friends

The Sixty-Seventh Letter: A Tale of Two Friendships

/ Elizabeth

IMG_4062

Dear Daughters,

So the thing is, once you’re a grown-up, and especially a mom, it’s really hard to make tried-and-true friends. Most conversations devolve into talking about your children: how big ya’ll are, how sick you are, quirky things you say and do.

I’ve never liked playdates for this very reason. I don’t like to sit and talk with other moms about being a mom.

Additionally, I don’t think that kind of chatter leads very often to friendship because there’s so much more to my life (to anyone’s life) than being a mom. For another thing, it’s plain old boring. Oh, and it’s also just annoying to walk that line between competition/judgement and appreciating one another’s experiences. Maybe that’s a mom thing, maybe that’s a woman thing, or maybe that’s a human nature thing, but it’s ridiculous. I think I was over that before you were even born.

Yes, it’s hard to make friends as a grown-up.

I have two close friends from childhood. Seriously, from elementary school! And we’re still good friends. I’ve actually texted with both of them multiple times today, believe it or not. Sure, we’ve had close seasons, and we’ve had seasons when we’re not that close, but when I finally emailed them to tell them I’d had a miscarriage but that I was now pregnant again and anxious and didn’t really want to talk on the phone about it but please pray for me, you know what they did? They said, “We’re coming.” And they came. Both of them. From different states. Because that’s what friends do.

And I have two other close friends from college. These women and I have shared quite a bit of grown-up life experience, and in the fifteen years since we’ve been friends, there has been some serious heartache and trauma in our lives. The change-your-life, knock-you-down, give-up-hope trauma that is hard to talk about, hard to witness your friends living through. But these are also the kinds of experiences that shape relationships and draw us into forced openness and vulnerability. This is how we heal, I think. And this is what friendship is: life through the dark hole of suffering, offering to shine in a flashlight when our friends are ready.

But since graduating from college and stepping outside the intensive relationship-building that can happen during that unique season, I got married and moved to two different states in twelve years. Two homes and new cities where we had to plant our own roots and make community and didn’t have family to flee to when we were lonely and wondering whether we would ever find anything in common with “these” people. (If you didn’t know this, people from Texas are really into Texas. People from Kentucky are really into Kentucky. So neither place felt like home.) I felt like a stranger.

But in both of those places, as my roots went down deeper and deeper, as we invested in our neighborhoods and churches and relationships, even as I felt alone, I grew friendships. It surprised me.

It’s hard for me to figure out how this happened. I would call up one of my old friends and feel like she really “got” me, and then look around at my relationships and think “nobody here gets me” and feel really, genuinely discouraged.

But I did grow friends. I still am growing them. And I think I’m getting pretty good at watering that soil and sprinkling on the MiracleGro or compost. (Let’s face it, sometimes you need the poop to get things growing.)

The more I’ve gotten to know women in my community, the more I’ve realized that lots of us are lonely and in need of true, deep, vulnerable relationships. It’s gotten me thinking a lot about friendship.

And I’ve decided adult friendships are hard for two reasons:

  • they take a lot of intentionality
  • they require longterm shared experience

What I mean by the first reason is that friendship does not grow by accident. If you aren’t working on a relationship (and by “working on,” I mean being intentional with keeping in touch, remembering what’s going on and following up, reaching out, showing emotional support, being transparent and vulnerable when you yourself are hurting and broken, and not being crabby when she doesn’t offer back what you think you deserve–there’s the rub), your friendship will not last. I’m not saying that if you do these things, this is friendship magic, but well, it kind of is magic. Be the friend want to have. That’s how grown-up friendships work.

What I mean by the second point—that friendships require longterm shared experience—is that you shouldn’t discount the value of staying put.

When I moved to the middle of small-town America eight years ago, I was planted (unwillingly!) right into the middle of a deep and long-lasting and multi-generational community. It was easy to feel sorry for myself as an outsider who didn’t understand all the inside references to major life events of folks I was living and worshipping alongside. But I stayed put. And I stayed put. And I stayed put. And soon I found myself living alongside an amazing community of women who, simply by being here in community with them, became my friends and support system and biggest cheerleaders.

Some of my closest friends in Kentucky have grown out of two separate groups I’m part of. One is a women’s small group at church that meets weekly, and usually at least one of us is crying at some point during our time together. (It’s also important, in growing friendships, to carry tissues.) We read books and study scripture together and talk about ideas together, but I think our sharing about real-life pain and being vulnerable when life is hard is why the soil has been so fertile for friendship.

