Adult Friendships

An adult friendship is a complicated thing. Adult friendships don't start organically, the way they do when you are thrown into a dorm room, or a high school classroom. I'm not talking about the friendships that started there, and that we may have maintained through adulthood.

The other type, the type people that you meet as an adult, as a parent, as a co-worker. I've written about this before, how it's so weird and awkward to make friends with someone as an adult. When I wrote about it initially, I was still pretty new to Vegas, pretty new to parenting. But now, three years as a Las Vegas resident, and two and a half years as a parent, things are a bit different. Friendships have developed (slowly), but inherently, they are not the same kind of friendships. We've gotten to know and have spent some time with parents from Mia's daycare. We've spent some time with B's co-worker's and are spending Thanksgiving with some of them. I've gone to some knitting circles. I don't have room in my life for much more than that, casual friends, going out to dinner friends, holiday friends. [When communicating with these people, I always run my messages past B: "Am I coming on too strong with this invitation?" B always reminds me that we are NOT DATING. My thoughts, aren't we?] My head is full - full from the demands of having a family and a job. Unless you are related to me, or giving me a paycheck, I have very little time left to give to you every day. 

As a 30 year old woman, and probably more pointedly, mother, I've come to accept that the era of "hanging out with friends" just for the hell of it and without any planed activity has come to an end. You know how in high school, or in college, you'd just go over to someone's house, and sit around talking for hours and hours? Of course you could do that when you had little more than studying to worry about. I've accepted that doing this, sitting around and just talking, plus the shared idiotic experiences you have with these people, is how you really become friends.

Maybe some people can still make these types of friendships into adulthood/parenthood, but I think it's over for me. And I'm OK with that. My everyday life is full. I feel fulfilled. I have a lovely daughter, I have a husband who is still my favorite person to hang out with. I have hobbies that I dream about, that keep my hands happily occupied. But on Saturday afternoons, when Mia and I are home on our own because B is at work, I get pangs of loneliness. Doesn't anyone want to come over and just hang out with me?