On Friendship in Your Fifties

It's been one of my resolutions for probably the past three New Years:

Make time for friendships.

You'd think it would be easy. I love to sit down with people and listen, talk, tell stories, hear stories, affirm and be affirmed.

We don't have to DO anything. Table games are not my cup of tea. Shopping and going to concerts and quilting together are ok at times, but I love just being together and catching up with their lives. 

Even more, I love to have friends who speak into my life.

I like to be friends with wise women who think about who they are and why they do what they do, who flex with change, who try new things, and who listen to what God is teaching them.

That's what I crave.

And it is so hard to make it happen.

A few young relations have been analyzing friendship the last while, such as Emily a.k.a Otter over at The Girl In the Red Rubber Boots, and Shelley at Frame of Mind.

Why don't you go read their posts while I go make a pot of tea, then come back and we'll sip tea and talk about this vast and important subject?

I grew up in kind of a friend desert. At our little church in Minnesota, there weren't any girls my age until I was about 14. I had one best friend through high school, a Catholic girl named Carrie.

When I went to teach in Oregon, I went a bit crazy, socially. One December, between going out to eat with friends, Christmas caroling with the youth group, the school Christmas program, and I forget what else, I had something going on every single evening of that month.

[One wonders how I got any teaching done. Well, I guess when the school board hired a 19-year-old without vetting her well, they got exactly what they deserved, but that is a rant for another day.]

As a young mom in mission work in Canada, I formed deep friendships with other women, such as my cousin Kay Knepp, who lived on the other side of a duplex one year and then, a few years later, on the same lane. We walked together in the mornings and talked about things. It was wonderful.

But here in Oregon, the last number of years, it's been hard.  All the urgent things keep yelling at me, so many people need me, and it is just. so. hard. to deliberately make time for friends. 

No one lives close enough that we can chat over the back fence. I am not good at planning. I am always overwhelmed.

I still have a full nest and a lot of responsibilities. As Paul's sister Lois told me--not a direct quote but this idea--"You and I are the same age but in very different stages. I have so few demands on me that I could very easily become self-indulgent. I pack Eric's lunch in the morning and a few things like that, but mostly I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT. I could take off and go to the coast tomorrow if I wanted."

I said, "Wow. I am not there."

She said, "No, you're not."

So I go galloping on, trying to take care of everybody and the chickens and cats and potted plants, until suddenly I just feel lonely. And I think, I haven't had a good conversation for a LONG TIME.

Or, I should say, a good conversation with a local woman-friend, the kind that takes deliberate decisions and planning ahead.

More than a single Best Friend, I've found I need a variety of friends. This one to discuss writing, that one with a similar spiritual gift, another to make me laugh, still another to help me through mothering dilemmas, yet another to feed my creative side.

Paul and whatever children are home like to talk and are good at listening, so some of those needs are met there. My sisters and I message a lot and talk now and then. My sisters-in-law and I have a coffee date once a month which is just balm and nourishment to my soul. I sporadically have coffee with a few others.

Maybe the key to real ongoing friendship is a regular date that is sacred, traditional, and cast in concrete, so to speak. 

Today, I am happy to report, I invested in friendship, and it was worth every bit of frantic preparation.  Paul's sister Lois's birthday is four days before mine. My neighbor Anita's is the same day as Lois's. Anita is 11 years older than Lois and me.

We have met for a birthday tea for....has it been ten years? Or more? You can't expect us to know this, because we had a round-and-round conversation trying to remember who hosted us last year and whose turn it was this year. None of us had any memory of when we last hosted, but we concluded it wasn't me, so I was happy to do it, plus the porch was relatively clean and I wanted to try a new chicken salad recipe.

I had a yellow themed decor. The sandwiches were delicious if I say so myself. It wasn't too hot or too cold. The cake was just chocolatey enough.

But the very very best part was the conversation with two wise and funny women who know me and my family and a good part of my history, who give me perspective, who are patient when I chatter too much, who accept others and don't try to press any of us into any sort of mold, who make me laugh, and who leave me better and wiser than before.

What did we talk about? Grown children and the multitudes of angles on that subject. Being 50 and realizing you don't care what people think, and how liberating that is. Our parents. Who to go to for the best machine quilting. Books and authors.

And so much more.

"We need to do this more than once a year," I always think. And then we don't. But I do make sure it happens once a year, because it is tradition, and we all plan for it, and it is important to us.

Finding ways to make this happen more, with various friends, is surely as important a resolution as walking more and organizing my paper piles.

I'll be like Shelley and Emily, and ask you to speak into my life on this subject. How do you pursue friendship when you're a busy pastor's wife and mom, especially when so many people need you, but not as many can replenish what you pour out?

How do you choose friendship, which is fun and rewarding but feels self-indulgent, over taking care of the sick and lonely and afflicted?

How do friendships change over time? How do you make friends with people in different stages and walks of life? How many friends are enough?

I'll sip tea and listen.

Anita and Lois

All ready.

One of our traditions is that Lois brings a sack of hand-picked second-hand books.
She has introduced both Anita and me to new authors that we have come to love.

Lois, me, and Anita when the party was nearly over, the tea was cold despite the cozies,
the books were chosen, advice was given regarding the quilt on the left,
and we still weren't talked out, but we needed to make supper.

Quote of the Day:

"Anything else you want to tell me about your party? I thought about sitting close and eavesdropping."

--Paul, this evening. He was inside doing warehouse paperwork while we had tea. I don't know why it makes me so happy to know that he was curious about our conversation. Maybe because men so often have more interesting conversations than women, which is a rant for yet another day.