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Photo Credit: Koshyk via Compfight cc

This week’s prompt is Friend

It’s so easy for children to make friends. They are the same size or playing with the same kind of toy and suddenly they have a bond. I remember the days of meeting someone randomly and suddenly realizing that we had a lot in common. Sadly, it doesn’t come to easily as adults. I remember reading a New York Times study that said that making friends after age 30 is notoriously hard. You tend to have casual acquaintances maybe a couple of friends but not the kind of bonds that are created in childhood and young adulthood. Life gets in the way. We become friends with people who have kids the same age as ours. Sometimes we don’t have much else in common. Then we spend much of our effort planning around bedtimes, naptimes, school and extra curricular activities.

My husband can count on one hand the number of friends he has and most of them are from childhood and early young adulthood. He’s loyal that way. I have lost touch with most of my school friends.  Though I maintain contact with a few, we are not as close as we once were. I’ve only made a handful of new friends since my daughter was born. The ones we’ve invited the dinner. The ones I called after my miscarriage and on the anniversary of when my due date should have been. Now I find myself in the third decade of my life and everyone around me is surrounded by a cloud of busyness. Dinners or nights out must be scheduled months in advance, only to be cancelled at the lasts minute when a child gets sick or another family emergency occurs. It once took me five months to reschedule a cancelled dinner.

We can blame a culture of isolation, or lack of proper community pride, busyness or lack of hospitality in the church. But the end result is the same. Women desperate for relationships and feeling like they are in this parenting thing alone. I’m blessed to have a mother and a sister in my life. Though, as I jokingly like to say, who do I go to when I need to complain about them? Building friendships is never easy, at least for me. But I keep trying because I know deep down inside that it’s worth the effort.

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