The perfect friend for a career-minded woman is another time-poor female because no one gets hurt.
I can go for weeks, sometimes months, without seeing friends. Every hour of my day is accounted for. I can blink and a season will have passed. The last thing I need is to feel guilty about that too.
It’s impossible to have all of the balls flying high in the air at the same time. One will always be on the way down while the other two are up high and on the way. If you choose to mix a career with children, as my close girlfriends and I have done, then it’s the time for friends that can often be sitting at the bottom of your priority list, until later in life when the balls get switched. At least that’s the theory.
If this is the case for all friends simultaneously then everyone is happy. I share this lifestage (because that’s really what it is) with most of my friends but one in particular stands out. I am grateful for the friendship of a woman I met when I was 12. We went to school and university together and our families are close. My friend is a scientist and she lives and works in Canberra, while I am based in Sydney. We are lucky if we catch up twice a year and she has never made me feel guilty about it. We both have children and they fill up the hours, minutes and seconds of our career downtime. But when we speak or see each other we just pick up the conversation like it was yesterday.
It’s not like I don’t think about my friends or spend time with them. Every now and then I will sneak out for a cheeky movie night with a couple of girlfriends or an afternoon coffee when the boys are watching the footy. But it’s usually last minute because I rarely know when I’ll have some ME time.
Having said that I have planned a long weekend in The Hunter Valley with some good friends in December. We’ll catch up on life over a few glasses of great wine and reminisce while singing along to Simple Minds.
My closest friends understand how my life works and put up with me.
How do you keep up with your friends while juggling everything in your life?