Fiercely, Jessica

I realized recently that a friendship had ended.

The strange part is, I think it ended months ago.

Nobody told me.

There wasn’t a fight.

No dramatic conversation.

No we need to talk.

There wasn’t even a moment I can point to and say:

That’s when it happened.

It was quieter than that.

Conversations changed.

Interactions became fewer.

Eventually, being in the same place didn’t necessarily mean we’d speak.

And somewhere along the way, enough small things accumulated that my brain finally caught up with what had apparently been happening for a while.

Oh.

So this is where we are now.

Apparently, adult friendship breakups don’t always require a conversation.

Sometimes nobody says goodbye.

You just eventually realize they already left.

The thing is, none of those little moments, individually, seemed significant enough to declare that a friendship had ended.

People get busy.

People have things going on that we know nothing about.

Sometimes someone doesn’t see you.

Sometimes a text doesn’t get answered.

Sometimes an interaction is weird because interactions are occasionally weird.

I know all of that.

I also know something about myself:

I recognize patterns.

Sometimes probably too well.

And there’s a difficult line between recognizing patterns and becoming hypervigilant about them.

One unanswered text isn’t rejection.

One missed invitation isn’t exclusion.

One strange interaction doesn’t mean someone secretly hates you.

Those are moments.

But patterns are made of moments.

Eventually, enough of them start saying the same thing.

I don’t know why this particular friendship changed.

I have theories, of course.

My brain is not nearly disciplined enough to refrain from producing those.

But theories aren’t facts.

I can know what I have experienced without pretending I know why someone else is doing it.

Maybe I did something.

Maybe relationships around us changed.

Maybe there’s an explanation I haven’t even considered.

I don’t know.

And maybe that’s part of adulthood too.

Sometimes you don’t get to know.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot because, while I’m navigating female friendship at forty-one, I’m also raising a thirteen-year-old daughter who is learning to navigate it herself.

And apparently I have a lot to say about it.

A lot.

I probably over-explain relationships to my daughter.

Actually, there’s no probably about it.

She can tell me a thirty-second story about something that happened with a friend and somehow find herself trapped in a TED Talk about communication, boundaries, intentions, accountability, conflict resolution, and why we’re not going to decide someone hates us because they left us on read.

I’m sure she treasures these moments.

The thing is, nobody really did that for me.

I didn’t have someone consistently helping me understand relationships or teaching me what to do when they became complicated.

So maybe I over-explain because silence taught me so much the hard way.

And lately, as I’ve watched my daughter navigate her own changing friendships, I’ve realized something.

Girls become women.

The problems become more adult.

There are no lunch tables for me to navigate anymore. No middle-school sleepovers or whispered conversations in the hallway.

Instead there are marriages and children and careers and churches and schedules that require color coding just to keep everybody where they’re supposed to be.

But strip all of that away, and I’m not convinced the foundation of female friendship changes as much as we think it does.

We still want to belong.

We still notice when something shifts.

We still wonder why the text wasn’t answered.

We still feel the sting when someone talks easily to everyone else in the room but somehow never makes it to us.

We still wonder whether to ask what’s wrong or pretend we didn’t notice.

We still wonder:

Did I do something?

Am I imagining this?

Should I reach out again?

When do I stop trying?

The questions grow up with us.

Recently, I watched my daughter experience a friendship slowly changing.

There wasn’t one dramatic ending for her either.

There were fewer conversations. Invitations that stopped coming. Occasional moments of connection followed by long stretches of silence.

I watched her notice.

And because I apparently believe every adolescent social interaction deserves a postgame press conference, we talked about it.

A lot.

At one point, after another disappointment, she told me it didn’t matter.

I told her it did.

She said she was numb to it.

And I told her something that I think I needed to hear too:

You can be okay even when what happened wasn’t okay.

Those aren’t the same thing.

You don’t have to fall apart for something to have hurt you.

You don’t have to hate someone because they disappointed you.

And you don’t have to pretend something didn’t hurt simply because you’ve learned how to live with it.

Eventually, an invitation came.

I had an opinion.

Of course I had an opinion.

I’m her mother. I have opinions professionally.

