Friendship Is Magic And Age Is Weird

Hi, friends!

A lot of you probably know this already, but I'm the youngest of six kids. There's a pretty sizeable gap between my siblings and me. My oldest brother was nearly seventeen when I was born and my youngest brother was eight. (And when I was eight, my first niece was born. There was actually slightly less time between my birth and my niece's birth.)
I have a theory that this unusual timing might be part of why I've never felt strange about befriending people who aren't exactly close to my age. If it doesn't feel weird to talk to my siblings, why would it feel weird to talk to other people who were in high school when I was born?

How old you are is such a huge deal when you're young. I remember being really excited that a friend's older sibling would talk to us during recess in elementary school because we were two grades lower and therefore automatically much less cool. In eighth grade, some people thought it was strange that I would eat lunch with my two friends who were in seventh grade. Age started to matter less in high school and wasn't really very important in college. By now, it's just something that I occasionally have to think about when I'm filling out a form or telling someone how old I am. (I legitimately had to pause for a few seconds the other day before remembering that I'm 24.) It went from basically being a social class to just a fun piece of trivia.

While I obviously made friends around my age while I was in school, I also befriended several teachers. I was one of those awkward kids who would eat lunch in a teacher's room and hang out by their desk to chat when class was nearly over instead of, y'know, socializing with people my own age like a normal person.

A big reason why I have so many Facebook friends with grandchildren is that I quickly got used to interacting with adults through church. I would talk to my teachers and my parents' friends like they were regular people instead of treating them like aliens who were super different from me. I got to know my piano teacher, my clogging teacher, my Young Women leaders, my Sunday School teachers, my seminary teachers, and a lot of other big, scary grown-ups who, as it turns out, aren't scary at all. (Even my really tall Sunday School teacher with the bushy mustache isn't nearly as frightening as he may look to a child.) Transitioning into Relief Society when I turned eighteen was super easy because I was already familiar with most of the women there.

Now that I'm a big, scary smallish, not-at-all-intimidating grown-up, the ages of my friends range from about thirteen to grandparent-of-people-my-age years old. Working with the YW has been a huge blessing in my life for a lot of reasons, but my favorite part is that I've formed genuine friendships with these girls like my leaders did with me a decade ago. They'll tell me about what's going on in their life, send me cat memes, and even come talk to me when they don't have any obligation to do so!

Since we're all children of God, we're really just a huge family. That means we shouldn't hesitate to get to know someone half our age, twice our age, or however old they may be.

I'd already planned for this to be the weekly post before today's news of the adjustments to how youth will age up in the church. (If you haven't heard or aren't LDS, the teenagers will move up to the next class at the beginning of the year they turn twelve, fourteen, and sixteen instead of waiting until their actual birthday.) That timing means that I now have some extra stuff to add to this post.

The YW group in my ward is a bit wonky. We have about nine girls that regularly come to things: two Laurels, five Mia Maids, and two Beehives. With this announcement, we won't have any Beehives starting in January because the two current (active) ones are thirteen and the next girl won't be turning twelve until 2020. My "job" in our organization is being the Beehive adviser. You can see why I may have some questions in this situation.

I don't know what our YW group will look like next year. I'm really hoping to still be part of the leadership in some capacity, even though I won't have any Beehives to work with. Whatever decision gets made, I'm so grateful for the past two years I've had to spend time with these beautiful weirdos every Sunday and Wednesday. I've watched them gain confidence, teach lessons, organize activities, have hysterical giggle fits, and share their testimonies. It's been such an honor to learn from them and grow to love them as if they're my younger sisters. I adore these girls and I'm glad they're willing to be my friends even though I sometimes reference movies older than they are.

Love,
Lizzie