Relationship Goals

She still likes me for the time being and is OK with me as company if nobody else is available but it’s become pretty clear that my daughter would prefer to spend her free time hanging out with her friends. It’s not a surprise but something that has been slowly building for a long time, a time that I knew would come. There’s a degree of melancholy about how fast she seems to be growing up but also an acceptance of its inevitability.

The hardest thing is coming to terms with the activity that she and her friends seem to spend so much of this time together doing. It would be a lot easier if whenever I spied on the little weirdos they were doing something other than just…talking.

Even weirder is how easily it seems to come to them, without any of the awkwardness that I would usually associate with small talk. One of my very first posts was about the group of friends that she had formed in pre-school and even though the other girl in the above picture is the only one of those that she still sees on a regular basis her other besties have been that for almost as long. Part of that might be due to us having become friends with their parents, part due to the fact that over the last year there hasn’t been much opportunity for her to meet anybody outside of the small circle that we have formed but mostly I think it’s just because they click.

My daughter has found several girls that she is just able to completely be herself around and as we head closer and closer towards the dreaded teenage years I think that it may just be the most important tool that she will have to navigate them.

It’s really all that any of us are looking for, isn’t it?  Whether it be our friends, our partners, spouses, co-workers even. We just want to be able to be ourselves, to not have to worry about how we are perceived or judged. We wear so many different masks over the course of our lives, pretend to be so many different people. Not everybody is the same of course but I think that for a lot of us there is a trail of broken friendships and failed relationships that are the result of trying to be other than what we are, often unconsciously.

Kids don’t do that, at least not at first.

The awkwardness, the self-doubt, the need to fit in, to be “popular” and liked, these things all show up so much earlier in their lives than we as parents realize. They show up so much earlier than our children are emotionally equipped to deal with them. Hell, most of the adults I know still aren’t emotionally equipped to deal with them. I’m 46 and if I thought for sure I could say that applied to me it would only be for the last couple of years.

I don’t ask what they talk about. I know that she would tell me, probably in excruciating detail, but that’s not really the important part.  It really doesn’t matter. I’m watching them through the lens of someone who’s much more introverted than I spent most of my life considering myself but for me the important part is that she has people that she can be comfortable around, that a day at the park with a friend can just mean walking around the track and bullshitting for a while.

Maybe it’s just me, but what else are any of us really looking for?

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Previously Published on thirstydaddy.com and is republished on Medium.

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