The other group is my community of creative friends. (Some women overlap these two groups.) I meet monthly with a group of women who share our writing and our lives. It goes hand-in-hand, because we write what we know and experience. In the years we’ve been meeting, there have been losses of love and family, serious illness, empty-nesting, and both of your births. We’ve been through a lot, and we write about a lot, and we continue to gather even when we haven’t written anything because that is what friendship is.

Let me tell you two quick stories of friendship as examples of the surprising ways it can grow.

The first is relatively recent, but one that feels like a soul-mate friendship. A woman visited our church the Easter before I was about to have baby girl number 2, literally the Sunday before I went into labor. I must have been huge and uncomfortable. I saw her and her family across the aisle from me and took note of her little girl’s hair because it was so cute. A few weeks after my delivery, I ran into this woman at the library, which I had braved because my mom was in town. We chatted briefly. But then, you know, I had two kids at home and didn’t leave the house for months. Nearly a year later, I ran into her again at the library and mentioned church to her but she said she was going elsewhere, and I didn’t push it. A few weeks after that, I was about to start a new women’s ministry at my church and was pretty sure the Spirit was nudging me to tell her about it. I’m pretty good at ignoring those nudges, though, so I did. But then she came over to me and asked me straight up about church, that she was looking for a community. So I told her about the ministry after all. That was more than two years ago. She’s now active in our community, one of my closest soulmate friends, your Sunday school teacher, and part of my weekly women’s group. Her daughter is one of your sweet friends. As it turns out, she confessed to me after we’d been friends for awhile, that whole year when I was MIA and not going to the library very often, she was trying to track me down. She was feeling in need of community, and remembered my funky glasses, short hair, and Keen boots, and thought I might be someone she wanted to get to know. I say all of that, girls, to to point out that you never know how the Spirit will nudge you, and you never know how much the folks around you need a community until you reach out.

This second story is one of friendship that grew between me and an older woman in my church over many years. She is one of my close friends now. The first time I saw her was while she was giving a children’s sermon at church about recycling paper bags. She struck me as quirky but not someone I’d have much in common with. She wore fancy hats to church. She was a science and nature teacher and made funky art. (This makes it sound like we would be fast friends, but you’ll have to trust me that we weren’t.) At some point, she joined the monthly writing group I was part of, and I slowly began to get to know her. She loved the gentle stories and poems I wrote about my family, especially about my maternal grandmother who suffered from Alzheimers and had failing health, and my friend always encouraged my “sacrilegious religious” poetry. When Grandma passed, before you were born, I was touched at a card my friend sent me about the special bond between grandparents and grandchildren. She remembered losing her own grandmother, and knew the pain I was feeling. Then, after you two were born, she showered me with support, with handmedown gifts, with love, with encouragement to write my own story for your sake. It was through those interactions that our friendship really grew roots. I credit her with my writing to you so regularly, though she denies it has much to do with her. In the years I have known her and lived life alongside her, we have shared loss and illness and brokenheartedness, but we have also shared stories and hope and the healing that comes through articulating grief and pain. I also got my first pimento cheese recipe from her. We’ve organized public combined poetry readings and I love the way our stories intertwine so well. And that can all be traced back, I think, to her reaching out to me when I felt such a deep loss after my grandma died.

So I’ll say it again: grown-up friendship is hard. It takes lots of work. But when we have the courage to cultivate it, it is worth it.

I guess what I’m saying is that this is my prayer for you:

May you have soul-friends. May you have old friends. May you make new friends. May you have friends who have walked through your season of life before you. May you have friends you can pull along on the journey. And may you have flash-light holding friends when you need them.

Because you will need them

You will need all of them.

Love,

Your Momma

The Forty-Seventh Letter: What You’ll Be When You Grow Up

/ Elizabeth

IMG_8431

Dear Daughters,

When I was in high school, my Spanish teacher told my friend Katie and me that she hoped her daughter would grow up to be like us one day.

Señora actually said that.

Her daughter was probably in early elementary school then, which means she is now older than we were when we were in high school. Sigh.

But on that day, we were staying after school to help with something in her classroom. It might have been when we were seniors and our classes were officially over but we were there hanging out before graduation. Taking bulletin boards down. Filing away books. We were nerds like that, so it’s imaginable.

And we’d had Señora for a few years. She knew us pretty well.

Still, I remember being surprised at her comment, surprised that she thought so highly of us. That she wanted her daughter to be like us.

That’s huge, right?

Well, I know now what it is like to be a mother with daughters.

I know what it is like to see strong, smart, beautiful women, so confident and courageous and determined to make a difference in the world, so full of conviction and love, to see those young women and think of you and of what you will be in the world, do in the world, how you will live in the world, how you will love in the world.

Because that’s what Señora was really saying. She was talking more about her daughter than about us.

Sort of like how in these letters when I’m talking about myself and telling my random stories, I’m really talking about you, my dreams for you, writing my stories for you.

