Best Friends: An Embarrassment of Riches

This post is a bit sappier than my usual sarcasm and snark, but apparently that's what motherhood has done to me.  The topic is a product of some freewriting I was doing alongside my students on the topic "Best and Worst" and was inspired by the blessing of friendship that has come my way in the past year.

“Best Friends”

I’ve been thinking some lately about the concept of “best friends.”  In elementary school, this meant an exclusive one-on-one relationship.  Once someone had a best friend, they could have no others. This was the person you automatically partnered up with in class or on the playground.  You stood in the lunch line together, ate lunch side-by-side in the cafeteria, and would often be discussed by others as an inseparable pair.  Jessica and Betsy.  Sherri and Autumn.  Chris and Richie.  Jessy and Kelly.   I didn’t have a best friend, as such, in elementary school.  Or in junior high or high school.  I was well-liked enough and knew people from virtually every demographic of the school, but always I was reminded (by myself more than by anyone else) that I was an “other”—never anyone’s first choice.  As much as I try to suppress them, those feeling sometimes still linger, as our early experiences often do.

Once I got to college, I would say I made my first true friends—seven girls who, to this day, pray about and cheer for one another.  But my “best” friend during those years was Laura Willby.  We met freshman year working on an assignment for Foundations of Education.  I remember meeting in the library to work, and she informed me later that she thought I was “super serious,” which anyone who knows me well would deny.  So we didn’t become close right away, since she apparently hadn’t met the real me. But as the year progressed, we started staying up late talking—often about boys—in one another’s dorm rooms, visiting one another’s homes over breaks, and generally “doing life” together.  I had never experienced such a thing.  She was close enough to recognize and call out my occasional self-centered lack of perception of other people’s feelings, and I would bust on her for her self-acknowledged stubborn ways.  We wronged—and then forgave—one another on a few rare occasions.  She was, as Meredith says on Gray’s Anatomy, “my person,” and that enriched my college experience more than any class, professor, or social event possibly could have.

After we graduated, I moved to Virginia to teach, direct, and go to graduate school, and Laura moved back in with her parents and got a job at her old high school.  We still called each other regularly, and, six years later, she was in my wedding, but things would never be quite the same.  Good.  But not the same.  In some ways, she will always be my best friend, but because life has taken us to different places—both literally and metaphorically—the nature of our relationship cannot help but be changed.

Now that I am older and married, my perspective of best friends (or BFFs, in today’s vernacular) has changed.  In some ways, my husband is indeed my best friend.  We spend more time together than anyone else, he knows my quirks and foibles better than anyone, and we certainly “do life” in a way neither of us ever had before—including raising two children together.  I love him deeply and can’t imagine life without him.

And yet, there is room in my life—a need, in fact—for girlfriends.  There have been periods of my married years—notably, when my twins were still babies—where my connections with other women were minimal.  I knew a lot of wonderful ladies, but they certainly didn’t know what was happening in my day-to-day life, which is not to discredit their loyalty or earnestness.  And my mother, a best friend of a wholly unique sort, was, in her way, my savior during those early days of motherhood.  But now that my twins are nearly five, and I have emerged from the delirium of waking at all hours of the night to nurse and change infants and the all-consuming exhaustion of monitoring fearless toddlers who were the biggest threats to their own well-being, my world has space for true friends.  And into that space have come a few wonderful women, some whom I’ve known for a longer time and others who seemingly appeared from out of the post-baby fog to be the friends I never knew I needed but can’t envision my life, in all of its highs and lows, without.  They fill my life with laughter, boost me with encouragement, and at times make me smile more broadly than I thought possible.  They inspire me to positive change.  They have, in fact, made my life an embarrassment of riches.  

Somewhere deep within, my insecure 10-year-old self sometimes prompts me to ask, “Are any of them my ‘best’ friend?  Would I be their first choice?”  That’s no longer such an easy (or even necessary) question to answer as back in the days of recess on the playground or shared dorm rooms, but—in my eyes—they are the best.  And time has taught me that is all that matters.