The articulation of her loneliness

The articulation of her loneliness took me by surprise.

We brought a casserole and garlic bread to a woman from church yesterday; she'd had surgery earlier in the week and was just home from the hospital. I visited with her for a few minutes while the woman's 4-year-old daughter dragged my toddler from room to room, showing off her toys, the perfume in her mother's bathroom, their dog panting behind the sliding glass door to the back yard. My girl ate up the attention, and put up quite a fight when I announced we had to go.

I had finally gotten her squirmy, sulky little self strapped in the car seat when she looked down at her shoes and said, "Mommy, I want friends."

Oh!

I haven't stopped thinking about it since; it hurts me that she said that, and so sadly. I didn't know....

Though she's always been a social creature -- saying "Hi, guys! Hi, kids!" to everyone we pass at the grocery store, for instance -- she's only just now getting to the point where she will play with people rather than simply near them. But who does she have to play with? Me, day in and day out (and we don't always get along). That's it. Well, and the baby, but my toddler is so aggressive in her play and the baby is still so small (almost a year old, but barely 14 lbs) that I usually offer myself as a buffer between them.

We don't live near any family -- no adoring grandparents or cool older cousins to hang with. A bunch of moms from church meet at a park (or Chuck E. Cheese's when the weather is bad) on Tuesday mornings for play group; I take the girls as often as I can, but play group is at 10AM and I'm ashamed to say we're rarely presentable (and I'm rarely functional) at that hour. So it hasn't been real often.

We'll go religiously from now on.

I took her this evening to the indoor playground at the mall. Penance, I guess. I watched her scamper around, happily attaching herself to a group of older kids as they played tag. They didn't welcome her in; they weren't mean, but they ignored her. Maybe, in the crush of the crowd, nobody realized she was trying to play with them...? In any case, she was happy. She giggled and ran and hid behind the fiberglass elephant and popped out: "Here I am!"

I've never worried before about how she'll be received, socially. It has never occurred to me to wonder if she'll be well liked, or if she'll feel awkward and insecure the way I did all growing up. She's an amazing kid, so smart, so full of 2.5-year-old energy and hubris.... But now that I see her on the verge of that other world -- that place where she craves the friendship of peers more than her parents -- honestly, I'm gripped with a slight panic.

I want her to have friends. I want her to have good ones. I want her to never be hurt by anyone, which I know is too much to ask but I want it just the same.

I just don't want her to feel so lonely.