“She
doesn’t watch TV…” said Lizzy. “She’s a really good reader… and she isn’t
into stuff like pink and princesses all the time… she likes riding bikes
and being outside… “ She thought for a moment longer. “One
thing I like about her is she doesn’t eat just a white-bread sandwich.
She has a real lunch.”
Well, that
clinches it: this isn’t just any old friendship -- it’s a liberal, outdoorsy,
intellectual, WHOLE GRAIN friendship!
Is it
possible for half of my brain to giggle gleefully while the other half cringes?
On one
hand, what parent wouldn’t be pleased that her twins had managed to find an
official Best Friend with delightful manners, precocious academic prowess, and
a penchant for consuming fresh, locally grown organic produce? On the
other hand… Oh my god. I’ve totally brainwashed my kids. And
on the third hand (yes, parenting requires growing a third hand) -- do I really
have a better grip than my second-graders do on what true friendship actually entails? Should I be
surprised, given my own selective proclivities, that they are choosing to hang
out with bookish,
intellectual, middle-class [knee-high] liberals?
From other
conversations with Molly and Lizzy, it has become clear that the nascent social
partitioning among the seven-year-old set is amusingly – and horrifyingly –
advanced. The kids are figuring out the religious beliefs of their peers, their
environmental commitment (or lack thereof), and their politics. That’s
right: although my children have trouble remembering whether Alaska is a town,
a state, or a nation, they are attempting to parse the nuances of the political
spectrum. And, apparently, they are also bread snobs.
This
social parsimony seems particularly startling, given that neither twin has ever
been what you might call extroverted -- or, to be honest, socially
skilled. The two of them have played with each other since they were old
enough to toddle, but they’ve always tended to hang around the edges of
playgrounds. One twin in particular
received preschool reports full of kindly, euphemistic phrases such as, “Does
not initiate play with others.”
Thus, I
was thrilled when, back in kindergarten, Lizzy told me that maybe (just maybe)
there was a girl in her class she liked. What? You’re actually interacting?
Hooray! A birthday party invitation was issued. Playing took
place. The little girl’s family seemed delightful. In fact, they
seemed like people I might have sought out as friends without the helpful aid
of my small children. That is… um… bookish, intellectual, middle-class
liberals. She has a real lunch.
The
following year, the same child – I’ll call her “E” – was in Molly’s class, and
the triumvirate Best Friendship was cemented.
But what,
exactly, does friendship entail in second grade?
Well, it
seems that in addition to appropriate bread choices, literary discussion is
important. A few weeks ago, I swung by E’s house at the end of a
playdate, and found that the kids had attempted to dress themselves as
characters from The Mysterious Benedict Society. Moreover, they had been
busy with letter magnets belonging to E’s little brother. They were
spelling out the names of their favorite authors.
BEVER
Y C EARY?
Well…
close enough. The little brother (given
the spelling of his name) was not willing to budge on the issue of L-sharing.
I loaded
all three girls in the car to head back to our place for the ensuing
sleepover. Our guest’s mother offered a fond farewell and a classic
reminder to her daughter: “Don’t forget your manners.”
As we
pulled out of E’s driveway, there was silence from the back seat. At
last, Molly spoke up. In cheerful, confident tones, she told E, “You
know, at our house, you don’t actually have to have manners.”
Come
on over, eat with your hands, and make fart jokes! Yup. Best Friendship, second-grade style. They’re
a trio of solidarity, for sure.
It
might not have been this way, though. It almost wasn’t. At the
beginning of second grade, E was missing. Her family had moved to a
bigger home. The move placed her in a different local public
school. The twins missed her sorely.
Every day.
“You’ll
make other friends!” I chirped. “There
are lots of nice kids in your classes!”
But Molly and Lizzy bemoaned her absence.
E attended
that new school for about a week. And then she came home with this
poster:
Although
the two schools were academically equal by all accounts, her parents shifted
her back. They committed themselves to driving her to and from school,
every single day -- to be with her friends.
I was
touched. But, at first, I was also taken aback. Really?
