Today I have cause to pause, and ponder the nature of friendship.
I am going to see an old friend. I don’t think she would mind me using the word old. I have known her for about 35 years. I knew her before I was married, before children, freshly dropped out of what was then polytechnic, scared witless in my first proper job. She had children the same age as me – ish. She didn’t mother me, so much as treat me as she would want her own children treated. She was my guide and mentor through “How to be a working woman”. She would take me to one side and whisper “like this” in my ear, if something was going wrong… as things frequently did! She knew I was pregnant before I did. She knitted things for Daniel when he was born, and at the same time, taught me to knit from a proper pattern, complicated stitches in expensive yarn. I had chips on my shoulder which she gently brushed away, seeing me for what I really was, not the person I was pretending to be, or the person I thought I should be.
I don’t see her often, but always feel I should see her more. She waves a hand at this and we just carry on as before. Life being way too short for scolding grown women perhaps.
I feel excited, looking forward to telling her what I have been up to, and can’t wait to hear what she is doing. Because although retired, she hasn’t stopped being the woman she is. She has taken up painting. I haven’t seen what she has done, and I don’t know if she will show me. But I know that her painting will come from her fizzing brain and her heart, not just from the ends of her fingers. She is a role model, in that she is honest and astute, she has insight, and clarity of vision.
I look at the friendships I have made since, and all of them have had to, in some way, measure up to this. I have no idea what I bring to a friendship, and it is undoubtedly different depending on who you ask… But the friends I consider the closest, no matter if I have known them thirty five years or five years, seem to have the goods on me. They know something of me, a couple of them know the very worst there is to know, and they seem to love me regardless. And that goes both ways. To know someone’s really irritating humanity, their awfulness, but to be able to see past it all and get to the soul of them, and realise that the awfulness of us is exactly the thing that makes us interesting. To smile at it… hug it… and carry on.
Sometimes it takes years of being jostled about by someone, close by accident rather than choice or design, to realise what you have. Sometimes the growth of friendship is quicker, and people get scarily close, scarily fast.
I have made new friends recently, through this blog and other social media. They are different sorts of friends.. but they do appear to have similar qualities. They know me through the work. My art as clues and shorthand to the stuff that’s taken me years to understand, and in some respects still don’t. It appears that bits of my awfulness leech out through my work, as if every stitch betrays me. There’s no hiding any more. These new friends see me for who I am. No point in hiding or pretending any more then eh?
