I have this friend...

I have this friend. I’m not good at making normal friends. Generally I make friends who have a lot of baggage. Women who have mental scars they are working through or need a lot of attention to fill an empty void in their soul.  I normally gravitate to the shit show in the room; the like-minded woman who has seen parts of life that force her to be realer than other people. She has no time for pleasantries and she knows life is short so she likes to fuck it up a little bit. She wakes up and sometimes chooses violence.

But I have this friend. We met because my daughter started pageants and she was THE photographer to hire in Texas. She had one daughter, just like me. All our eggs in one basket, or at least the good egg.  She was very nice and calm.  She was normal. One of those women I try not to scare and tell myself to be on my best behavior. She was very talented and knew so many people in the pageant world. I was just starting out and she kindly helped me along. I felt lucky to know her.

She told me one day she thought she would start her own pageant here in Texas. I immediately entered my daughter to support her. And to my surprise, my daughter won!  We were elated to get spend more time with this talented woman. She had her life together, was independent. She commanded attention as her bangles clanked on her wrist as she talked. But, I saw she could use some help. She was a great face for the business, but could use some help behind the scenes. So, I offered my organizational talent. Before I knew it, I was the director of operations for the International Junior Miss Pageant. We were a team. I was in.  I had a normal friend.

Over the next ten years a bond would form that surprised me. The inside jokes accumulated. Memories stacked one on top of the other. You become close with someone when you’re puking into a plastic beach bucket on the way back from Port A. Or when you’re stuck on the side of the road, in the dark, with a flat tire, in a small Texas town waiting for the wrecker to come… so glad your friend is white just in case you hear a banjo in the distance. We watched our daughters graduate. Cry over boys. Cry over girls. The dinners, the flights of wine, the laughs. It was a friendship I didn’t expect, a friendship I probably thought I didn’t deserve.

I had a normal friend who was told last year she had cancer. Not just any cancer. An aggressive cancer. So now, she was my friend with Cancer.  You do what you are supposed to do. You pray. You are there for them. You try to act normal. You keep things positive. But the other part of you is scared. Scared for your friend. Scared that the reality is she may leave her only daughter alone in the world. Scared that your friend lost her mother around the exact same time. I have a normal friend who opened her heart for me and let me in. And I am powerless to truly help. 

I’m getting older. It’s harder to find friends. It’s hard to find that personality that works well with yours without fizzling out or blowing up. I’m not good at it. I try but there’s a part of me that holds back, for protection. But I have this friend, and now I need to be there for her, for her daughter. It was announced tonight that hospice is coming in and I have never felt more inadequate.