Thursday, January 31, 2019

Family Friends

In planning the upcoming weekend, I realized we had Saturday evening completely open, and thought it'd be fun to have someone over, but couldn't think of who to ask that would be a good fit for all us. Kids similar ages and personalities, parents we both like, and likely to be free at the last minute on a weekend?

Finally, after years of feeling lonely and trying to put myself out there, I feel like I have a decent tribe of my own local friends that are up to hang out and fill my need for social interaction. But I can't always be dashing off to do something on  my own, leaving G and the boys in the lurch...it'd be much better if we could all socialize together.  Its the ideal situation when kids play on their own and the grown-ups get a chance to chat. Order in or make something simple, casual and frugal. This was literally every weekend for my parents growing up...not sure why its alluding us.

My initial reaction is to be discouraged, and assume that everyone has already figured this out, and we somehow got left out of the mix---we weren't invited to ANY Super Bowl parties! But, as I've learned over the years, you have to be a friend to make a friend, so we have to take the plunge, overcome the fear of rejection (why does this never go away?) and invite people over if we want to build our circle.

So I guess I gotta keep putting myself out there, because as much as G would like to have more of a family social life, he sure as heck isn't going to plan anything.

How have you made family friends, and are you going to any Super Bowl parties? 

6 comments:

  1. I really struggle with this. We've lived in our neighborhood for over 10 years now, but we still don't have many local friends. Q and I are both introverts, which is part of it for sure, but it's also that E has so many social struggles and P is out of sync with siblings being so much younger. The mums I best connect with, for the most part, have kids who don't mesh with E. His best friend is the one exception but they're very busy and very extroverted, so we don't link up as often as we'd like.

    I need to reach out more and risk more, but it's scary and also something I often don't feel like adding to my 'to-do' list.

    We have made a point of getting together with one family every month or so, but they live out of town. I've known the parents for 20 years and E gets along well with their youngest.I often wish they were neighbors!

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    1. Our older son's social struggles lie at the heart of this issue for us, too.

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  2. No super bowl parties (our people aren't the type to watch the super bowl!). But yeah, I do have family friends....mostly they emerged because our kids were good friends when they were little, and even if the kids have drifted apart, the adults have remained close. Last weekend involved a semi-spontaneous dinner gathering of another mom-and-kid family (divorced, not SMC) whose 14 year old has known mine since preschool. She brought over salad and cookies; I made soup. It was a good time.

    I will say this dynamic has largely worked with those families whose parents are also academic, though (as I think about it, we're all PhDs in various fields, including a librarian, a psychologist, a sociologist, a couple of economists, a linguist, etc) Although Tiny Boy has friends whose parents I like, we're not hanging out as a family any time soon.

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  3. The Super Bowl is this weekend? (kidding... sort of)

    Our social life is entirely on me, and more recently my daughter. And, I have no time to plan and have social anxiety as well, kind of like you. I've been trying to go out and do more things with people, because it makes me so much happier. And a Sunday night social event sounds like just the thing to get rid of the Sunday night scaries. I don't know why it's so hard to do in practice!

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    1. Yeah, I didn't even remember the super bowl until someone mentioned it at work, but Sunday night outings really do relieve the scaries and end the weekend on a high note

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