friends

Well. So I had a little bit of sadness this weekend and then I wanted to do this blog post, and the topic of it makes me a little sad sometimes so maybe I'll get to feeling sad over this since I've already been a little sad these days, albeit over something totally unrelated. Okay, enough with the preamble.

I don't know about you, but I don't have very many friends. I feel like I'm surrounded by people who have tons of friends and it only makes me feel like I have none. And this is mostly okay...I figure if it really was NOT okay, it wouldn't be so, since I'm not a troll, I'm reasonably sociable and I'm not an asshole. At least, I don't think I am. But, then I see things that make me start thinking (damn brain!) and I realize that having a very small circle of friends could actually be a detriment to me, particularly later in life.

Take this one, for example. My mom has a friend who's been going through the cancer thing. She had cancer and she had it treated. Then the cancer came back and she's had it treated again. Actually she's recovering from cancer surgery at the moment. And the thing about it is, she has this fabulous network of people around her. She's a person my mom has known for a long long time, worked with way back in the day, when I was a kid, and has remained part of my mom's circle for all that time. And my mom has always had that big circle, of women with kids and women without kids...just, friends. Who have now all drawn together in her hour of need, to help and support and just be there.

And I don't have that.

My sister has it. When the subject has come up, she tends to wave it off, like, "pish posh, I don't have that many friends." But the reality is, she does. She always has had a bigger circle than me. She's a more outgoing person than I am. She loves her quiet and solitude just as our mom and I do, but she also has the other thing. When she has a party, she has a guest list.

I don't have parties. I always think: who would I invite if I decided to have a party? Okay. Um, well, my mom, and my sister, and my daughter. My boyfriend, my friend Bella. My friend Fee that I barely ever see.

...

That's about it. Maybe some of my daughter's friends.

Is that enough? Is that enough friends for a person to have? The thing is, I've always had one close pal who was a real extrovert. Someone who attracted people and could do the work of initializing those relationships. Once I'm in them, I'm pretty good at maintaining them, so long as the people don't drift away, as they often seem to do. I was married for 10 years to someone like that, and while we were together we had tons of friends (over 60 of them came to our wedding). But they gradually fell away and when we eventually split up none of them, I discovered, were really mine. Well that's not entirely fair, since I do still talk to a couple people from that time now and then. But they're not people I see every week or even every month.

I see or hear about groups of women who get together and do stuff on a regular basis. They go out to dinner or cocktails. They go for walks or go to the gym. They take classes or do projects like quilting or cooking. They have book clubs. Why don't I have that? Don't I want that? Sometimes, I want that more than anything else in the whole world. I want people who will phone me up and ask me to go do things. I want people I can phone if I just need to talk about something. But I don't really have that. And I suppose, I don't really need it most of the time. Or else, if I felt that need so keenly all the time, I'd surely be like a crazy person walking down the street mumbling to herself, or I'd be locked up in my apartment with 50 cats or something. Wouldn't I?

I really don't have the answer. All I know is, it's something that preoccupies my mind fairly often. And somehow, I got through this post without getting really sad.

comfort zone

I am the first to admit I am a terrible chicken. I think I alluded to it a couple of posts ago but I thought I'd elaborate now that it's official: my daughter J has been accepted to the gifted class at a new school, and has made the bittersweet decision to accept it. What this means is a whole new set of social challenges and expectations, situations to adapt to. Of course, when I talk about these things I'm talking not about her, but about me.

My daughter has had the great good fortune to inherit one of her father's best traits, which I will call gregariousness. He has always had the ability to enter a room and instantly become the best friend of everyone in it. There are downsides to this characteristic to which he also succumbed when he was older, and we're all crossing our fingers that that does not come to pass for her, but for now I'm pleased that she has that trait. I've never had it so I know what it's like to go through life without it.

Well, let me amend that statement a little bit. I guess for me, the difference is that at this point, now that I've developed skills and confidence in my chosen profession, I have no trouble walking into a work-type situation and brazening my way through. I still have a very hard time in social situations: parties in which I know nobody except the host are my absolute nightmare. I'm definitely a one-on-one type social being. Which has served to make my social circle extremely small -- one could call it a social dot, more than a circle in fact -- but that's a post for another day and ignites a whole other set of anxieties.

