Two of my best mates are a quarter of a century apart in age. One of them was born the year my husband and I started dating. The other was married the year I arrived in Australia, an awkward and unhappy not-quite-twelve-year-old.
One of the many good things about getting older is that you have a bigger pool of potential friends. And age absolutely ceases to matter.
My mother was 41 when I was born so I was always accustomed to having older people around. As a young mother, living a long way from my own parents, several older women became important mentors to me. They showed me that it was possible to get through the early parenting years and out the other side with one’s sense of humour, enjoyment of life and relationship intact. At times they kept me sane. They are still an inspiration.
As I eased into my middle and late thirties, however, I realised that there was a bunch of enticing people fifteen years younger than me. Their youthful enthusiasm was energising, their ideas were sometimes challenging, their appreciation of me as an older person was affirming.
These friends are now in their thirties and many have children of their own. Some of them have the relationship with my kids that I did with them: part-mentor, part someone who is older but not their parents, so has an element of cool. As their babies grow, I hope my kids will be a similar part of their lives.
It only gets better, and richer. In my early fifties, I now have yet another generation of people I consider friends and enjoy spending time with. There are my own young adults and their partners and friends. There are also the offspring of my oldest and dearest friends – the ones I grew up with, the ones who had babies the same time as me.
Those babies are now irresistible young adults with whom I share text messages, emails and phone calls and sometimes lunch or coffee. I learn so much from them. I care about them in a way you can only care about someone you have known since they were in utero, that you have watched grow. They are like part of my extended family.
One of the things I have always treasured about belonging to a church community is the access it gives you to friendship with people of different generations. There aren’t many places in our society where you are exposed, week in week out, to everyone from babies to great-grandparents.
Living in a country town had some of the same advantages. In Melbourne, I tended to hang out with people who were very like me. We were the same age, socio-economic level, had often been to similar schools or grown up in the same suburbs.
Living in small county towns, contrary to what I expected, I was exposed to a wider range of human beings. There weren’t many there with my kind of background, so I had to explore friendships with people I might never have spent time with in Melbourne: builders, business people, farmers, some who voted for the country party or thought the Bible was meant to be taken literally.
Work can be another place where you get close to people quite different from yourself. I have a dear colleague who was muttering just last week about his low opinion of Greens leader Bob Brown. I said to him, ‘You know, you are the only friend I have who doesn’t revere Bob Brown. In fact, you are one of the few friends I have who is even remotely right wing, and I treasure you for it’.
Friendship is one of the things that make life worth living. I am very self-contained in many ways, and love being alone, but I couldn’t live without my friends. Both the intimate ones I have shared anguish and joy with at great depth, and also the larger circle of people I don’t see all the time but I know would always be there for me or for my family.
It’s a cliché, but friendship and community are two of the things that will help me survive if life goes pear-shaped, and that will be there as I grow old. Now, while life is rich and full and mostly wonderful, friendship and community give me joy and broaden my horizons. Like a good book, my friends of different ages and backgrounds help me understand points of view and enter worlds other than my own.
So, I have coffee with my two mates; hear about one’s grand children and the other’s toddlers and move on to other topics: books and God, relationships and death, work and the environment. And count myself lucky to have such a varied array of human beings in my life.