You've got a friend?

When I was a child, I was the type of kid who got along with everyone, but only had a couple close friends.  When I was a teenager, I still got along with everyone, but I rarely did anything outside of school with anyone but the 9 other people in my group of friends.  I went to school, and mostly hung out with my roommates, but we weren't really "close" friends, and we would always lose touch after the year was over.  I started working and again, I got along with others, but I never did anything with anyone outside of work.  I got married.  And then mostly did things with Mr. Simple. 

I do have about 175 friends on Facebook.  People that I've known from past jobs. People that I've met in the past 10 years. People from childhood. 

But, at least 50 of the people on Facebook that I am friends with, I have NEVER met in person.  Most of them, I "met" online many, many years ago.  It was early 1998, and I had just had my first miscarriage.  I didn't know anyone in "real life" who had gone through a miscarriage, besides my mother, and so I went searching to find if there was anyone out there.  And there was.  And the women that I met under sad circumstances then, well, we have watched each other's lives over the past 14 years as we had more children, got divorced, had medical problems, had spouses die, etc.  I've asked for advice and given advice over the years.  My friendship with these women has been/is very important to me. 

But then there is my real life. 

I've gone in waves with "real life" friends.  When I had my first child, but I was working full-time, I had very few friends.  When I started teaching preschool in the morning, and had my afternoons "free", it made my schedule much more flexible.  I could do the park, I could do playdates, I could do the museum, etc.  I had more friends, but it was often just women who had kids the same ages as mine. 

But my kids started growing up.  We were homeschooling and I didn't see other moms at school. I was doing daycare, and couldn't really get out to other activities.  So my circle of "moms with kids" friends grew smaller.  Last year, my kids all went back to public school and so I do have some women that I've met because of that, but only one or two that I've done things outside of school, and that was because my child had been friends with their child since Kindergarten, etc.

Also, for most of my life, I was very involved at church.  And there were many opportunities at the church we attended to be with adults, particularly women. I enjoyed talking to these women about all sorts of things - church things, kid things, fashion things LOL I had a large-ish group of women from church that I would do things with outside of church - baby showers, girls night out, movies, that sort of thing. I had been hanging out with some of them for over 10 years.

And then, we decided recently, for reasons that I will NOT be going into on this blog, to stop attending this church. And it has been difficult, at best, to maintain friendships with these women, if for no other reason, because I am not attending many of the same activities as they are anymore.  So my circle of "women from church" friends has greatly diminished. We are attending another church, and the people at the new church are nice and friendly, but there has only been one woman who I have really talked to at any point outside of church. 

When I was doing preschool and daycare, there were plenty of days that talking to the parents would be my only form of adult conversation that I had that day, outside of conversations with my husband. But then I decided to quit last March so that I could focus on my Simply Living In The City business and my freelance writing and training business.

And now, I meet people through my Simply Living In The City business, and that is great, especially since I love talking about Simple stuff and hearing about how other people are trying to live that way, but for the most part, it has not led to any sort of friendships that involved getting together outside of a Simply Living In The City class or whatever. 

I meet people through my freelance writing and training jobs, and that is nice too.  But when it is at home/offsite work, it is really difficult to have much interaction. And when it is at a client site, well, work is busy, and I just have never felt comfortable in establishing friendships with work colleagues outside of work anyway.  So I don't have (and never really have had) friendships with people that I met at work. 

Which means, right now, I have very, very few "real life" friends.  At least the kind that you could say "Hey, I don't have anything going on tonight, do you want to go to a movie?" or "Let's take the kids to the pool today" sort of friends.  Or "I just need to vent about something" sort of friends. 

I know that friendship, in general changes, over the years.  As an adult, with children, with work, with a spouse, etc., time to do things with friends is usually quite limited.  That is true for me, and most people that are around my age.  I know that your relationship with your family is and should be more important than your relationship with friends. 

