Options

 

It's been a pretty good week.

There is another office person that has started at my work to help me out, I've been getting a bit snowed under with paperwork!

Anyway, she reminds me very much of one of my childhood friends who I grew apart from as we grew up.  Sadly, she passed away before my son was born but we lost contact a long time before that.

This actually got me thinking about the "friends" I had growing up, that I don't have anymore due to either growing apart or never actually being a friend.

The friend I have mentioned above was a couple of years older than me, but our families grew up together. We spent a lot of time at their place.  Looking back, if it wasn't for this, I don't think our paths would even have crossed. 

My love of Bryan Adams and Roxette comes from fun times spent in the "new room" (a built on room separate to their main house) and I have so many lovely memories.

The trouble is, as we got older, I was only her friend when she had a falling out with her other friends.  She would ignore me in High School because I wasn't cool.  It took me a little while to figure out that she only wanted to spend time with me when she had no one else to spend time with.  And when she would come and pick me up and go for a drive, she would spend the whole time talking about her other friends and their arguments.

She got married and had children, so she then didn't need me at all anymore and so we grew apart completely.  

Another friend lived down the road from me.  We lived out of town and went on the same bus together and were in the same year in Primary and High School.  

On weekends, I would ride my bike to her house and either spend the day or have a sleep over.  This friendship was a secret.  I wasn't allowed to tell anyone at school that we were friends, but of course the way she spun the story made it really exciting, instead of the fact that she didn't want anyone to know she was friends with ME.  But of course she was in with the cool popular crowd so I felt special that she wanted to spend time with me on weekends.

I haven't set eyes on her since we left High School.

I guess this got me thinking about my choices in friends and how sometimes they are not fantastic and turn out very badly - as I've written about before.

I think I choose people who are like me and weren't in the "cool crowd" at school.  I just need to remember that sometimes there is a very good reason that they weren't liked very much at school.  

I realise that as we get older, we don't need to spend as much time with our friends to know that they are still there.  I am still best friends with a girl I went to kinder with.  We only see each other about once a year but when we do, it's like it was only yesterday.

Now to the reason I'm actually writing this.  I hope that I have never treated any of my friends as "an option".  I hope that I have remained in contact with them even when I've been in a relationship and never made them feel that way.  

I know that life gets in the way for us all, and we get busy with work and family etc, but there's a big difference between having busy lives and only calling on a particular person when you have no other options.

If anyone reading this has ever felt like they are an option, or a "sometimes" friend, please know that it says nothing about you, but everything about the person that treats you that way.  

HUGS xxxx