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Showing posts from July, 2018

Being a friend, a carer and a friend to a carer

I have been thinking a lot lately about friends and the meaning of friendship. As a child, making friends didn’t come easily to me, so those friendships I had were very precious, and I suppose that established a pattern that followed me into adulthood. Working full time in a demanding job with a 3-hour commute several days a week has meant that some of my closest friends and confidants are work colleagues. It makes sense as we spend most of our time working together in a tight knit team, supporting and encouraging each other. Consequently, I have had less opportunity to cultivate friendships in other areas of my life. Where we have invested in friendships in the past we have often found that a change in circumstances was enough to cause the connections to wither. This happened some years ago when we were struggling with infertility and, as each couple in our circle of friends began their families, they inevitably moved on to establish friendships with other parents with whom t