You can pick your friends...

My mother always used to say to us, "You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose but you can't pick your friend's nose."  Upon reflection I must question why she says this.  To my recollection we didn't have any sort of chronic nose picking habits, let alone any desire to explore our friends' nasal passages.  Of course my sister did sport a cruel rhyming slang nick name that will NOT be making an appearance on this blog, thank you very much.

No, I think maybe my mother said this (besides the fact that she thought it was funny) to remind herself of the inarguable fact I have been contemplating lately: you cannot make friends for your kids.  That simple.  You can't.

It's really quite a difficult fact to come to terms with, and one which accompanies the void in your sphere of parental influence called the school day, which stretches out like an empty space where your guidance and instruction should and used to be.

My kids have struggled with the friendship thing.  Each in their own way.  Of course my older two children were far more deeply affected by their early years and this has demonstrated itself in a variety of ways not acceptable in the school yard: picking up and eating food off the ground, taking jokes seriously and having a tantrum or cry, stealing food from others, trying to garner sympathy and get kids to do everything for you... the list is very long.  There are (LOTS) of times when this journey feels hopeless and endless.

However, we did have a birthday party for one of our kids recently.  She has really struggled with gaining and keeping friends.  She had a lazy eye, no social skills and an allergy to wheat that left her speaking like that Miss Teen America contestant who kept saying "The Iraq" in that infamous YouTube video.  Her party last year went so badly that a bitchy mother actually sat at my back porch table and told me she had no idea why her kid was invited because they weren't friends.  Shameless, really.  Why did they come if they didn't care about her?

So this year's party was a relative success in comparison.  Only three of the seven children she invited attended, but they were genuinely interested in being a part of her special day.  They wanted to play with her, they wanted to be her partner in games.  They LIKE her.  A small victory on the long, long road to gaining social acceptance, but hey, we'll take it.  Because at the end of the day we can't actually pick our kids friends or their friends noses.  We just have to hope that we can somehow steer the spaceship called our children toward that dream-galaxy called acceptance, love and friendship or at least toward self-acceptance.  (And no nose-picking!)