But sometimes - well, to be really honest, I'm on a roll, so I might as well keep going LOL - Often, I miss having "real life" friends.  I miss the days of going to movies, going to dinner.  I miss the days of hanging out with our kids at the park, at the pool.  I miss talking about church. I miss talking about parenting.  I miss talking about fashion.  I miss just talking out loud about life to someone besides my husband.

And trust me, there are times when Mr. Simple really wishes I had someone to talk to about life besides him.  :)

It is Valentine's Day and nothing says Valentine's Day like

LOVE!

I'm all about lists lately, so I'm making a list of things that I love. 

1 - well, of course, my family.  Mr. Simple, Flower, Jelly Bean, Super.  What would I do without all of you? And of course, little Christopher too.  We love and miss you! And my mom and dad, my sister and two brothers.  And my in-laws and other extended family.  Big Hugs!

2 - My friends.  Too many to list here.  But so many of you have helped me in so many ways.  And if you think you've never helped me, trust me, you have. If nothing else, you've helped put a smile on my face, and trust me, some days, that is HUGE.

3 - I'm loving my new kitchen stuff! I've got quality knives for the first time in my adult life.  I always thought that spending money on knives was silly.  And a waste.  I plan on having these knives for the rest of my life and I'm glad that I finally invested in something.  And the stainless steel pots and stoneware.  I've used that stuff daily since I got it.  How did I live without it??

4 - I love Netflix.  I know. It sounds funny.  But I love that I can watch old TV shows, some of which I never watched the first time around, and all without commercials.  And my kids love Netflix too.  And all for less than $10 a month.  Love it!

5 - I love wool.  It helps make winter bearable.  Well, almost.  But it certainly helps.

6 - I love to run.  I'm saying this here to remind myself.  I haven't run in way too long.  Running has helped me so many times.  It has made made me strong. It has given me somewhere safe to go when I had nowhere else but to that place I go when I run.  It has helped me see so many beautiful things in the outdoors. 

7 - I love to cook.  I didn't used to.  In fact, I used to dislike it.  Quite a bit.  But now, I get a big kick out of taking ingredients and putting it together and making something yummy.  I also love that you can make something at home that tastes way better than something that you buy at the store.

8 - I love Swiss Miss hot chocolate.  Sorry, it had to be said.  And York Peppermint patties.  And Diet Pepsi.  I'm all about whole, natural foods, but I love these things in all their processed glory too. :)

9 - I love writing. I love training.  Funny how you love something more when you have been away from it for a long time and all of a sudden, it is back in your life.  But I'm also loving learning how to combine in it my life today.  And that includes working around my family.  And combining with Simply Living In The City.

10 - I love my life.  Today anyway.  LOL.  No, really.  There have been tons of times when I didn't.  Lots of days when I felt like things were unfair for me. And they were. I've had my share (and sometimes more) of bad things happen.  And things are far from perfect too.  Our money situation isn't perfect.  My kids aren't perfect. I'm not perfect. But I'm at a place where I'm happy and grateful and looking towards the future.

Solstice Party 2010

Phew! After this post, I think I'm all caught up with December activities. It was a busy month!

Anyway, I originally had the Solstice party scheduled for a few days before Solstice, but two of the invitees were ill that day, so I rescheduled for a couple days after Solstice.

I also meant to take lots of cool, artsy pictures, but I was having so much fun hanging out, talking, and eating that I forgot. My one attempt at a picture during the event didn't turn out, so you'll just have to imagine it. I even forgot to take pictures of the food!!

Anyway, I was in charge of the food, and then some groovy people brought all of the other stuff. There was a beautiful centerpiece with evergreen boughs and red glass berry branches, some nice music, tasty beverages, and even a great presentation about Solstice. (We all laughed during the poem - but we were supposed to, right????) And then we went downstairs and talked about kids and home ownership and life. It was a lovely evening.