But I didn’t make the decision for her.

She thought about it.

She decided she didn’t want to go.

And I let that be her decision.

Because I’m learning that raising a teenager means slowly moving from making every decision for her to helping her develop the wisdom to make decisions for herself.

I can help her recognize a pattern without pretending either of us knows what’s inside another person’s heart.

And I can teach her that boundaries aren’t punishment.

Sometimes they’re simply what happens when we pay attention.

But there’s another side of friendship that I want her to understand just as much.

Sometimes she’s the one who gets it wrong.

A few years ago, my daughter participated in something that betrayed a friend’s trust.

When I realized what had happened, there was no ambiguity for me.

She was wrong.

She was ashamed and hurt and stubborn, and she had plenty of feelings about how her friend reacted once the betrayal was discovered.

But those feelings didn’t change what she had done.

I told her that.

She didn’t particularly enjoy that lesson.

Neither do adults.

It’s remarkably easy to hurt someone and then become so focused on their reaction to being hurt that we stop examining the thing we did in the first place.

Her friend had every right to be hurt.

My daughter owed her an apology.

And she wasn’t ready to give one.

So I apologized to the girl’s mother for what my child had done and made it clear that I knew my daughter was in the wrong.

Then I waited.

Every so often, I reminded my daughter that there was still something she needed to make right.

Months passed.

Eventually, I almost gave up on her doing it.

And then one day, she did.

Without me standing over her.

Without me writing the words for her.

She wrote her friend a note and genuinely apologized.

It had been more than a year.

The girls eventually became friends again.

Not exactly the way they had been before.

But friends.

And that taught both of us something.

It’s never too late to apologize.

But an apology isn’t a receipt you hand someone in exchange for restored access.

You can own what you did.

You can apologize sincerely.

You can repair whatever belongs to you to repair.

But you don’t get to decide what the other person does with that apology.

We’ve used an object lesson with our children since they were little.

Words are like nails driven into a piece of wood.

You can pull the nail back out.

You can fill the hole.

You can sand it down.

You can do everything you know to do to repair the damage.

But the wood has still been changed.

That’s why we teach them to be careful with the hammer.

It isn’t because repair is impossible.

It’s because repair doesn’t always mean returning something to exactly what it was before.

And maybe that’s what I’m trying to teach my daughter about friendship.

I want her to recognize patterns without becoming suspicious of everyone.

I want her to trust her instincts without assuming she understands everyone’s intentions.

I want her to give grace without abandoning herself.

I want her to know when to speak.

I want her to know when to listen.

I want her to fight for relationships worth fighting for without believing she has to chase someone who no longer wants to participate in one.

And when she’s the one holding the hammer, I want her to understand the responsibility that comes with it.

James writes:

“Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.”

I’m beginning to think there’s a lot of relationship wisdom packed into that one sentence.

Listen first.

Don’t react to every feeling the second you feel it.

Leave room for the possibility that you don’t know the whole story.

And when something belongs to you, own it.

I wish I could hand my daughter a perfect formula for friendship.

I can’t.

I can’t keep her from getting holes in her wood.

I can teach her not to be careless with the hammer.

And I certainly can’t promise she’ll never be the one who hurts somebody else.

What I can do is give her language.

I can teach her that being okay doesn’t make what happened okay. That recognizing a pattern isn’t the same as knowing someone’s motive. That sometimes relationships end without villains.

And that something can have been real and still be finished.

Maybe that’s the strangest part of raising a daughter.

I thought I would teach her from things I had already learned.

Instead, sometimes I’m teaching her while I’m still learning them myself.

Because here I am at forty-one, still encountering grown-up versions of questions she’s beginning to ask at thirteen.

Who is safe?

Who is sincere?

When do I speak?

When do I give grace?

When do I stop explaining someone else’s behavior for them?

When do I let go?

I don’t have all of those answers for my daughter.

I don’t even have all of them for myself.

But I can give her something I didn’t have.

Someone willing to sit beside her while she figures them out.

Girls become women.

The problems grow up with us.

And while my daughter becomes one, I’ll sit beside her.

Even if I’m still learning too.

Fiercely,

Jessica