CONTRIBUTED BY HEATHER GELORMINE

A few months ago, Heather N. contributed a post about how to take the next step when you've made a friend.  Today, however, I'm going back a step: about how to make friends in the first place.

As a parent, I’m continually concerned with helping my children learn and master basic social skills.  When they’re toddlers, that involves teaching them to share and take turns.  School-aged kids need to learn how to balance playing with multiple friends at the same time, and how to know when it’s appropriate to play and when it’s time to settle down and learn.  I’ve spent much of the past six years guiding, correcting, and teaching my children how to make friends (and keep them).

What I’ve found to be more challenging than that, however, is learning to make friends for myself.  This is particularly compounded in difficulty when I have to add in the factor of moving every two to three years, because - like many of you, our readers - our family is in the military.  In the past eight years I’ve lived in three different countries and three different US states… and each time I’ve had to leave behind the friends I’ve made and tentatively work my way around to making new ones.

If I were more social or more outgoing, perhaps this wouldn’t be so difficult.  But it’s not in my nature to put myself out there, to approach strangers in conversation and then make plans to meet again.  I tend to be shy and I often find myself hanging back in social situations, because asking for friendship isn’t something I’m comfortable doing. 

This is my second time living in a foreign country, and as much as I loved living in Europe and exploring that culture, in Germany we were stationed at a tiny post far from others.  There was little opportunity to meet and socialize with others working for units (or branches of the military, for that matter) other than my husband's.  Here in Okinawa, however, we're set up very differently.  I'm no longer limited to making friends that are just associated with the Army, because, frankly, we're in the minority here.  I'm much more likely to meet women whose husbands serve (or who are themselves serving) for one of the three other branches... or who are working here as civilians with no military affiliation at all.

But even though the pool of potential friends has widened, it doesn't make getting out there and making them any easier. 

Back in the US, at our last stateside assignment, I made friends quickly. My husband deployed just months after we moved to a brand new city, where we'd bought our first home, and where I knew no one, not even our neighbors.  But we didn't live near post, and the level of support for spouses left behind in this deployment wasn't strong.  So when I joined a playgroup it was because I was in a situation of sink or swim.  I chose to swim.

As any mother can tell you, making friends for herself when she was single or when she and her partner were a couple without children, was different.  She could make plans to go out and not worry about things like Can I bring my kids with me? or Wait - I have to get a babysitter first.  And once she was out, she could stay out without checking her cell phone for calls from home or rushing to get back home before the world crashed down because it was bedtime.  Once children enter the picture, though, it's like living at that tiny post in Germany again.  The pool shrinks.

So now I'm here on Okinawa.  I live on base and I have neighbors who I've gotten to know well because my daughter has befriended their children.  I've gotten involved in our unit's family activities, and I've joined the community on Okinawa Hai Society.  I've created myself a little world that looks nothing like anything I've experienced before... and it's (surprisingly) lovely. 

What about the rest of you, though?  Do you mostly stick to base activities and getting to know the people within your unit?  Are you active within a religious community? Do you participate within OIWC or a similar group? Have you joined a playgroup or another group specifically for women?
 

As a parent, how do you make friends on Okinawa?