All the food came from the book Recipes from the Root Cellar. I mentioned that I wanted it, so I decided to buy it for myself as an early Christmas present. Love presents like that :) We had Couscous Sasad with Kale and Feta, Creamy Potato-Leek Soup, Maple Glazed Baked Winter Vegetables (I used beets, carrots, parsnips, turnips and butternut squash) with Chicken, and Applesauce Cake for dessert. I must admit that most of it was delicious, although somehow, I managed to screw up the Applesauce Cake a bit. The cake itself was overdone a little, and then I didn't do the crumb topping quite right, although all the guests graciously ate it without complaining.

It was so nice to share a meal and lovely conversation with friends as we welcomed in the new season. It was so much fun, I'll probably be hosting one every season! I'll try and take pictures next time too!

Another Ode to Mary Mary Commentary

OK, this is not really an ode. And this isn't even an original idea. I stole it from The Bishop's Wife. But it was a great idea (The Bishop's Wife has many good ideas), so I decided to copy her. Don't Hate Me Bishop's Wife!

I don't exactly remember meeting Mary for the first time. But I do remember thinking that she had that look that I liked. The striking dark hair, the funky cool glasses, the retro cool skirts. (Despite liking this look, I have lots of grey in my naturally dark brown hair that I color light brown to try and hide the grey, glasses so ugly that I almost always wear my contacts, and fat-lady looking skirts. Because, um, those are the only kind of skirts available for uh, fat ladies.)

Oh, I do remember now. She was eating at a Chinese restaurant near our house. It was our favorite restaurant back then. It has since moved, and a new Chinese restaurant is in its place, but I digress.

I had seen her and her family at church the week before, and decided that since she was new, she wouldn't know that I wasn't usually the type of person to just go up to someone in a restaurant and say Hello.

So I did, and she didn't seem to think I was so strange. We got talking about our kids, and found out that her third child was close to Flower's age, and that Jelly Bean (who was a baby at the time) and her oldest daughter shared the same name, although neither of our children went by the formal version of the name.

And then things just went on. I don't remember when we started being friends, but I remember how she was always so sweet. She would say to me in the hallway "I'm so happy to see you!" and it didn't sound fake. And it always came at a time when I was stressed, or lonely, or unhappy, and made me feel all warm and glowy.

One day, we got talking about our families and our lives, and we discovered that our families knew each other. In fact, she lived very close to my parents when we were all living in Utah (I was living in the dorms in the same town, but I lived at home during the summers.) We knew some of the same people, and all the local places. What a small world.

And then when she started coming to Girls' Night Out things, she became my idol. She was just the kind of mother I wanted to be - natural, but practical. Thoughtful and purposeful, yet real. And just loved being a mother. You can see it in her face. Even if she didn't have any of her 5 children with her, you would know that she was a mom. And not because she is frumpy (she's not!) or she has spit-up in her hair (none that I've ever noticed).

And she was a reader. She IS a reader. I was a reader in a former life, but I've let my life become my excuse for not reading anymore. (Although I just finished Matters of Faith last night. Review coming soon.) But she has 5 kids - two more than I have, and still manages to read. We were at Women Living Wisely recently, the one about Books, and we were talking about books that we loved as kids, and she listed all the books that I read back when I was 12, 13, 14. I said to her "Too bad we didn't know each other back then. We could have been book friends!" On Sunday, she said to me "You know, we can still be book friends!" So I'm really going to try and do better about reading and reviewing. (I promise, I'll post my review soon.)

And she loves flowers. And cool, antique stuff. And lives in a great, old house with all of its quirks (and lack of air conditioning apparently. I'm so sorry Mary.)

When I got pregnant in 2006, we decided that we wouldn't tell most people until I was about 20 weeks along. Sadly, I lost the baby at 13 weeks. I had told a couple of people, however, and someone told Mary. Mary came to me, and said "I'm so sorry. And if you ever need to talk, I'm here. I lost a baby once at 11 weeks, and we hadn't told many people either." It was just comforting to know that I wasn't alone in my pain. And that she got it - that it was still devastating, even though we had been blessed with 3 children. She got that I loved my kids, and that I knew that I had blessings, but that it was sad. And hard.

