Remember your parents’ friends?

I don’t. Mine didn’t have any.

Isn’t that odd? I am totally serious. For my entire childhood, from birth to college, neither of my parents had any friends at all. Nobody they went to dinner with now and then, nobody who came over for dinner and board games, no other couples or families that we did family activities with. Nobody who came over for the occasional back yard barbecue or outing to a park or the movies. Nothing. ^[1]

And the really unusual thing about it is that I was well into my twenties before I realized just how weird that was. Parents with no friends at all. Neither of them.

Looking back, it’s not that surprising that it took me a long time to figure out the strange nature of my parents’ social life. After all, no matter how strange your household is when you are a kid, it’s normal to you. As far as you know, everyone’s family is like that. It’s not until we go to school and begin comparing notes with our friends that we get some sort of clue about the weird things and the normal things about the way our family does things.

Alas, I too had no friends to speak of all through my childhood, and the ones I did occasionally have were generally not very good to me and we didn’t exactly have long heart to heart talks, so I never had much basis for comparison but my beloved television.

Given my parents’ lack of friends, I suppose it’s not that surprising that I never learned how to make friends either. My older siblings had friends, but they lived in a world different than my own. Their friends were never over all that often, but when they did have friends over, I would often somewhat pathetically try to include myself in what they were doing and try to get some friendship by proxy.

The thing is, it’s not like my parents were curmudgeonly recluses. Both had jobs that brought them into contact with lots of people. My mother was a teach, an adult educator, and so her work brought her into contact with dozens of students, other teachers, administrators, and so forth. And my father was a provincial civil servant, whose various jobs in the government of Prince Edward Island over the years, as well as being quite active in the community, caused him to come into the acquaintance of half the province.

But that’s as far as it went with my parents. Acquaintance. They were the sort of people who could not walk through a busy mall without meeting and chatting with a dozen people they knew through their work, and yet none of those people ever so much as came over for a drink.

I know why, I suppose. It’s because my mother, like me, is painfully shy and sensitive. Like me, she is only comfortable socially when she has a role to fulfill or a job to do. Hence, she is comfortable when being a teacher because that is a defined role with known expectations, not the unstable and chaotic world of purely interpersonal interpersonal interactions.

Likewise, I am quite comfortable doing customer service jobs. I was a clerk at my uncle’s shop for years and was pretty good at it, in my own humble opinion. This, despite my otherwise quite intense and at times crushingly crippling social phobia/agoraphobia. It sounds contradictory, but to me, it makes perfect sense. At work, behind that counter, I was a clerk, with a role I understood and could do. None of it was very hard. So I was calm, confident, pleasant, helpful, and in general, happy.

On the other hand, on the walk to and from work, I was a nervous social-phobic wreck, feeling like every person who passed me on the street hated me and wanted me gone.

So I am the shy child of a shy mother. Even if my father had wanted to make friends and have them over, I doubt my mother would have allowed it. She’s no more comfortable with strangers than I am.

Mom, I got a lot of wonderful traits from you. I consider you the source of what I like best in myself.

But I got some bad stuff too.