Close Friends and Peripheral Friends

Oh My Goodness… I am sitting here in my office where all of my daily adventures and usually the imagined ones begin as I gaze outside to the world which amazingly continues to move ahead, even though I am not there to direct them! I suppose that sometimes I forget that my way isn’t the only way, though my darling daughters are sure to remind me of that.

Though they may remind me of that, and quite often, I am still pretty sure that though my way isn’t the only way, it can be quite often the best way. STOP it! Like you don’t feel the same about the way you think. I mean obviously we all think we are right, otherwise we wouldn’t do life the way we do, so take the hands off the hips and check this out!

Yesterday, my daughter Elise, comes home. She is excited because it was candy gram day. The day they reserve candy grams for their friends for the party prior to, Valentine’s day. I asked her if she had reserved her grams for her two close friends, the ones that have been her friend since she moved to this new school in August. No she says she reserved them for these two girls that I know she wants to be friends with because she thinks they are cool. Mind you Elise is only 10ish, but I was just shocked.

It occurred to me that children do not just inherently understand not only social graces, but how to do right by their good friends, and how they can have peripheral friends but that they are not on the same level as said good friends. As I am having this thought, and we are walking out of the school yard, Jana her good friend (not one of the candy gramed) came to see if she could play after school. Elise was more than happy of course to go do that, but it made me realize that we had to have the friend talk when she came home.

When I picked her up, I asked her about why she gramed the other two girls, and not her good friends. She said she didn’t even think about it that way. I had to explain that you only have a handful of good friends in life, and those are the ones we go above and beyond for, those are the ones that we stand up for, and those are the ones, we think about ahead of all of our other friends even if some seem cooler. We talked and I explained the whole concept of peripheral friends and close friends.

After we finished talked and she decided how she was going to right this situation, I began thinking about those two twitty cool girls. I know I am an adult and I am supposed to be beyond that, but hello? I found myself irritated that my daughter was trying to basically suck up to the cool girls, and I felt back in school again! Honestly, I will admit, that my dear Elise, is far more patient and kind than I was then or even now. There is no way I would have tried to befriend the cool kids, just on the mere fact that they think they are all that and a bag of Doritos already, so I wouldn’t have wanted to feed into their egos. Am I odd here? Should I want her to befriend the cool kids? I of course believe I am so right about this, but I am older now and willing to admit, (to you, not to Colin, so shush it!) that I may not be doing this right. Any ideas??? I mean seriously, let me know!