And then she had her 5th baby, a lovely, precious, little boy on March 28, 2008. He entered this world the same day that our lovely, precious, little boy left this world. Some people would think that it would be painful to have that connection with a friend, but for me, it has helped me. In many ways.

Happy Birthday Mary. Hope you had a lovely day.

Facebook - Or Confronting My Past

I know that many people, myself included, are on Facebook. I hadn't even heard of it until last summer, and didn't sign up until late last fall. I don't even remember why I decided to sign up. But it looked like it was relatively harmless, and didn't give me the heebies like MySpace, and there were ways of avoiding becoming "friends" with people that I wasn't that close with, or people that I had no interest in reconnecting with, so I went ahead and signed up.

I quickly became "friends" with approximately 100 people. And started telling people about the little silly details of my day, and reading about theirs. Again, pretty harmless, but I kept wondering "Do people really care that I just baked cookies or that I have had bangs all of my life?"

Mr. Simple joined around the same time, and initially became friends with about the same number of people, but then he started to reconnect with people that he went to elementary school, high school, college, etc. I noticed that many of my Facebook friends were doing similar things. And I think that using Facebook is a good way to be able to connect with people that you haven't had contact with in awhile, or people that you are geographically far away from, or both. My problem is that my friends are people that a) I have regular contact with and we live in the same area, and have "in real life" conversations with a very regular basis or b) are people that I don't live close to, but I have regular e-mail/electronic communication with on a very regular basis. Out of my 100 "friends", only one is someone that I hadn't spoken with in a few years, and even with him, I think I've posted two comments to him since I joined.

But I look at other people's pages, and I see all the pictures from their past, and all the activities that they did, and all the people that they hung out with, and it just makes it so glaring that their childhood/teenhood/young adulthood was typical, and mine was not. And it makes me sad to see all the opportunities and possibilities that people have during those years, and that I didn't try any of them. So I started to wonder "Why am I on Facebook?" And I started to think about my past.

It started off during my childhood - I was liked at school, I suppose, but just had one or two good friends. I always did well in school, and loved it until sixth grade. It was in sixth grade that it all really started. I moved across town. I went to a school that my best friend, who went to my church, attended. I started hanging out with her, and her friends. It was great. I was part of a group, and we were popular. There were six girls and five boys. By that spring, we were together constantly, and we started to only hang out with each other. My parents thought that it was phase, and that it would pass. Sigh.

By 7th grade, we all moved over to the junior high. We were still very chummy, but it was seventh grade, and everything else was new and different, and so it was comforting to be in a group of kids that you knew so well. By eighth grade, one of the boys decided that he was going to become our group "leader". It was up to him to decide what was cool and what was not, what was allowed and what was not. It was also when people in the group started pairing off. I still didn't really like boys, so I avoided any activities with the group when they were going to be doing anything that might include hand-holding or kissing. By 9th grade, my best friend decided that she no longer wanted to be restricted by the group, and she left. We still saw each other at church and in the halls, but that was it. I was so sad when she left, but I didn't have much time to worry about it because the group had gotten even more restrictive. It wasn't "cool" to be involved in sports, except for football, and there was only one boy out of the group who would be big enough to play all four years. Basically, any extracurricular activities were strongly discouraged. I had always wanted to be involved in music and theater, maybe debate or student government, or swimming. I tried out for none of them. (Although I did rebel and do track!) I just did things with the group. I only saw people from the group. We only wore grey hooded sweatshirts and jeans. We only talked to each other, about each other, and there were "punishments" for doing things that were not allowed. There were other weird things going on too, but I didn't know who to tell. Certainly not my parents, or teachers, and I didn't have any friends outside of the group. I went to a large school, and I "knew" other people, but yet, I might has well have gone to a school with 9 other people. The only thing that helped was that I had a boyfriend from outside the group, but he was also a year older than me, and didn't go to my school, and I didn't see him that often. And he broke up with me over the summer too.

