Friends stay a part of our life for all the years because true women friendships follow each other through the years, listening, questioning, or even crying for each other. NO perfection is needed. Love is required but even that can be woefully broken, because at the end of the day what we really need as others is a friend who simply stays, because when she stays, we know that we are loved. We can go to sleep at night, awaken the next day, and know that we can make it because she is out there- loving us.
But friendship, which seemed so simple when we were kids, has gotten harder as the years pass, and not just for me but for all mothers, We labor intensely during the years when our children are young, and we think that we will have time for fun, occasional lunches with women friends, or even trips with friends after the kids leave. The truth is, when something needs to be cut out in the crunch of daily demands friends are the first to go. Sometimes friendship seems expendable, unnecessary, so we delay friendships and put women off, all the while believing that we will catch up later.
The problem is most of us doing catch up doesn’t work. Life gets more demanding as we age; we have parents to care for and bill to pay. Work shift gears and we move in different directions. Marriages become strained, faces wrinkle, and all body parts begin to move southward. Life presents a whole new set of imminent challenges, which need our attention more, we think, than friends do.
Lets un not be so fooled. We need other women if we are to work more efficiently, worry less and stay healthier. Find me a mother who doesn’t harbor a silent fear of being all alone one day and there you’ll find a woman who doesn’t need more friends. But she isn’t out there. Why?
