another town. And, like me their autonomy had been usurped by a tiny human who swallowed down their time and attention along with their milk.
When my forties arrived, they brought their own issues, (What … I’m meant to maintain this life I’ve established … forever? And who turned up the heating?) They were also my time to recalibrate, to become myself again; to rediscover what was really important to me.
One of the things I rediscovered was how important my old friends are to me. For a start, they know all my secrets and love me anyway. They add landmass to the rock which my family have formed beneath me. As my children step away from me in painful, incremental steps, I find myself turning back to the woman who I grew into myself with, and I have found that they haven’t changed at their core, any more than I have.
A friend I made at Sunday School when I was three still rolls her eyes when I get overly anxious, just as she always did. A school friend with a laugh like a gunshot will always bring cake and kindness, whereas a friend I made at university can be relied upon to find the most creative way to insult me, and the most inappropriate things hilarious. These women are still the same people they were when I first enjoyed their company, just wiser, and that makes me feel safe in the world.
Thankfully, none of these friendships have been tested quite as brutally as Nicky and Sabine’s relationship is in the book, but like them, l believe we will be friends until our dying breaths, because, like the characters in the novel, we have shared enough for our bonds to be elastic, to take a considerable amount of pressure without snapping.
Old friends are like electricity. They plug you back into the grid and make you shine. Now I’m old enough to have known many of my friends for decades, I feel very fortunate to have such incredible women in my life. Friendship in any form is a blessing. I believe old friendships are the greatest blessing of all.