Because you are the words of my stories, the strokes of the brush in my paintings, the captions in my photos, the tap-tap-tap of the keys right here in front of me as I type this.

I can’t believe there have been nearly fifty letters so far. Every day, sometimes multiple times a day, I think of an idea for a letter. But life usually gets in the way, so I tuck those ideas down into the pockets of my heart, or if I’m lucky the pages of a journal, and hope to revisit those thoughts some day.

And some days I do.

I’m still friends with Katie. She’s got two little girls herself, her youngest almost exactly the same age as you, Goose. Less than a week difference in your birthdays, I think. I’m guessing she knows what it’s like to wonder about their futures, because that’s what we moms do. On our lesser days, we think of all the bad things that could happen. But on our better days, it’s not worry. On our best days, it’s all dreams of grace and courage and confidence and love.

That’s the you I want you to see as you read through these letters. The you that I can already see you to be, the you that embodies all the wonder and sacrament and joy and heartache of being the hands and feet of Jesus in the word.

You know what?

Katie texted me a picture the other day. The caption for the photo came through before the photo itself did.

Guess who I found at Panera today?!?!? Katie exclaimed, with her typical excitement. And when the picture popped up, you know what it was?

It was Katie standing beside Señora.

And that’s when I remembered what she had said those sixteen years ago to a younger version of myself.

And that’s when I wanted to write you this letter.

Love,

Your Momma

The Thirty-Fourth Letter: Where, O Death?

/ Elizabeth

IMG_8544

Dear Daughters,

We live a few blocks away from a funeral home, so I’m reminded every other day or so of the reality of death and suffering. On long walks, we pass by cars full of mourners, with you two happily in the stroller eating your snack, oblivious to what’s going on. On our way to head out to eat for dinner, on the way to Lowe’s for a quick construction run, on my way to reading group, heading to a playdate, picking up your dad from work when it’s raining: those who have experienced recent loss are nearly always present. I drove by black-clad mourners on my way to get a soy latte this morning.

I have always found this reminder of death in the midst of life helpful. It’s a proverbial wake-up call each time, that whatever is on my mind or burdening me at the moment is fleeting and that there is real suffering all around me.

I love our church’s Easter tradition of carrying lilies down the center aisle in memory of loved ones who have passed away the previous year. The preschooler carried one this year, in memory of my grandfather who died on Christmas Eve. The plant swayed as she walked, but she made it safely to the altar.

As the lilies pile up in the front, filling up the absence left when the altar is stripped at the end of the Good Friday service, our congregation stands and sings “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.” I can never sing the song, of course, because as I watch my friends carrying down lilies–or those years I’ve carried them down myself–I think of all the loss we’ve experienced as a community. I think of all the meals we’ve delivered. All the prayers we’ve prayed.

My throat catches, and I don’t sing. Our loved ones die, and we feel so much pain.

The lyrics to many of the great Easter hymns, including “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” have a line or two echoing the sentiment of 1 Corinthians 15:55: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (sometimes the King James Version just says it best).

I counted at least three references to that verse in the songs we sang Sunday morning. And, I’ll confess, it kind of annoyed me each time.

A friend of mine who lives many states away texted me an update about her dad, who is having significant health problems and was in ICU. She was travelling back from visiting with him, and she concluded with, “I’m exhausted and sad. But He is risen, so there’s that.”

So there’s that.

Where, O Death, is now thy sting?

One of my strong and beautiful friends lost her husband suddenly last year. She carried a lily down the aisle at church.

Where, O Death, is now thy sting?

A vibrant 26-year-old mother in our town was diagnosed with two forms of terminal cancer this week. She was given three to six months to live.

Where, O Death, is now thy sting?

I can tell you where. It’s right here.

Right.

Here.

People are hurting all around us, girls. It is hard to live in this world and know pain and love people who know pain. And we get numb to these words of Scripture–O death, where is thy sting?–and it kind of makes us, okay, me, mad. Or sad. Or frustrated. Or helpless.

All of it.

Sometimes I think we sing Where, O Death, is now thy sting? followed by Alleluia (adding a little salt in the wound) without remembering that many among us don’t feel encouraged by the creeds. And I’m talking about those of us who do have faith in eternal life, who do sincerely believe that eternal life brings relief from suffering. We know it intellectually, and we might even know it on a deeper level, but it doesn’t always ring true to experience.

What we feel is the very real sting of death.

The very real sting of our loved ones being diagnosed with cancer. Of babies dying. Of marriages crumbling.

I have faith, girls. Most days, I have it in spades. But I have faith alongside a healthy dose of reality, which is that life in this world hurts a lot of the time, and I don’t want to pretend that’s not the case.

