From Teenage Mischief to Glamping: 28 Years of Us

Some people come into your life and stay there.

Not because you make a conscious decision that they will become lifelong friends, but simply because life keeps putting you together, year after year, chapter after chapter, until one day you look back and realise that you have shared almost half your life with them.

For me, those people are my cousin Michelle and her husband, Paul.

Michelle and I were incredibly close when we were teenagers. We were the kind of teenagers who believed we were far more grown-up than we actually were, and who occasionally felt that the rules were more like gentle suggestions.

We had a particular talent for sneaking into clubs when we were far too young to be doing so, under the watchful eye of my older brother Stephen, who was apparently entrusted with keeping us alive and out of trouble.

How successful he was at that remains debatable.

Then came the day our husbands met.

Allan and Paul met at my father’s funeral and, somehow, in the middle of one of the saddest days of our lives, they just clicked.

And that was the beginning of a friendship that has now lasted 28 years.

Twenty-eight years.

When I say it like that, it sounds incredibly respectable.

It was not.

The Rock ’n’ Roll Years

In our younger days, the four of us partied like rock stars.

Looking back, I genuinely have NO idea how we made it home alive so many times.

Our car must have been blessed.

There were countless nights involving the kind of behaviour that, if repeated now, would probably require several days of bed rest and a physiotherapist.

There were the legendary incidents involving the guys…

Guys who persistently and consistently threw up at the end of every Saturday night.

Guys who apparently thought a driveway was a perfectly acceptable substitute for a bed.

And somehow, the next weekend, we’d all do it again.

But our adventures weren’t always about partying.

When Allan and I moved into our very first apartment, Michelle and Paul came to visit us.

And, because apparently the universe had decided that our friendship needed to be forged through adversity, Paul’s car was broken into on their very first visit.

That should probably have been enough to make anyone reconsider visiting us.

But they came back.

And then, in that very same apartment, we were burgled.

They took everything.

And when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING.

They even took our bedding.

There is something particularly awful about being burgled and then discovering that the thieves have apparently decided that your duvet is now their duvet.

But Michelle and Paul didn’t just sympathise from a distance.

They arrived with a blanket for us.

A simple act of kindness at a time when we had very little left.

And that blanket?

We still have it.

After all these years.

I think that’s one of the things that makes certain objects so special. It isn’t really the blanket itself.

It’s what it represents.

It represents a time when we were young and figuring life out.

It represents a terrible night.

It represents someone showing up when things were awful.

And it represents the kind of friendship we have always had: the sort where you don’t just hear about someone’s troubles.

You show up.

Then came the camping trips.

Oh, the camping trips!

We camped everywhere and in every conceivable weather condition. Sometimes our tents worked beautifully.

Sometimes they did not.

There is something deeply humbling about discovering that the tent you trusted with your life has decided to become a leaky puddle in the middle of the night.

There were seagulls stealing braai meat, beach swimming, lazy afternoons at the campsite and the simple pleasure of sitting around together doing absolutely nothing.

And then, inevitably, things would get weird.

One of my favourite memories has to be the guys performing raucous opera in the bathtub in the women’s bathrooms.

Yes.

You read that correctly.

The men were in the women’s bathrooms, singing opera in a bathtub.

I don’t remember exactly what they were singing.

I only remember that they were very, very committed to the performance.

And this is the thing about those years.

We laughed.

A lot.

We laughed until our stomachs hurt. We laughed at each other. We laughed at ourselves. We created stories that would be retold around future braais, with each retelling becoming slightly more dramatic than the one before.

Then We Became Parents

Somewhere along the way, life changed.

Michelle and I were married about a year apart, and then came the children.

Our firstborns, our Kieran and their Kaitlyn, were born exactly six months to the day apart.

Six months.

It was almost as if we’d planned it.

We hadn’t.

But it meant that our children grew up alongside each other, just as Michelle and I had.

We shared the chaos of raising children, and thankfully, we had remarkably similar parenting styles.

There was comfort in that.

We understood each other’s choices. We understood the challenges. We could talk about our children without having to explain every little thing because the other couple had been right there beside us, experiencing their own version of the same thing.

And so the camping trips continued, just way more organised this time.

And with bigger tents and more equipment.

The getaways continued.

The braais continued.

The laughter certainly continued.

Our lives became this enormous, wonderfully tangled collection of shared memories.

