It's Hard Being A Good Friend When You Weren't Around Long Enough To Learn...

I know a lot of women who have an amazing amount of friends for their support group. I'm not one of them. It's hard for me to make friends since I never had many growing up. We always moved before I could solidify any relationships with other girls my age. Therefore, I really never had any practice at being a good friend.


Being a good friend is an art I've never mastered, although I do have a few die hard friends scattered here and there. I'm not sure why, since I've never actually worked at cultivating these friendships. Still, I love them dearly and would do almost anything for them. Then it dawned on me that perhaps I'm just not that likable a person, but then decided I'm more likable than most, so that can't be it. I'm just not well versed in remembering birthdays, planning for special occasions, etc. I tend to just go about life living in my own private little world, with little regard for others (since I can't remember anything these days). 


I dream about what it would be like to actually have friends that I talk with every day, but am uncertain as to whether or not that's what I really want. I think it mostly has to do with missing my best friend Susan (Suze/*sooz*), gone five years now. Most of the time I don't think about it but every now and then I get melancholy, missing my oldest friend. I miss going MIA with her on our *afternoon adventures in early cocktails*, lunches-turned-adventures, trips to shop in Dallas while staying at The Adolphus, trips with our kids to every place they wanted to go, etc. Those were truly the days when we had the most fun.


I suppose it's quite different for those who grew up in *normal* families. You never even knew kids like me existed, much less understood what we were going through every time we had to attend a new school (which was basically every 3-6 months for me).


Still, I persevere to learn. It's not easy knowing how to be a good friend without knowing the *ground rules*. I suppose you could say I'm still a work in progress and probably always will be until I die....