I just turned 56 last month, which seems an impossible number. As I write this, I just upped the zoom on this document to 150%.

Because I’m a December baby, I’m younger than most of my friends from HS and college, several of whom are still my closest friends (I’ll get to that in a minute). But I’m two years older than my husband and had kids late—gave birth at 36 and 38—so my immediate circle is mostly younger, some by as many as 5 years. Anyway, this post isn’t about age really at all, but as a woman when you get into the old end of your mid-50s, everything is at least partially about age.

I’ve followed Shannon Watts for a long time and have been especially drawn to her content during the past year–her election action steps (sniff) and several things about being a woman in midlife, too. I’m not sure when I first saw her post about realizing that she didn’t have close friends in her 50s, but at the time I tucked it away as an “I have to read that when I can focus on it” thing, since I was mid-scroll on Instagram and not in reading mode.

My SIL texted me a few days before we were all going to be together for Christmas and said she wanted to pick my brain about making friends in your 50s. Um, me? I wrote back that it would hopefully be a mutually beneficial conversation because I needed friends, too. As someone who has lamented not having a set local moms-night-out crew, I wasn’t so sure what I could contribute. We chatted on the couch in the kitchen of our AirBnB, with way too many family members around and over coffee instead of many, many glasses of wine. We didn’t figure out much. I finally read and then sent her the Shannon Watts’ Substack when we got home, and we both felt a little better that this amazing woman was also having trouble. Then we realized, shit, this amazing woman is also having trouble.

My SIL had had a tight knit group of friends when her daughter was in elementary school, which started with a moms group when they all had babies. When their kids went to Middle School, their friend group kind of dissolved (actually a few of them broke up with her in a super fucked up way) and others have ended because of divorce or natural growing apart. She’s finally given up reviving all but one of the friendships, and I think rightly. Now, although she has her best friends for life from both high school and college, she doesn’t feel like she has many options locally and with little ways to make new ones.

Let me start with acknowledging that I am also super lucky to have a group of truly best friends from college. Although we went to school together, we really became friends in our 20s living in NYC, when we struggled of course with guys and jobs, but had a pretty ideal living in New York as a twentysomething existence. With marriages and kids different ages we drifted, and then one by one, they all moved outside of the city. But once our kids were a little more grown and no longer waking at 5:30am, we started going out at least a few times a year and once the first of us turned 50, we started vacationing as a group. It’s been life-changing. We laugh our asses off, drink way too much, pick up exactly where we left off every time and piece together our conversations the next day over text and bad selfies. I also have college roommates I adore, and feel that any one of them would drop everything to help me if I asked–the thing that Shannon Watts realized she didn’t have–and I would do the same for them. We all get together less often, but are always in touch and especially when something big happens either in our worlds or the world around us, and again, I feel so lucky to have them in my life.

The thing is, like my SIL, I am looking for the friend(s) to pal around with on the regular. To see a movie with on a Saturday afternoon which then turns into an early drink and a nice buzzy dinner of happy hour oysters and splitting a salad and fries. To watch the Oscars red carpet with in sweatpants. Or someone to go to that cool cultural thing that I kind of want to go to but know I won’t really once the date approaches.

But after a pretty tough time when my kids were little (more on that later), I now have these people, actually. We have great couple friends who I love and the women are my good friends—best friends. I have gotten to know their friends and love them, too. I’ve become close with some of the wives of my husband’s friends, and even the moms of my kids’ friends from middle and high school, which rarely happens. We’re now friends with my son’s girlfriend’s parents and their friends! And I have my own relationship with the women. So literally as I write this I’m trying to figure out why I still feel this void sometimes. I said the word friends so many times in this paragraph–annoying! why isn’t there an alternative word?–I clearly have them. And clearly, I should just ask them to the movies and happy hour or to come over to watch the Oscars, I’m realizing. This stuckness has been an issue for me for a while, as has the question, why they don’t they ask me? Also, am I just wanting what most people only have in their 20s, when there are no spouses or real responsibilities? Perhaps at 56, time to flip the switch.

I’m going to leave that quandary to my next writing. It likely goes way back to when I was pregnant, over 20 years ago when I started my quest to go it alone (without really meaning to). Or even to my teens when I developed my steely exterior. Blerg.