J, however, is in grade five, and will be transitioning to a new school in grade six, just before her eleventh birthday. School at that stage is not like a job, where you can have a modicum of social interaction with your coworkers, but the majority of your social life is conducted elsewhere. Elementary school is kind of an equal mix of social and "professional," or in this case academic association. J has always mostly come home from school and been pretty solitary, spending her evenings with me or her grandparents, doing homework, watching tv, playing various electronic games, doing extracurricular activities. It's only been in the past year or so that she's started having social interactions with her friends from school, outside school time. Especially now that we live across the street from the park and several of her buddies live around the corner.

At this point, I don't really doubt that she'll be able to maintain those extracurricular social contacts, even though she's moving to a school that is basically across town. I mean it's only a 10-minute drive, but it might as well be across town. It's a bit of a pisser to me really, since I've spent a lot of time and energy working to reside in the neighbourhood where she goes to school, and now this. Oh well, I keep telling myself it's only for 2 years.

Which is the other bright side to this whole thing, and probably was a point that helped J make the decision to make the change. She will come back to the neighbourhood and go to the same high school as the kids she's been going to school with all this time. In grade eight, they'll all be small fish swimming in a big pond, and they'll need to watch each other's backs. She was reassured by this notion I think -- not because she's anxious about high school, far from it, but because she does have a few buddies at her "old" school and doesn't want to lose them entirely.

I suppose I might be having a wee bit of that "my baby my baby" syndrome too, since the reality is that from here on out, she's going to need and want me around less and less. So although I tell myself I'm anxious about trying to find a niche in a new surrounding, I probably will find myself barely involved in anything going on at her new school anyway. It's been a couple of years since I've had time or energy to be on the PAC for example, and she's perfectly capable of advocating for herself. I will make myself known to her teachers and administrators, but probably won't need to do much more than that.

This comfort zone thing is bigger than I knew!

photos...at last!

Sorry they are so boring.



this is infokid, hurtling down the slope in the park across the the street from our house this past winter.



this is also infokid, riding her unicycle at her CirKids class. a few weeks ago they took the kids outside to ride, since it was such a lovely day. So i made her pose in front of the mountain panorama because i am a geek :P



and this is an urban park here in Vancouver. It's a lovely oasis of green and trickling stream in the middle of the city. Directly adjacent to it is a community centre, fitness centre and pool, and a nice branch of the Vancouver Public Library. If I didn't live where I live, I'd like to live near here.

one day I will update my links

It's really pretty sad that this pathetic attempt at a blog is the most lasting of all the links I have on my links area there. The personal ones anyway. I check them all periodically just to see whether there's been any activity, and I see that even darth's has been obliterated. Ironic that he's the only one who actually reads my blog. Hi darth! Where's your blog gone???

fear and change

well. I am a bit paralyzed by fear because of impending change, and I feel the need to "talk it out."

It's interesting that I'm feeling this way on my daughter's behalf, when a) she seems quite calm and even kind of excited, and b) I'm such a change addict when it comes to my own life, particularly jobs and dwellings. But.

so if you read the last post, you'll know that we've been working for some time toward providing my daughter with a more enriching, more appropriate, more satisfying academic environment, and in so doing also improve her social surroundings. This has been in the works for some time, and I've been chomping at the bit to keep the process in motion, and to see results.

Now, it seems, all our efforts are bearing fruit, as a 2-day visit to the gifted classroom has been successful, it seems that she will be offered a spot, and she is happy with her choice and the changes that accompany it.

but I, suddenly, am feeling very very very anxious about the changes myself! The logical (very tiny, it feels like) part of my brain is reassuring the emotionally charged (very much larger) part that I am just projecting because I lack confidence in my own ability to establish myself in a community. But that emotional side is thinking about all the wonderful people and relationships we've built up at our school, and worrying about what will happen when we leave it all behind.

Let's see what's worrying me:
1) I won't be able to be an advocate for my child among people I don't know and who don't know her.
2) She will lose her friends and be a stranger in a strange land when she enters high school.
3) ...

Okay that's all I can think of right now. But they're big, aren't they?

Aren't they?

Oh all right. I know. It will be fine. She will be happy and having the kind of education I always dreamed she should and never dreamed she could have. I will be able to procure the attentions and benefits she deserves because, well, because I'm her mom and that's what I do. And she has her dad's gift for making a niche for herself and going along through her life with confidence.

Phew. I feel better.