I sometimes think that if someone asked me to separate my memories into my family, my friends, my childhood, our holidays, our children’s childhoods and our celebrations, I wouldn’t know how.

They’ve all become meshed together.

One enormous, slightly chaotic, very funny story.

Because We Were Family

And perhaps that was the greatest gift of all.

They weren’t just our friends.

They were our family.

That meant there was a level of comfort between us that you don’t always have with friends. We could talk about anything.

And with our family?

There was ALWAYS something to talk about.

There were births, marriages, arguments, celebrations, illnesses, holidays, children, parents, grandparents, cousins, work, money, relationships, disasters and all the ridiculous little things that happen in between.

There were conversations that began with, “You’re never going to believe what happened…”

And there were conversations that somehow lasted for hours.

We didn’t have to pretend.

We could just be ourselves.

And in this crazy world, full of false people and false narratives…

I cherished that.

I still do.

And Then, Almost Without Us Noticing, The Kids Grew Up

But time is sneaky.

One minute you’re chasing children around a campsite, trying to stop them from drowning themselves, eating something they shouldn’t or wandering off.

And the next minute…

They’re adults.

They have their own lives.

Their own relationships.

Their own plans.

And soon, their own homes and responsibilities.

And suddenly, sometimes, it is just the four of us again.

Michelle.

Paul.

Allan.

And me.

Except this time, we aren’t the young ones.

We aren’t the parents frantically trying to keep everyone alive.

We’re sitting back and looking at what we created.

And there is an enormous sense of pride in that.

Because we raised amazing human beings.

We didn’t get everything right. Nobody does.

There were probably plenty of moments when we wondered what on earth we were doing.

But somehow, we got them here.

And now we get to watch them build lives of their own.

The Next Chapter

I know the years ahead will bring a mixture of emotions.

There will be sadness.

We’ve already lost parents, aunts and uncles who were such important parts of our lives. And, inevitably, there will be more goodbyes in the years ahead.

That’s one of the difficult truths of getting older.

The family tree slowly loses some of its older branches.

But something else happens too.

We become the older generation.

Which is both slightly terrifying and absolutely hilarious.

Because surely nobody has actually given us permission to become the “old folk” yet?

I’m fairly certain I’m still about seventeen in my head.

My back, however, strongly disagrees.

Which brings me to our future camping adventures.

I suspect the days of crawling into tiny tents, sleeping on the ground and attempting to stand upright the next morning may be behind us.

Our backs simply aren’t interested anymore.

I think our future involves glamping.

Proper beds.

Bathrooms.

Definitely electricity.

And MOST definitely?

A coffee machine.

We have earned it.

And I’m perfectly happy to admit that I have no desire whatsoever to sleep on a thin mattress on the ground while wondering whether my hip will ever function normally again.

But there is so much still ahead.

Hopefully there will be weddings.

More celebrations.

Children becoming parents themselves.

And perhaps, one day, the extraordinary privilege of becoming grandparents.

There will be new stories.

New people around the braai.

New family members to love.

And, knowing the four of us, probably still some questionable decisions.

Perhaps not quite as questionable as the ones we made when we were younger.

But I wouldn’t put money on it.

Twenty-Eight Years Later

When I think about Michelle and Paul, I don’t think about one particular holiday or one particular party.

I think about a lifetime of moments.

The teenagers we were.

The young couples we became.

The parents we learned to be.

The children we raised.

The people we’ve lost.

The adventures we’ve had.

The countless braais.

The camping disasters.

The stolen meat.

The beach days.

The opera.

The laughter.

The blanket.

And after 28 years, what makes me happiest is knowing that this isn’t the end of the story.

It’s simply a different chapter.

The children have grown up.

Our lives have changed.

Our responsibilities have changed.

Our knees and backs have definitely changed.

But the four of us are still here.

Still laughing.

Still talking.

Still making memories.

And perhaps that’s what a lifelong friendship really is.

It’s finding people who become so woven into the fabric of your life that eventually you can’t remember where friendship ends and family begins.

Michelle and I started this journey as two mischievous teenage cousins sneaking into clubs.

Now, nearly four decades later, we’re two women sitting beside the men we love, looking at the lives we’ve built and wondering where on earth all those years went.

And if we’re lucky, we’ll have many more years ahead.

More sunsets.

More braais.