No Title, Just Some Thoughts on Parent Friends

Missed yesterday because I was out in the country with the girls and two newish and delightfully appealing friends, who both have kids of their own.

Which transitions nicely into a conversation I had just this week with a close friend--male, single, no kids--about the phenomenon of "parent friends." He was asking if most of my friends now were moms and dads of kids that were peers of mine, and I was scoffing at the notion, at the idea that I had entered parenthood as a way of building a social circle. As if I didn't have friends already--like you, buddy, the one asking the question--and had abandoned the idea altogether that friendship was based on compatibility, shared likes and values, and that intangible factor called, for lack of a more specific term, chemistry.

But then, as I drove back into the city from our country retreat, I found myself feeling so grateful for the friends I have made as a parent, because of our kids, initially, and how there is actually something very real and profoundly helpful and even soul-saving about having friends whose parenting makes me feel safe and validated and sometimes even inspired. I learn from my friends who are parents, and I don't think it's a coincidence that I so often love their children, too: fierce and unquenchable, watchful and so often delighted, complicated and wise--so many people--adults and children--have come into  my life since becoming a mother, and some of them have become true and valued friends. 

My thoughts are scattered: I want to write about the fact that the way you parent can make for the foundation, at least, of friendship, about the joyful rolling of enormous, straw-filled snowballs in a white, white field under a gray sky with a charming, witty man who will do a headstand to make children smile and has honed fatherhood into an art and a gracious, lovely woman who appears to serve as an example of how to live for many, about how in the end, friendship is still about the same things it always has been if reached by different routes, and more, but I think I will go to sleep instead, for now, and sleep the satisfying sleep of a person who is rich in her friends, old and new, and striving for gratitude, more and more every day.