statistically speaking...

Quick update on the four years I have been away: I’ve gotten married. And had a baby boy. I’ve begun to learn the Ukulele. I still sing in a band and I am still writing, just not blogging as much. I can’t believe it has been over four years since my last post. But let me explain why I thought about this cob-web covered blog after such a long time:

It’s about Friendships.
Frankly I have never been any good at them. I am no good at keeping in touch, and I have been so scared from past experiences that I often don’t put too much weight in friendships. I have not had a ‘best’ friend since college (read: 20+ years). I do have some close female friends who I try very hard to make time for, but being a working mother, I often choose going home to be with my son over an evening of Mojitos.

This doesn’t help the ‘sustained friendship’ cause. This morning I discovered a close set of friends have been meeting without asking me if I would like to join them. The excuse was that I often say I have to go home, so they just thought of not asking me altogether. But they ‘swear’ they ‘spoke about me’ and ‘thought’ about me.
As soon as I heard it, I felt choked up and was instantly in tears – I had to immediately hang up the phone. And the moment my body reacted like that, I blamed myself. I blamed myself for putting too much faith, love, emotion into a friendship that, statistically speaking, isn’t likely to last.

I see so many women with ‘best friends’ even at my age (here I was thinking it was a younger woman thing). And I often wonder what I have done wrong to not deserve, or be able to sustain a friendship that is my ‘go-to’. We are constantly fed with the idea of Meredith-Cristina friendships that are able to surpass Motherhood, long work hours, personal catastrophes and silly misunderstandings. So how does it work? And why have I never ever had one?

The moment I put the phone down, these thoughts ran through my head. And I had no one to talk about it to. My husband agrees that I seem to not be able to sustain a friendship, and has nothing to offer on the subject besides jokes. Work colleagues would find this kind of a heavy topic to discuss, perhaps even whiney. There’s always social media, where people upload their status and get loads of free therapy – but that seemed too needy for me. What would I say anyway? I don’t have any friends, so that my 700 Facebook ‘friends’ would read it and perhaps have a ‘sad smiley’ reaction? No thanks.

That’s when I realized my catharsis. Writing. Writing down my thoughts and feelings and posting them into some abyss. The old cob-webbed friend of a blog surfaced. I’m not necessarily feeling any better than I did. But at least it saves me from venting to a human being who might judge me a few years hence. I’ll pass.

So here we are. A ranting post about how I have no friends.