There's a well known idea floating around that friends can be for a season, a reason or a lifetime. The premise is that once you have identified the nature of the friendships in your life, you can then nurture them accordingly.
I truly love the friends I have made in recent years through work, parenting, fitness, our neighbourhood, my Hubby or other friends.
But there is definitely something special about enduring friendships.
The lifetime kind.
The ones that have weathered all manner of seasons, storms and stupidity.
I'm blessed to have a few long, long, long term friends that I am still close to.
These people are high school girlfriends, university buddies and work colleagues from my very first days of teaching.
These friends have seen some seriously bad fashion going on, they've watched in horror as I've put my foot in it - again and they've laughed with me until our cheeks ached.
I hope they'll be there when we laugh until we wet our incontinence pads through.
Through ups and downs and everything in the middle we've remained solid friends.
We've supported each other through excitements, disappointments, relationships, careers, homes, hangovers, pregnancies, losses, motherhood and mother in laws.
They're the ones with whom secrets are pointless and with whom one look can convey a thousand words.
These friends know my family, my neuroses, my history and what shapes the person I am today.
For some unknown, blessed reason they're still here.
With my closest family member some 15,000 kms away, these friends are the family that I have been lucky enough to choose.
These same friends have embraced Hubby and love my Magoo - no matter how poorly behaved either of them may be on any given occasion.
As an old girlfriend (as in we've been friends a long time - not that she's old) and I watched our sons in the bath the other night, we had a giggle at the way our lives and our friendship has evolved.
From propping up the bar, procuring drinks galore and dancing til the sun rose in the 'gool old days' - to playing with, feeding and bathing our kids together in the 'just as good now days'.
There's a gorgeous comfort in that familiarity and endurance.
Thank you, my lifetime friends.
All of you.
Words don't do you justice.
Shar :-) xx
