Who do you trust?

I completely love the women I'm friends with today. I feel hugely grateful and fortunate to know them. But they probably aren't people I would have been friends with in high school. They have different tastes in music. They don't live on my block. They come from different socioeconomic backgrounds. It's not that I would have necessarily disliked them, but we probably would have had different circles of friends if we had gone to high school together.

And when you're an at-home parent without a long-time circle of friends and family, where do you make your friends? In high school, it was pretty clear-cut. We all took the bus together. We all wandered from class to class together. We glanced inside other kids' lockers to see if they have the same New Order or The Smiths stickers we had.

But now that we aren't taking the bus to school or sitting in class with other kids all day, how do we find our friends? We don't live with our parents. We don't live in the same town or state we grew up in.

Miriam over at Playground Revolution recently posted about a weekend in North Carolina talking with other women about parenting and grown-up friendships. She wrote: "(F)riendship in adult life is not really about finding kindred spirits and soulmates, as we used to think, but rather, about being there, about going to the Y three times a week and talking to the same people, or, for many parents, going to the playground, or the schoolyard, and suddenly, those people become your friends even if they're not who you thought you'd be best friends with."

It's true, we find the grown-up equivalent to going to school and meeting kids that have similar interests. Only instead of looking for people who like photography, or are vegetarians, or who also work for the high school newspaper, we bond through seeing each other at the park or the mothers' club playgroup. The common thread is our kids and the fact that we show up, not our background or what street we live on. We see each other at the park, we can look at their kids and watch how they interact with them.

We all talked about this for a while, and agreed, but the conversation held a bemused tone, as if to say that we didn't quite believe that being there is enough to build friendship on. And then Vivian made a comment that being there is an expression of trust. That when five mothers or fathers see each other five times a week at the playground, there's a level of trust that builds up. They are showing each other that they are present, that they can indeed be counted on. It doesn't have to be spoken, but that's why playground friendships build so strongly, even among people who have little else in common. She took something that seemed trivial--making friendship on something so silly as being in the same place at the same time, repeatedly--and linked it with one of the most fundamental of human desires and qualities: trust

Another reason that these friendships and bonds become so strong is because in addition to just physically being in the same place at the same time, these people meeting at the playground time and again are also emotionally, mentally, psychologically in the same place at the same time. They are all raising little kids who like to go to the playground. And having that bond off the bat helps people feel connected as well, which also leads to trust.