I am careful when I write condolence cards because it’s too easy to be trite.

Of course, Easter reminds us that death does not get the last word. I appreciate that message. But I think we need to be careful where we go from there.

Easter does not tell us that we won’t feel the very real pain of losing loved ones in this life.

We can believe and have hope in eternal life and in the good God whose own creation sings praises, while we also say, no, I’m sorry, there is a sting of death.

Part of me hopes that you feel the sting of death a lot, girls. Because that means you’re really living in the world and loving people.

And I hope when you see full parking lots at funeral homes, you are able to pause and reflect on the death and suffering that coexist with your own lives, that trump your own annoyances and frustrations and pride and self-centeredness.

But I also hope that when you see Easter lilies, you remember why we carry them down the aisle on Easter morning. I hope you remember this little nugget of the truth of Easter that sometimes gets buried: even when we’re sad and exhausted, He is risen.

Because there’s that.

Love,

Your Momma

 

The Eighth Letter: Messy Houses & Being Real

/ Elizabeth

photo 2

Dear Daughters,

When I was a little girl, I spent a few days each summer at Grandma and Pappy Lehman’s house. I walked in the morning with my grandma and her TOPS friends, learned how to weed a garden, played UNO in the evenings. Each summer, we’d spend a few hours cleaning her spoon collection. I slept in the purple bedroom at the end of the hall.

One of the best things about visiting Gram and Pap’s was getting to go to work with Gram because Gram was a cleaning lady.

I loved going into those big empty houses. They were never very messy or dirty, but that’s probably because Gram cleaned them regularly. My favorites were the ones that seemed like mansions to me at the time, the biggish homes in upper-middle class suburbia. The master bedroom beds were all incredibly high, which always seemed so fancy to me. I have friends who live in those kinds of houses now.

I don’t know if visiting Gram is when I learned to clean or not, but I sure did learn to clean early on. Cleaning—vacuuming, mopping, dusting, toilets, sinks—and doing dishes and sorting laundry and stripping the bed and remaking it: I don’t remember not knowing how to do these things.

Of course, I still know how to do them.

But I rarely do them. Only when absolutely necessary.

Or so it seems.

We bought this house in 2010, so we’re in our fifth year here, and I’m pretty sure it’s only been cleaned thoroughly twice—both times by your grandma, immediately following one of your births. By “thoroughly,” I mean that the baseboards were wiped down, the windows shined up, the closets sorted through.

It just isn’t a priority for me.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that I don’t prefer a clean house. I like things to be picked up, and I don’t like the mess. I hate feeling the dirt under my bare feet and it annoys me when I find the shirt I want to wear in the dirty laundry basket.

In fact, having the house a wreck really does bother me and stresses me out. Just ask your dad. I especially freak out about the house being a mess when we are about to have people over.

Part of this is because I was raised in an exceptionally clean house with a bathroom that got scrubbed down every week, and this set the standard a bit too high for my own mental health.

And part of this is because I’m embarrassed to let people see my mess.

I wish the latter weren’t the case, but there you have it.

I distinctly remember visiting a friend of mine in Texas and walking into her kitchen to get something to drink. The sink was piled so full of dirty dishes that I couldn’t use the faucet to fill my water glass. I thought to myself, Wow, I really wish I was relaxed enough to have people over with this big of a mess in my kitchen. And then I thought, No, I don’t.

That was before I had children.

Girls, having you in my space perpetually disrupting things and making a mess—for example, pulling the books off a bookshelf I’ve just restocked—has chilled me out a little bit. A very little bit.

If I know people are coming over, I tend to do a quick once-over of wiping up crumbs, throwing all the loose toys into the nearest box or bin, putting the dirty dishes into the sink, if there is room in the sink. Sometimes I even look into the toilet bowl just to make sure it’s been flushed. Sometimes.

But you know what?

Sometimes people stop by unexpectedly. And the house is a mess.

That is life.

Recently, our friends stopped in with their new baby. Of course, I invited them in. I had to step out of the room for a minute when the nine-month-old woke from her nap, and when I came back in, our friend said, “I was just saying that I really love that your house isn’t picked up. It makes me feel so much better.”

That, girls, is profound. People need to know that life isn’t perfect. That it’s messy sometimes, maybe even most of the time.

If your friends—and heck, strangers—only ever see you with your hair done, with your car clean, your books in alphabetical order on our bookshelf, your life all put together, then they’ll never be able to be real with you. And real life is so messy.

So go ahead and disinfect that toilet bowl and throw your dirty clothes in the washing machine. I’m not saying you should be a bum. But I am saying you should be real.

And sometimes the ring inside the toilet bowl is what’s real.

Love,

Your Momma