(Our oldest daughters together, 2006)
My dear friend Lori came to town with her husband and children to spend a week at Disneyworld. I live close, so we drove to meet them and spend the day. Lori and I had a few precious minutes in her hotel by ourselves while our husbands took the noisy girls swimming. It was just her and I and our 8 month old babies.
We had one of those conversations, that dips and flows and is truly enlightening. As if your brain finally starts working (usually only happening every few months) and you start encouraging each other's talents, confessing weaknesses and trials through motherhood.
There are some very real things that all of us feel and are sometimes too afraid to tell each other. And you know what? We've known each other for years and we rarely get enough peace and quiet to really dig deep. And this was one of those times, in a Disney hotel, that I had a face to face conversation with an amazing mother and I realized how I lack that interaction so much.
I text, talk on the phone, email, whatever else... and I read a post on one of my favorite blogs, Remarks from Sparks, about this very subject, about how all of us need more "person to person" in our lives. We need more facial expressions, natural pauses, body language. Conversations, the good ones, don't usually happen any other way.
2 comments:
Sometimes I read your blog and wonder how you know what goes through my head at times.
It's these friends that make MAKING friends so worthwhile. The kind that you pick up exactly where you left off, even if it's in a Disneyland hotel room. The kind of people you don't have to ask the whole getting-to-know-you questions anymore. You already know where they are from and now it's just to the point of getting to know their struggles and ups and downs.
So glad you got a chance to be with a friend like that. It's always refreshing.
"natural pauses". I miss those. All of my friends are too brilliant online, because we don't write our lulls and pauses and brain farts down. Sometimes we write a sigh or a gasp or a laugh. But those are all charming. I like the uncharming, awkward lulls and "I swear I was going somewhere with this.... oh well. I guess that's the end of my story" kind of conversations.
Thank goodness for writing, it definitely has it's place-- but thank goodness for those face-to-face's to really feed your soul.
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