Someone is going to haul their second-grader across town? Just to be with
my kids? Haven’t they noticed that my delightful little angels tell fart
jokes?
I felt a
little odd, and a little guilty about the whole thing. Is it really worth it? The three children – Molly, Lizzy, and E –
ended up in three different classes, thus covering all of the second grade
teachers in the school. They only saw each other at recess and in reading
group. How important, and how permanent, I asked myself, is a friendship
between kids whose biggest concerns in life include tooth fairy earnings and
who can build the coolest Lego structure? How meaningful is a friendship
based on lunch choices, Beverly Cleary, and bikes?
Then
again… books and bikes are kinda high on my list of friend-attributes,
too. I’ve got my very own set of outdoorsy, nerdy, non-princessy buddies
(well, okay, maybe some are a little
bit princessy). I have WHOLE GRAIN
friendships!
I found
myself squirming a little, mentally. Yeah, my own choices are so adult, so
diverse, so darned nuanced! Just how
thrillingly deep do I think I am, compared to my second-graders? What is
friendship supposed to be about?
And what, over my almost 42 years of existence, has friendship actually
entailed?
I found a
Best Friend when I was seven, too. Like my kids’ Best Friend, mine was
(and still is) a lot like me: bookish, intellectual, and
middle-class-liberal. Together, we created complicated treasure-hunts
full of cryptic clues. Together, we built obstacle courses in the back
yard. Together, we studied for Advanced Placement exams. We went
off to Ivy league schools. We both eventually became professors.
But in
other ways, we weren’t so alike after all, my Best Friend and I. I was
the scabby, grubby, always-up-in-a-tree one. She was cleaner, quieter,
shyer, and definitely sweeter. Her family put up a menorah when mine
(somewhat arbitrarily) put up a Christmas tree. As adults, she settled in
suburban New York and became a swing-dancing expert, and I went to live in an
unplumbed cabin in Alaska and took up odd hobbies such as hundred-mile
wilderness racing on skis or snow-bike.
We were
alike. We were different. We stuck by each other through some
horrible teenage crap that I’m no-way-in-heck going into in this blog
post. We grew up together.
In
college, I found a Best Friend who was, again, bookish, intellectual, and
middle-class liberal. Together, we made a valiant – and inexplicable --
attempt to learn Esperanto; we sweated over multi-variable Calculus; we
imprudently decided to climb down a fire escape and explore the steam tunnels;
and we made loud jokes about phalli.
Again, my
Best Friend was so terribly, achingly like me – and yet not like me. I
spent summers wielding an axe and heaving rocks about, while he did research
projects. He was publically exuberant and affectionate, and I didn’t know
what to do with a hug. He reveled in geographic trivia; I barely knew my
lats from my longs. He faced the desperate struggle of a being teenage
boy coming out as gay to friends and family, while I’d barely considered what
life would have been like had I not been conveniently straight.
We were
alike. We were different. We stuck by each other. We thought
we were already grownups, but of course we weren’t – so we grew up together,
too.
Of course,
no one is ever all the way grown up –or, if they are, I’m crossing them
off my list RIGHT NOW. We still – and always – need people to keep on
growing up with us. To me, a true friend – a Best Friend, if you will --
is someone who does that growing in concert and in synergy with me, but also in
a state of constant challenge – stretching me, pushing me, extending me. A best friend is someone who can get me to
ski a hundred miles or write a novel, not by goading or nagging me, but simply
by believing I can. He or she is the
keeper of a lost piece of my brain – someone who makes the inside of my head a
less lonely cavern, someone with whom to share not only thoughts and
adventures, but also hidden shames and peculiar joys. You feel that
way too!? Holy crap, I thought no one else ever felt that way in the whole
history of the universe.
That
friend and I can run our brains sometimes in
parallel and sometimes in series. We can
create a devil's-advocate spark, and set alight an intelligence, humor, and joy
greater than the sum of its parts: friendship as emergent property. We
can go on a six-hour hike, talking non-stop, laughing about everything, from
profound to profane. We can share obscure, nerdy jokes predicated on
Latin roots or imaginary numbers. We can wax lyrical about physics, in
the next breath quote Beowulf, and in the breath after that make some kind of
pun so filthy that it would make a nun's hair fall out in an instant. Or
we can be silent together – comfortably, slowly, deeply silent.
