BFF forever
BFF … I hate that phrase, and I only used it because it works well in a google search. Of course, it's easy to have a best friend when you're five years old, and meaningful connections are based upon the fact that you both have the same pair of new shoes to start school with. But for midlife women?
It gets harder as we age, both to make new friends, and to keep the friends we already have. Established friends make choices that we don't agree with, partner up with people we don't like. 'Show me two women who haven't come to blows over half a lifetime and I'll show you two acquaintances, not friends.' This is what, Helen, the heroine of my book A Midlife Holiday, says. I think Helen's right. So although this post is in praise of one my oldest and long-standing friends, you won't hear me use the phrase again. I have no idea what should replace it? LLFF? Loyal, long-standing friend forever? Maybe
This is sixty
So, the woman on the postcard, looking fabulous in a sparkling silver jumpsuit, is my LLFF, at her 60th birthday celebration last week. I'll call her M.
I first met M, twenty-eight years ago. We were working at one of the most exclusive gyms in London. Soap-stars and TV presenters, the wives of very rich men, and the very rich men themselves, frequented our gym. Britt Ekland came and sweated it out on the treadmill, without ever taking off her sunglasses. She needn’t have worried. I never knew it was her, until years later. I was once chatted-up by a lord, or a baron, maybe an earl … Another very wealthy man anyway, and at times I’ve wondered what my life would look like now had the chatting-up occurred under different circumstances. A sophisticated wine-bar perhaps? Somewhere at least where he wasn’t sweating buckets, in a t-shirt that didn’t cover his paunch.
I thought M was ancient. I had seen her age written down. Thirty-two it must have been, I don’t remember the second digit, just the first one. 3. Which equaled thirty-something. Thirty! I was all of twenty-eight, and I couldn’t imagine being an age that began with the number 3.
I knew she was recently separated from her husband, and the father of her two young children. I knew it hadn't been easy, but no more.
I got to know those children well, as within another year I was couch-surfing at her place. I say couch-surfing, but really I was sleeping in the bottom bunk, whilst her daughter slept on the top, and her son slept in with his mum. He would have been about five, her son, the sweetest kid, with a nervous stammer.
I recall occasionally picking them up from school, maybe watching them as she drove from one exercise class to another. One gym shift, to another. I think she used to do a Sunday afternoon shift – the kind of graveyard shift, no one else will do. I lived with her for about three months and our weekend started on a Wednesday, with a bottle of red wine and ER. Those were innocent days. One bottle lasted both of us all night, and no-one even knew who George Clooney was. M’s flat was simple, sparsely furnished with cheap furniture. She didn’t have much, but what she had she made the most of – a simple rug, a postcard framed to serve as decoration.
It wasn’t all one way, as any good friendship isn’t. My company was good for her. We had a lot of laughs and those Wednesday evenings were really quite lovely.
A life well lived
Years went by. I moved into my own flat, began writing my age with the number 3, went back-packing, came home, fell pregnant with twins.
By now M had a new partner and those tiny children were teenagers; never did we expect to be pregnant at the same time, but that's what happened! And then she carried on, having her last child at fort, and once again I thought she was ancient. Forty? Who could imagine being an age that begins with the number 4, and then having a baby …
Not me, until I went on to have my last child, at forty-four. Here's a post about Never saying never
Oh, ladies, if there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s to stop looking at numbers, and start looking in the mirror instead. Yes it’s in the mind, but it’s also in the body. It’s in the bones, the density of them, it’s in the muscle mass, the hip-to-waist ratio, all of which is something we can change, and then control, and all of which affects the mind. Anyway ...
I spoke to M last night on the phone. I’d had a glass, or three, of bubbly and I needed to off-load some of this divorce stuff. And that’s when, quite unexpectedly, she told me just the smallest slice of what had really been going on in her life when we first met.
Her son’s nervous stammer?
Probably because he’d seen his father pin his mother to the bed, with a knife at her throat. Probably because he’d witnessed the police breaking down the door. Probably because of the disruption of moving into a refuge, or being carried down the stairs in the middle of the night and bundled into the car and taken to the safety of grandma and grandad - this was when she lived on the 20something floor, of a London high rise where the elevators rarely worked.
All of this, and more, had happened in the very recent past when we first met, and M didn’t say a word. She got up, she got her kids up, she got them to school and went to work. She paid her bills, shared a bottle of red with me. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
I asked her why. Why didn’t you ever tell me just how awful it had been? But even as I asked, I knew the answer.
M is a Buddhist, you see. Amongst other things I know her practice, the literal chanting, for peace, for forgiveness, for positivity, gives her an outlet for all the other destructive thoughts and emotions that have no place in a healthy body and mind. And at that time, she was practicing daily. So much so that, like poison sucked from a wound, returning to the trauma felt both unnecessary and unhealthy.
I know exactly how she feels. Hearing about the divorce, all of my close circle of friends, and beyond, have reached out. And I'm truly grateful, but I don't want to talk about it. My writing does for me, what M's chanting did for her. Everybody, must have something.
And now she’s sixty! Ancient again, because I am, and always will be so much younger. But just look at her! Her fiftieth was great, but her sixtieth … She’s setting the bar, for what living a good life looks like.
And that little boy, by the way, with his nervous stammer?
If I gave you his name, you could google him and find he’s a very successful actor. This week he’s been narrating an audio-book. Imagine that? The boy with the stammer.
M is quite rightly proud of him. And I’m proud of M. And as I go forward into my new life, I carry with me the image of her flat in west London, the sparse furniture and the simple postcards. I’m not sure, at the age of fifty-six if I can face a Sunday afternoon graveyard shift, but I will do what I have to do.
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