At 38 years old, I can confidently say that one of the greatest loves of my life is friendship.
Not the surface-level kind. Not the friendships built only around convenience, proximity, or perfectly curated versions of ourselves. I mean the real kind. The soul-saving kind. The friendships that hold you together in the years when you quietly wonder if you’re unraveling.
I have always valued friendship deeply, even as a little girl. I was the kid who loved sleepovers, long talks, inside jokes, and handwritten notes folded into tiny squares. Friendship always felt sacred to me. But it wasn’t until adulthood, more specifically motherhood, that I truly understood just how life-giving a handful of good friends can be.
Because motherhood is beautiful, yes, but it is also exhausting, isolating, overwhelming, repetitive, emotional, and demanding in ways no one can fully explain until you’re living it. Somewhere between the chauffeuring, the endless laundry, the mental load, the guilt, the marriages, the careers, and the constant pressure to do everything well, you realize something very important:
You cannot carry this life alone. And thankfully, I don’t have to. I have my girls.
The ones who keep my spirit alive in the daily group chat. The ones who can turn a mundane Tuesday into a full-blown therapy session with a few texts and memes. The ones who somehow always know when I need encouragement, distraction, validation, or simply someone to say, “Same.”
There is something profoundly comforting about friends who understand your life without needing a long explanation. Women who know the tone of your “I’m fine” text. Women who have witnessed your chaos and stayed anyway.
I think about the little things constantly. The things that may seem small to the outside world but feel enormous to me.
The friend who answers the phone in the middle of dinner cleanup is me.
The “ice-cream run?” text that arrives at the exact moment I’m doubting myself as a mother.
The friend who drops off coffee, picks up a kid, sends the funny reel, or sits with you while you vent about something completely irrational and somehow never makes you feel ridiculous for it.
The pep talks. The late-night debriefs. The “tell me everything” dinners. The movies that become less about the movie and more about laughing until we cry in the parking lot afterward. The weekends away when we temporarily trade responsibility for dinner service, oversized sweatshirts, and uninterrupted conversation.
These moments may look ordinary, but they are not ordinary to me. They are survival. They are medicine.
Friendship in this stage of life feels less performative and more intentional. We no longer need perfection from one another. We need honesty, presence, and grace. We need people who can hold space for both our joy and our unraveling.
And what a gift it is to be fully known. To have friends who have seen you at your best and at your absolute lowest. Friends who have watched you evolve through heartbreak, marriage, motherhood, insecurity, growth, exhaustion, and reinvention, and who continue choosing you through every version.
At this age, I don’t need a hundred friends. These days, I pay close attention to how people make me feel after they leave the room. I no longer have the emotional capacity for one-sided relationships, constant negativity, or connections that feel like obligations rather than comfort.
The women I hold closest are the ones who leave me lighter, stronger, calmer, and more myself. I need the few who show up consistently. The ones who remind me who I am when I forget. The ones who help carry the invisible weight of womanhood. The ones who celebrate loudly, listen deeply, and love without conditions.
So this is my love letter to them.
To the women who helped raise me while I was busy raising children. To the friends who became family. To the group chats that kept me sane. To the dinners, the tears, the laughter, the favors, the honesty, the solidarity, and the sacredness of simply being there for one another.