Maybe my
connection with my own close friends isn’t any more cosmic than my little
girls’ connection with theirs. Life,
after all, is mostly built of small moments, not Epic Events (although I
manufacture a few of those, to keep myself feeling important). A true friend is
the person who knows too much about me, and judges too little. She’s the one who eats the other half of the
box of Girl Scout cookies at midnight, helping me to drop crumbs into my
textbooks. He’s the one who swings by
for a game of Scrabble even though I’m not very good at shuffling my tiles
while nursing twins. She’s the one who
knows which book I’d like, and leaves it in my mailbox, and never asks for it
back. He’s the one who drives to the airport in the middle of the night to
whisk me – and my horribly jet-lagged kids – to a nearby Chinese restaurant, so
we can catch up, and reminisce, and laugh together over our trumped-up
fortunes.
True
friendships last. Nonetheless, old
friends scatter, and are seen only rarely -- and new Best Friendship is harder
to find, for middle-aged individuals such as the person that I have somehow
unexpectedly become. Sociologists note that development of true
friendship requires frequent unplanned interactions and a relaxed setting.
In addition, although kids (and adults) should all learn to foster
empathy, respect, and affability across even the most yawning gulfs of
diversity, close friendship requires a sense of commonality – shared interests,
shared beliefs, a shared quirky twist on this screwy thing we call life.
It also requires a significant and continued investment of time.
Proximity.
Commonality. Time.
One day a
few weeks ago, I picked up the kids from school. This is rare for me (Buses!
Public Transportation! Yay!), but we had a dental appointment
scheduled. I loitered uncharacteristically by the neighboring doorways of
Molly’s and Lizzy’s classes. When they
emerged amidst a welter of bouncy little bodies, I accompanied them down the
hall toward the exit. A few doors down, we passed E’s classroom. It
had already emptied out. But one tall, dark-haired girl was standing there,
waiting. She fell into step beside her friends. For the hectic two
or three minutes that it took us all to reach the snowy curb, the three of them
quickly caught each other up on Important Stuff. We’re going to the
dentist! And I realized that, unseen by me, this happened every day.
Proximity. Commonality.
Time. She’s a really good reader… She
likes riding bikes and being outside… she
isn’t into stuff like pink and princesses all the time. E is not the same
race/ethnicity as the twins. She prefers
scarier books than the ones they choose.
She plays hockey and soccer, while they eschew team sports. But… She doesn’t watch TV. She has a real lunch. At that moment, I
understood. They are alike. They are different. They stick by each other. Maybe they will grow up together, and maybe
they won’t. But they are in the same school
again. With our two families, they hiked
over thirty miles together, and skied many more, this second-grade year. They wait for one another, to catch those tiny
moments in the hallway. They are being
given the chance.
In all
likelihood, my kids don’t yet fully understand what a Best Friend really
is. Maybe their bonds and their memories won’t last. Then again, maybe thirty years from now their
childhood friend will be strong-armed into playing Monopoly with their own kids
-- or editing their blog posts for them (um, thanks, Childhood Friend). But, regardless of the outcome of this
particular friendship, learning to make those individual, quirky, hard-won,
joyful ties is as important as all the other skills they are learning and
practicing in second grade (reading, subtraction, fart jokes). No, it’s not just important – it’s crucial.
Even for the most independent or introverted among us, what would a life be
like, without strong, meaningful human connections?
I can only
offer my kids the same thing that – I now realize – I owe to myself: time for
friendships (carved out of the packed strata of life) and proximity to a wide
range of potentially mind-meldingly, challengingly, hilariously, brilliantly,
fabulous friends. From there, it’s up to
each of us to find the connection, the bond, the spark, the glorious commonality. And if, for my seven-year-olds, that means a
whole grain friendship… well… I can count myself lucky to have some of the
same.
