Peers

Peers

We have been swallowed up by a storm of bureaucratic bullshit and it's fall out here at Witch HQ over the last week or so culminating in a rather long "assessment" of our home, our child, and our schooling today which lasted over three hours.

The general upshot from all this for us was a deep seated feeling that they just didn't get it.

More than that they were happy academically with where E is but doesn't she need friends her own age?

I pointed out I had tried to encourage her. That she used to play out in the street but she had (and still has) very little urge to do so. 

She is certainly not shy, or reluctant to talk to people she just has friends who are much older, from all kinds of backgrounds.

Now I had friends in school (of all kinds) but I got on better with the teachers than I did the students.

Even at sixth-form, my peers (of all ages) tended not to be the other actors but the musicians, techs and others.

I fell in with a crowd in their early twenties at 17 (of mostly guys) and for the first time in my life I felt I belonged, at least a little.

I had a couple of best friends at school, but this was different. My friends from school taught me a lot and I even had a lot of fun, but...I didn't have friends until I found my little nook of support at school, I would have been E's age then. 

Yet while I grew into being out going and semi-popular, few people knew me.

No it was this guitar playing, hippy, grunge, pool playing, poetry reading, smart ass university students who drank a lot of hard booze (not that my school friends didn't) that shook up my world.

We played chess (I still suck at it), discussed history and politics, ideals and ideas in a way I had never had the freedom to do before. I heard weird new music, weird old music and sang songs from my soul too drunk to lift my head from the sofa cushion. When I got to university I again had to find a spot and again it was not with my "peers". I couldn't stand most of the writing students (doing the writing/philosophy combo), or the dram llama ding-dongs (all tits and teeth). No I found friends with people like the wizard (20+ years older than me) who lived in the tower over looking my building (this is the stone cold truth) and the freaky rock club D.J's (10+years older than me), Runesmiths (20+ years and some serious life experience) and street performers (+ but no clue by how much), and wild dance drop-outs (my own age but much more worldly). I meet and got to know law students, artists, and as the pagan world opened up to me a whole host of other weird and wonderful people, most of whom couldn't give a crap when my birthday was. 

 

So why do schools (it is a particularly schoolish idea) think your peers will be people who were born roughly in the same year as? It isn't like that at work? It isn't like that in families. So why do they create an alien environment and then judge us if we don't fit into that box?

They can't see that having friends of just your age is actually very limiting and kind of weird.

I just have this knowing, that it isn't important if she does or doesn't want to hang out with people her age now. She will grow into friendships of all kinds for all kinds of reasons. Some will be older, some younger. Some will be the other side of the world. Some next door. Some will have their own lessons, and reason, their own seasons too. The best friends might not be the ones who give us the comfort of who we were but challenge us to be smarter, faster, bigger and brighter.

Of course I hit this plateau in my twenties where I gained younger friends too, and as I have aged I have lost and made friends with people from all kinds of backgrounds, of all ages, races and beliefs, with all kinds of passions and desires.

So this anxiety of "abnormality" is based on an artifice they themselves create. As the people around her grow into and out off their bodies and hormones as well as experiences, as she does herself she may wish to re-join the world of her "peers". She may just be waiting for her tribe, her soul friends to find their way to her.

Bright Blessings xxx