A House Full of Friends

I sat at the kitchen table with my teenager, listening intently to her work out her feelings about her friendships… or lack of them. She is filled with the same angst that I was at her age. I understand. And still I can’t do much to help. She is struggling with issues I still struggle with: friendships are just plain hard sometimes. Should she go to a party or stay home? Should she keep trying to hold the pieces of a long-term friendship together or let them scatter in the wind? There is no right or wrong answer and I sit here and watch her struggle. It’s painful to see her like this. She wants so badly to make the right decisions, but we can never be 100% sure that our decisions are good ones. Many are, but then some we make turn out so terribly wrong. Sure, it’s all a learning experience. But tell that to my teenage daughter.

As we sat, her talking and me listening, my other two daughters came to the table to take their seats around us. My teen kept going and my two younger girls looked on sympathetically. They didn’t add to the conversation, they listened quietly in support. And there it was… the four of us sitting around the kitchen table. And it hit me.

The four of us are so incredibly lucky to have each other. WE are each other’s best friends. Not in the sense that we all hang out every day and go the mall and talk about boys (well, they do and I try and shrug it off). I’m talking in the sense that WE will be around for each other when no one else is. WE have each other through thick and through thin. WE have each other when the girlfriends are mean and ignore us, when the boyfriends cancel a date at the last minute, when we want to go to a movie and have no one else to go with, and when we need an opinion on a new outfit or hairstyle. One day, WE will be sitting at a bar having a drink together… or sitting around a hospital bed when a new baby arrives. WE will be there when graduation caps are worn and white dresses bought.

My girls… they fight and yell at each other and steal each other’s clothes. They kick and pull hair and lay blame and don’t do their chores. And they also help each other with homework and take funny videos of each other and laugh at each other’s dumb jokes.

They are each other’s best friends. WE are each other’s best friends. And that is exactly the way it should be.