Having just come back from a wonderful week with childhood girlfriends, it struck me how much we have changed… and how little. We three grew up together, were roommates when we got to the big city once leaving high school, worked together and shared all our secrets. Even a boyfriend or two.
We have all since married, had families and are suddenly 40 years old. How did that happen? Weren’t we going to be young forever? With weekdays of boring jobs so that we could afford weekends spent clubbing and seeing far off places? We’d be together forever and nothing would ever change. Pacts and promises made, and meant to last forever.
Twenty years later we have eight kids, three husbands and three very different lives between us. We live in three different countries, have three different lifestyles and have vastly different careers. So much has changed from the days when we thought everything would remain just as it was.
We all flew in to the beautiful Spanish city where we chose to meet, and stayed in a striking apartment so that we had a stunning living room to hang out in and a kitchen for coffee and cooling the wine. A home from home - perfect for girlfriends. I got there two days early, having come the furthest. I saw the city, engrossed myself in museums, galleries and the vibrant street culture that surrounded me. Just me – with no family attached and a laptop left at home. Strange days, but wondrous ones.
Then came our much anticipated reunion and every single year that had passed seemed to fly into some kind of time traveling machine and flew us all back to our teens and early 20s... strangely, our behavior jumped into that machine too. We laughed over everything, and over nothing. Sometimes we talked about sad things and realized we weren’t as alone as we thought. We spoke of our children and our husbands, of career choices and the countries we now live in. We all look the same. Older, of course, but pretty much unchanged from the days of youth, when turning 40 would never happen and we’d never have responsibilities that really mattered.
So what didn’t change much at all? Our personalities. Our experiences have changed how we think about the world and our years of travel, work and having relationships that ended up with babies alter things forever. But deep down, we’re just as we were. And when all is stripped away – when all the news and stories, the differences and adventures are set aside, we are who we have always been: three friends who made pacts and promises we said we’d keep forever. And it turns out we did. We’re still there for each other, still there for a shoulder to cry on and an arm to lean on when our feet turn unsteady from laughing. And after so many years, still no-one quite gets us like we get us. We understand why we think like we do and why we do what we do. It was all there, more than two decades ago, planted in fertile childhood soil and in the wishes and dreams we all had back then. The wishes and dreams that didn’t sound quite the same when we told them to new people in our lives.
But on meeting up again, the wishes and dreams returned and the pacts and promises raised their pretty heads. And here they remain, twenty years later. As we left the beautiful country that was our home for several memorable days, and all returned to foreign shores, we’re somehow shocked, yet not surprised, as to how all the years fell away. And how such strong friendships between women can truly last a lifetime, despite having spread our wings the world over, with families of our own and lives so vastly different. Somehow we will always understand us, like no-one else. Three musketeers who have many more decades to hold our friendship close to our hearts and never forget that we understood each other before anyone else did.