By the middle of tenth grade, things had gotten to a breaking point. I had just gone out with and broken up with the "leader" and it had not been a good situation, to put it mildly. And finally, the group did break apart. Three boys and one girl left, including the boy who had been the "leader". And although I had wanted to get out of the group for years, I found myself lost and sad when it did break up. And now that I "could" do activities at school, I was too nervous, or I felt like it was too late. Everybody at our school was already labelled as being a "criminal", a "princess", a "brain", an "athlete" or a "basketcase" (a little homage there to Hollywood's version of high school, The Breakfast Club) and I was labelled as "one of the girls from that weird group." I did reconnect with my boyfriend and that helped, but mostly, I just bided my time until I could go to college. Despite the fact that I hadn't enjoyed school for years, I was a very good student. I looked forward to the fact that I could reinvent myself at college.

After my junior and senior year of high school were finally over, I got accepted to my first choice for college. My best friend, from way back, was also going to the same school. We would be able to reconnect, and we could do all those fun, stereotypical college things. My boyfriend was going to the same school. It was going to be perfect.

Except that she fell in love with a guy during the first week of classes, and was married by the following summer. I hardly saw her. My boyfriend died in a bicycle/car accident the first month of school. I discovered that college was not the time to be trying things just to try them. If you were doing things, even extracurricular things, in college, it was because you were good at them. I hadn't had/taken the chance in high school to find out if I was good at anything, and didn't even really know what I was interested in. I had 5 roommates (in a 3 bedroom/kitchen/bathroom suite sort of thing), and 4 of the 5 had all gone to school together. And then we met five guys during that first month that we hung out with all year. It was like being in the group all over again. By the end of the year, I had to leave.

And I left. And wandered. I spent a year at a junior college, not because my grades were bad, but because it sounded interesting. It wasn't. I went back to my original college, and dropped all my classes. Did the same thing the next semester. And then I dropped out of college by 21 and worked full-time for the next four years as a police dispatcher. I did go back and finish my degree, in a different state, different school after that, but as I sat in classes as a 25 year junior, it was just more of the feeling like I had missed my chance AGAIN.

So if you have made it through this epic tale, what I was trying to say is that Facebook is really making me look at those old days, and the old me. Not surprisingly, not one of my Facebook "friends" are one of my "friends" from the group. I have contact with my best friend from those days, and I exchange Christmas cards with another girl. The rest of them I don't have any contact, don't know where they live, or anything about their life since we graduated in May 1984. I don't have any contact with any of my roommates over the years, with the exception of my grad school roommates. 95% of the people that I have contact with on Facebook, I have known for less than 10 years. And I'm friends with most of them because they have a life similar to mine - a busy mom, wife, and usually someone is working, either in or outside of the home, full-time or part-time.

Do any of these people care that I was in some weird group in high school, and that I never tried out for a play, never had a boyfriend at my own school, that I was 27 when I graduated with my bachelor's, that I don't have scrapbooks full of pictures of me from all those wacky things that kids were doing in the 80s? I'm very sure that they don't. They are friends with me because of the things that we have done or said or shared in the last 10 years.

Do I care? Hmm. Complicated question. Care, well, probably not. Things happen, it is what it is, what are you going to do about it now, sort of thing. And I don't sit around thinking "Wow, if I'd only been on the debate team in 1982, my life would be SO different." But would my life had been different if I hadn't been in that group? I think yes. Would I have been a different person now if I hadn't been that group? I think yes. But who is to say that my different life/different person would have been "better?" Hmmm.

Yes, I'm so lucky

Super: Mommy, I love you.
Me: Are you sure?
Super: Yes, I love for 5 years.
Me: Just 5 years? How about a million years?
Super: Yes, I love you for a million years.
Me: Thank you! I love you for a million years too.
Super: Mommy, you are lucky.
Me: Yes, I am. (Tears welling up.)
Super: And Mommy, I'm lucky too.
Me: (Gives him a hug to try and hide the tears)


I haven't always felt lucky in life, and I certainly haven't felt very lucky this year. But Super is right. I'm so lucky to have him - and all of my family and friends. Love to you all for a million years.