I get by with a little help from my friends.
My daughter has a friend, Emilio, from preschool. Sometimes they talk on the phone for much longer stretches than you’d anticipate. And he texted her happy birthday wishes (mom’s phone to mom’s phone) on the exact right day. Of course, now they’re only in second grade, but I like to imagine that they will be friends forever.
Despite the fact that my daughter will be friends with her preschool best bud for a lifetime, I feel like most of our friendship histories start in grade school. Maybe it’s because we feel, even as children, like we now have a shot at permanence. I moved to my childhood home when I was in third grade, and I met my first friend through a parentally planned blind date. At church that first Sunday, I was introduced to the girl who would be one of my best friends throughout my primary education. We shuffled to sit in the same pew and that was that.
With Grade School Friends, we’re starting to test our wings. It’s the first time we have secrets, and need secret keepers. The girl from Week 1 of third grade? We hid secrets and friendship tributes under a loose stair tread on the unfinished stairs winding up to the attic. 25 years later, when my parents moved out of that house, one of the things I did was remove the diary, the painted rocks, the embodiments of that absolutely foundational friendship. I watch my daughter in the same sort of core friendships now. She wasn’t in the same class as her two closest friends this year, and next year, one of them will be going to another school altogether. It makes a difference in your day-to-day, at this age, what class you’re assigned to. But you have your core people, fortified by sleepovers and recess and lunch (and by mother-friendships, but more on that later). Grade school friends are the ones who wear our BFF necklaces, who had a vote on which signature was best as we were developing handwriting. We terrified ourselves playing Bloody Mary at sleepovers, and balanced with some Barbie play when we were sure no one else would know we were still playing with dolls.
As we grew older, some of these grade school friends remained in our closest circle. I went to a small school; my graduating class was 97 people. Especially in a small town, your High School Friends know your story. High school friends were there through horrible hormones and pimples and crushes. They know how many times it took you to pass your driver’s test (not the driving portion, just the maneuverability, and really, when do you need to parallel park when you can walk another three blocks and be healthier for it?).
High school meant long talks on team busses, experiments with at home hair color, dating, rumors about who was losing their virginity, part time jobs, hanging out in parking lots and friends’ driveways. We felt so much older than we were. We talked, and talked, and talked. Our lives were a constant consultation, and for me, this was before cell phones became a thing (because I’m just that old now), and way before texting and Facetime and Skype. 
We confided our secrets as God intended, from a phone hanging on the kitchen wall which was, hopefully, a cordless phone we could sprint to our bedrooms and use with the music turned up. We spend potentially 12 years with a group of friends on what is always a countdown to leaving. I remember being horrified when my mother admitted she had lost track of many of her high school friends. That would never, ever happen to my group because we were clearly much closer. I felt a little bad for her, and a little smug. But I was the only OHS grad who left for my particular college, and as my mother knew would happen, for the most part we drifted into our own story lines after graduation (before Facebook made faces and stories familiar again, an impromptu reunion.) And for the handful whose phone numbers remain current in my phone, there’s a porch rocker waiting when we’re gray.
College is like friendship on speed, I think. There is no other period when you spend so much time with your friends, when an open door policy is not only accepted but encouraged. Today, if someone tells me they’re stopping by “in thirty minutes” that gives me just enough time to clean frantically so that I can apologize for not cleaning. But in college, it’s all communal all the time. Friends are your family, your compass. There is no hiding anything in a college dorm room, and there’s not hiding much in a college apartment. You eat together, you study together, you go to class together, you go out together and look out for each other when you do. There are a thousand inside jokes that will last for decades. You stay out late, and sleep til noon.
I had, in some ways, two college experiences. One was at a fairly large state school in Pennsylvania, and the other at a small college in the West Midlands of England. In both cases, these are the people with whom my soul has been laid bare. It didn’t matter what we had in common at the beginning of it. In the end, we had each other in common, and I would go to the wall unquestioningly for these amazing people today, some whom I haven’t seen in years. It doesn’t matter. These are the people who can name seven of the Top 10 stupidest things I’ve ever done, and aren’t surprised by the other 3. They can cut to the heart of things in twenty seconds because they know me backward and forward, but will spend days driving around in New Mexico (hypothetically) letting the real conversation percolate if necessary, because it’s not quite time yet. I have a sheaf of letters from these friends, mostly from summers spent apart, that I keep tucked away like love letters, and that’s essentially what they are.
As an adult, 90% of my friends have been made in two categories. Work Friends and Mom Friends. And then one day, they’ve seamlessly become no-modifier-needed Friends.
Work Friends begin with a realization that we both find Peter in accounting to be a sycophant obstructionist, or because we realized we stayed at the same slightly shady hostel/hotel in Amsterdam in the late 90’s. Every life scenario has its own politics, and the work day is no different. We need to find our tribe to survive. And while most of the people we meet at work fade to LinkedIn contacts after we leave, every now and then we find an actual friend, someone with whom we share the details of our real lives, and meet for happy hour on the *weekend*, not just at 3pm on a Friday.
Mom Friends are symbiotically interwoven with grade school friends, but it takes a generation to understand exactly how it works. There are, certainly, children with whom my daughters are friends whose mothers I feel no real connection to. But these are the exception, because whether it’s fair or not, we nurture the friendships of those children whose parents we enjoy the most. I think this actually works out fine because whether you’re a proponent of nature or nurture, one or both of those is driving a chunk of childhood development. It’s better than betting odds that a good match kid probably means a good match mom. While our besties from other friend categories may also be going through many of the same career, relationship and parenthood trials, these are the new friends who are ON THE GROUND with us. They speak the language of parenthood AND our specific community. It starts with the person you spend 5 minutes with at school drop off, and then suddenly, this is also the got-your-back-when-the-babysitter-cancels friend who receives the no segue 9pm photo text of just a glass of wine. And totally gets it.
This accumulation of miraculous people, whether they be a handful or a legion, these are the people with whom life gets real once you’re, you know, adult-ish. There are divorces and pregnancies and losses, there are kids with issues we didn’t anticipate, there is cancer and job loss and bad investments. We thought we knew how to be supportive from those times in college when we sat up and ate ice cream and drank tequila with our friend who just realized her boyfriend wasn’t going to be the one. But we aren’t always prepared for what adult friendships ask of us. Sometimes we find the right words, the right gestures. Sometimes we’re a deer in headlights, wishing for a do-over of what we could have said and done in hindsight. But we learn from each of these life-just-got-real experiences so that we’re a better friend the next time.
Friendship becomes weightier as you get older, I think. Time, money and energy are all budgeted. 
Texts with a single heart emoji are code for, I’m thinking of you and wish we were having dinner somewhere laughing about the good old days and comparing notes on how to make it through Common Core math — seriously what *is* that stuff! — but know that my lack of communication has everything to do with the start of soccer season and strep throat and nothing to do with the fact that I am returning your last three texts with an emoji.
The spontaneity of showing up at someone’s dorm room has been replaced with happy hour planned 6 weeks out. The friends we once saw every day we now see once a month, or year, or decade. But it works, because it’s not about how often we see each other — it’s about how comfortably wonderful it is when we do.
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