My son thinks everyone is his friend. Maybe he’s right

Saturday, 6 June 2026

What does it mean to be a friend? Gemma Bowker-Wright reflects on the relationships that shape a life.

I have a friend called Ernie. Ernie is everyone’s friend. Ernie is always smiling.

We meet on Mondays.

“How are you?” I ask him.

“Great,” he tells me. Ernie is always great.

He’s a careers counsellor. He walks with a crutch. He’s been teaching for 57 years.

We talk about everything. The situation in Gaza. My son’s current job title of school chook monitor.

“Should he add this to his CV?” I ask.

“Absolutely,” says Ernie. “It shows commitment, responsibility and a love of poultry.”

He talks a lot about his former students; some are parents now, some are grandparents. He has an encyclopedic memory. He remembers names, dates, job titles. He knows everyone. And he cares, deeply.

Ernie helps me write and rewrite my CV. He helps me quantify the skills of motherhood under the heading: Contracting and Freelance Work. We decide the skills gained include leadership, mediation and crisis management. He gives me recipes for chicken drumsticks with apricots. He tells me when the red variety of kiwifruit are $2.99 a kg at Pak’nSave.

“See you next week,” he says at the end of our conversation. A cheerful wave. A grin. And he’s gone, driving away in his little red car, waving until he’s out of sight.

My children are learning about friendships. Some friends come and go. Some stick around. There’s pain when a friendship slows and ceases, and there’s joy in a new beginning, a new person to play with.

“This is my Amos,” says my younger child at 3-years-old. They hold hands on a bus trip to the new playground outside Parliament. They wear matching knitted hats. They share a love of trains and dinosaurs.

My older child makes friends by osmosis. Friendships come to him en masse. A swarm of boys, interchangeable, skinny legs and baggy T-shirts and muddy shorts. Their names all sound the same. Girls appear from time to time, but he doesn’t seem to notice gender.

“Who are your closest friends?” I ask, attempting to create a list for a birthday party that doesn’t include the whole school. I go through all the names I can think of.

“Yip,” he says. “Yip. Yip. Yip.”

“But which ones do you play with the most?”

“All of them.”

“But if you had to choose?”

He looks at me oddly. “I don’t choose,” he says.

“What do you do at lunchtime?” I persist.

“How do you decide who to play with?”

“I just go into the playground,” he says. “I see other kids. I play with those kids. I play with everyone.”

We hear laughter and he runs off to see who

is walking by the gate.

I have a friend from university. We met during our first year when we were doing an ecology paper. We did an experiment together involving kawakawa caterpillars. The caterpillars escaped all through the lab. My friend and I spent all evening and most of the night trying to find them all and return them to their designated Petri dishes. We laughed so hard we cried.

My friend texts me when I am in hospital 10 years later, potentially losing a pregnancy I had fought hard for. She sends emojis of leaves and caterpillars and a picture of us together under a tree during a field trip. We look painfully young. We are grinning at the camera. “Do you remember this?” she says. “Do you remember the Great Caterpillar Escape?”

I hold onto my phone all night, watching her messages on the screen and trying to block out the sounds of the hospital. One message after another after another. Memory after memory. Emoji after emoji. She continues texting me until the morning.

What is a friend? I ask AI.

A person with whom one shares a bond of mutual affection, trust and support, existing independently of family or romantic relationships, says AI. (What did we do before AI? Before Google? We looked things up in books I tell my children, and they look at me like I’m crazy.)

A friend is for a reason, a season, or a lifetime, a good friend and neighbour says. She lives a few houses down and has become an honorary grandmother and friend to my children. She makes them pikelets and they pull out her honeysuckle and water her pot plants.

“Who’s that lady?” a friend of my older boy asks when she pops over one afternoon.

“Oh, one of my friends,” says my older boy. “I have a lot of friends.”

It’s a sunny Monday when we say goodbye.

“I won’t be coming next week,” I tell Ernie. I have a new job.

He shakes my hand. His grip is warm. “Goodbye my friend,” he says.

He winds the window down and waves as he backs out of his car park and drives away.