Two Friends, Finally
For a long time making friends was the thing I quietly grieved the most, more than the words, more than the milestones everybody else warns you about, because making friends is so social, so unspoken, so much a language kids just seem to absorb out of thin air, and Levi never absorbed it, he had two siblings at home but a lot of the time they just made him mad, and as his parents we weren’t even allowed to touch him or really play with him most days, so play itself was foreign, he didn’t know what to do with another kid, he didn’t know what to do with us either honestly.
When he started early pre k for developmental delays we were told, gently but plainly, that he probably wouldn’t talk to the other kids or try to play with them, that he’d likely just sit and do his own thing, and that was exactly what happened, for years, he sat and did his own thing while the room played around him, and I want to be honest that hearing a teacher say that about your kid before he’s even old enough to know what’s being said about him does something to you, it sits in your chest a long time.
As he got older it stayed the same, he never really connected with kids his own age, the kids he was drawn to were always younger, and even then it wasn’t friendship exactly, it was more like he took care of them, watched over them, or he’d be so called friends with adults instead, easy conversation with grown ups who could meet him where he was, but never a kid his own age looking back at him and choosing him the way friends choose each other.
It took until seventh grade, but he finally made two friends, and they are still there today.
Seventh grade, two boys, and it wasn’t small, he went to their house, swam, played video games, went to a party, and I remember watching it happen almost from the outside like I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing, because this wasn’t another younger neighborhood kid he’d taken under his wing and it wasn’t an adult who’d learned how to talk to him, this was two kids his own age who talked with him and built something real on a social and emotional level, back and forth, mutual, chosen.
They still talk to this day, even now that one of them has already graduated and moved on into whatever comes after high school, and there is something about a friendship that survives that kind of distance that tells you it was never fragile to begin with, it was just late, and late is not the same thing as broken, even though for years it felt like it might be.
I carry that seventh grade year with me into every session where a parent quietly mentions their kid doesn’t really do friends, doesn’t really do groups, doesn’t really do the things that come so easily to everyone else’s kids, because I already get it, I sat in that pre k classroom and heard the prediction too, and I know now that a prediction is not the same thing as a future, it’s just what someone could see from where they were standing at the time.
Both things get to be true, the years of watching your kid sit alone in a room full of other kids, and the seventh grade year that finally comes and rewrites the whole story, and I don’t know when your version shows up, I just know I’m not in a hurry for you to get there, I’ll walk alongside you for however long it takes.
If you’re still waiting on your own version of seventh grade, you’re not alone in it. Let’s talk about your family’s session, wherever you are in the waiting.