When Friendship Doesn’t Feel Like Magic

I had a best friend in preschool. Her name was Caitlin and we had a mutual love of My Little Ponies. She had me over to play with the mansion. The mansion. It was huge and spending time in her playroom with our favorite toy is one of my earliest memories. But of course, her dad was a Naval officer and she moved away in Kindergarten. There was talk of being pen pals and I remember getting one letter with some Lisa Frank or other neon stickers on it (this was around 1989 after all), sending one in return, then never hearing from her again.

I saved that letter for a very long time, along with a box of My Little Ponies. The ponies are now in my daughter’s room, the letter probably sent to the trash in my move to my first apartment. I thought once of looking her up when social media started, but quickly abandoned the idea. Years of moves, probably a married name, what would be the purpose? She may not even remember me, and we couldn’t exactly talk about My Little Ponies now. I’m now the military spouse and mom, moving my children and myself around, never being settled. I’m the cause of the hurt when I leave or can’t make it to things. It’s hard to know if platitudes of “we will miss you”, and “keep in touch” are meaningful when the calls, texts, or social media likes drop off within months, or maybe never happen at all.

At one duty station, there were two older ladies at our church that had been friends since they were young ladies. A story about admiring the other ones hair or something as a meet-cute, vacations together with their husbands in retirement, it all seemed like the friendship version of a romantic comedy. I loved being around their sweet demeanor's, but it also hurt as I attended weekly Bible studies with women of established friendships I couldn’t work my way into. I’m not in constant contact with the ladies who were my bridesmaids, I don’t live near any childhood friends, I haven’t stayed in a job for ten years to see a work friend at every day— I’m a stay at home mom in my thirties who has moved every three years or so of her adult life. I love my life — getting to travel, getting to experience the character of different communities, being blessed to spend time with my young children, and I certainly have developed some awesome friendships along the way, but there is a longing deep in my heart for the type of female companionship that reassures you that you have someone to write down as an emergency contact on a school form or call in the middle of night when an actual tragedy strikes, and for when those friendships happen, that we’d go more than two years without one of us moving so that we can have all these shared memories to talk about in our rockers.

We talk a lot about the damage media and culture does to women’s psyches regarding our physical appearance, but we still regulate discussion of the difficulty of forming real intimate friendships and community to “cattiness” in women — when we don’t have the sort of eternal bond that we imagine Amy and Tina to have, or share our lives over coffee like fictional Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe, we begin to believe some weird story of women that they are more difficult to be friends with, or that we have some sort of personal failing that makes us unlovable. Those that are lucky enough to attain the status of “best friend” in someone’s life may be slow to let others in, and in their insulation find a storm of life that requires a wider community difficult to navigate. Learning to be friends is a skill that has to be taught, and it requires an amount of emotional vulnerability that is hard to give when over and over it hurts. When our lives are lived largely in spaces that are shallow — work, social media, organizations…we may have both a false sense of security that we are seen and an inflated idea that others are having more fun together than you are alone.

I’m in a season of feeling lost friendships — not through anger or any sort of drama, but just the slow disintegration of not being in geographical proximity. It feels like such a silly thing to grieve when the world around us is on fire and we are acutely aware of actual harm or hardships, but in the same token, by sharing the burden of everyday life, wouldn’t we make communities so much stronger and able to weather these storms?

I can tell myself I don’t want to tell my past pain to someone else who may disregard it, I don’t want to pour time and energy into relationships I cynically feel will end, I don’t want to continue picking apart the way I interact with others to continually work on being a better friend, to subtlety shout, “Pick me! Pick me!” with invitations.

It would be a lie though. Why does that box of ponies still bring me such joy when I pull it out to play with my daughter if that friendship wasn’t worth the anger I felt about its dissolution when other classmates excluded me? Is two glorious years spent getting to know someone not worth the pain of missing them? I will continue to feel anger or sadness when a hope for a friendship isn’t fulfilled, or it is, but it’s taken away through a circumstance beyond my control. Sometimes I’ll handle it well, sometimes I won’t. Sometimes I’ll recognize fully the blessings of friendship I have in my life, other times it’s hard to see that you are loved. Maybe I won’t have a BFF in my old age to wear fancy hats on our cruises with, but maybe I’ll have a sprinkling of lives spread around the globe remembering each other fondly as a time we didn’t give up on the range of human experiences that come from being in community with one another. I can already point to experiences of travel and nights spent “solving the world’s problems” that wouldn’t have happened if I treated each temporary place like a temporary place, because isn’t it all?

Maybe Caitlin is out there somewhere playing with ponies in her child’s playroom, fondly remembering our joy over every new piece in our collections. Unlike the new incarnation of My Little Ponies that exclaims that “Friendship is magic”, there is no magic formula that will grant me companionship. May I see it clearly as hard, yet necessary and rewarding work.

Meredith Flory is a freelance writer, military spouse, and mom. She is a former educator with a master’s degree in children’s literature from Kansas State University. Her Raising Readers column can be read monthly in Augusta Family Magazine and you can find her on Facebook and Twitter @meredithflory.