From More Magazine, Inventing the rest of your life...

Growing Up Together
Suzanne Braun Levine

We refer to childhood friends as "people we grew up with." The phrase conjures kids coming over after school, giggling in my room, raiding our refrigerator, endorsing my annoyance with my little brother, knowing my parents in their prime. There is a special intimacy about that shared history, and whenever I run unto Someone I Grew Up With, I count on that special bond to bridge the years.

We certainly didn't register at the time that we weren't just growing up alongside one another -- we were helping each other make sense of our world, establish relationships, sort out emotions, and over and over again set the markers for being grown up. In other words, we were extracting lessons from what was happening to each of us and translating them into principles to live by for people our age.

That mutual demystification of life is just as important to later stages, particularly the one about aging. I have written and lectured and mused to myself about the support I get from a good laugh with my friends as we search for What's Her Name's name, or the strength I get from the knowing warmth of a hug for no reason, or the real know-how gathered by their mobilized problem-solving powers. But recently I have become aware of a new dimension of growing up together.

My 90-year-old mother is increasingly bewildered by the aging process. Even when I try to explain that many of the memory problems, stiff joints, skin anomalies that she is noticing are shared by much younger women, she feels blindsided by the kinds of things my friends and I laugh about regularly. It finally dawned on me that, because she never had a close community of women, "a circle of trust" as I call them, she has grown up alone. No one bemoaned her thinning hair before my mother noticed her own. No one set a light tone for coping with the memory lapses. No one described learning to do one thing at a time as the multitasking mechanism shifts into low gear. No one has given her an important life lesson from the field as a friend recently did to me. "You know I'm beginning to think about things I won't do any more," she said. "But I'm surprised to discover that it doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would."

Growing up together is a lifelong process, and we need to nurture and cherish our best friendships not only for their historical value but for the protection and guidance that our dear soul mates contribute to coping with change and for how they make aging just one more stage of growing up.

Posted by Suzanne Braun Levine

Go to Suzanne's Web site, http://www.suzannebraunlevine.com, for more information on her work.