Skip to main content

Walking With Friends

I spent this past weekend doing something that has literally been I think 8 or 9 years in the making: I went away with two of my very good friends. How completely unremarkable is that? Ever since we became mothers, we spoke and started to plan but amazingly never actually pulled together one single kid-free, husband-free moment in that entire time. We held our friendship together through playdates and birthday parties, holidays, and whispered phone calls in the middle of nap time, and work time. We had laughed and shared in each others’ lives, but I don’t think we’d legitimately finished a complete and honest thought with each other in years. That is until this weekend.

We went somewhere relatively unremarkable that was within 1-2 hours of all of us. And it didn’t really matter where we were, because when we got there we followed a simple formula that we could’ve used in just about any spot in the country: we walked and talked. Truly, that was it. We were completely agenda-less with ourselves and each other for an entire 24 hours. To tell you that it was liberating and clarity inducing and truly therapeutic in every sense of the word would legitimately be an understatement.
There are many things that I love about being a mother and specifically my children’s mother, but something that is always there that I think I underestimated in how particularly challenging it can feel on a day to day basis, is that pervasive pace that children somewhat instinctively set for the day of what is coming next? What’s the plan? Where are we going? How long till we are there? When we get there, what will we do? Maybe I’m a crappy parent for overly managing the expectation that I can answer those questions and that this is why they constantly ask them. Or maybe they just ask them because they are 3 and 5. But either way, I totally undervalued how much this was starting to wear on me.

And so we met up and we walked. And when we got hungry we ate. And then we walked some more. And if we were tired, we sat on a bench. If we saw a market or store that looked interesting, we went inside; not to buy anything, but just because. And then we wandered aimlessly about the markets and stores just browsing. We didn’t look at our watches for nearly the entire afternoon. When we realized at 6:30pm that we wanted our toes painted, we dipped into the nearest salon and painted them.  And the whole time we talked and actively listened to each other. We shared our stories and finished thoughts that had been left unfinished maybe for 8+ years or maybe just for 8+ minutes.
We meandered and sauntered and laughed and ate. It was truly heavenly. The next morning I woke up at 6:34AM which frustrated me to no end on my one kid-free morning so I went back to bed and slept until 9AM. It was delightful. We ate brunch and there was more talking and strolling and strawberry butter. And after just about 24 hours together it was time to part ways again. I felt completely restored.

I was left with some sharp reminders of seemingly obvious stuff that I had clearly forgotten in recent times. Firstly, I was reminded of the importance of having friends. Not particularly of the need to have a lot of them or to do spectacular things with the ones you have, but just one or two really good folks, the ones who you can spend a whole day with doing absolutely nothing and everything at the same time. 
And last but not least, I was reminded of the friend I’d missed the most: me. When I returned home to my family I felt so calm and refreshed. I felt so humbled and grateful for them. My brief time away had been truly good for all of us. Indeed good friends and family restore your soul and help put mommies back together, even mommies who might not realize the extent to which they had started to become a bit undone or broken.

Comments

  1. Oh my gosh, Jenn, I actually feel more refreshed having read this! Agenda-less...it must have been amazing. I can barely remember these days. Really, really great post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks so much Rachel! I highly recommend it :) thank you so much for stopping by and taking the time to read and share!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rachel Hollis' Instagram is The Bad Place

  Women, mothers, pull up a chair.  I wish to have a word with you about Rachel Hollis, toxic positivity, and women as a commodity.  Do you know Rachel Hollis? She is a self proclaimed motivational speaker and life coach. She has nearly 2 million followers on Instagram, has published multiple NY Times bestsellers, and runs her own business, has a product line in Target, a clothing line on QVC, her own fitness app, and sells out large convention size stadiums where people pay $40 for a general ticket or up to $200 per person for a VIP pass that will give them things like “digital swag” (those two words together form a new one that has an unclear meaning to me), and video playback on all speakers. Rachel Hollis is a business and the thing that she is selling? Why that’s you. It wasn’t always this way. As one of the few bloggers still kicking around that started out nearly nine years ago, many of us old folks can tell you how quickly the landscape of personal essays and blogging changed.

Distracted Living

Last week, I almost killed my daughter. It started off as really any other week ever does. My husband had been travelling pretty much non-stop for nearly the entire month. Whether we wanted to or not, we were all falling into a fairly regular rhythm without him, at least Monday-Friday. With school and activities and for better or worse, the days seemed to move rather quickly but by evening all three of us were stretched thin. Collectively, we all seemed to peek at maximum crabbiness somewhere around 6pm. It was shortly after this time last Wednesday night that I brought the kids upstairs to help them get washed up for bed. My daughter had an upset stomach for most of the day but I hadn’t thought much of it. She was otherwise happy and playing and generally herself. I did know that she was very tired. Still, we were a good hour and a half from her usual bedtime of around 8pm. I put her in the bath and let it start to fill and left the room to go start the shower for my son. This is

Keeping it Real

I received an email tonight from a fellow mom. Really, it was more of a detailed confession of all of the things she’d done wrong today as a mother. It ended with two simple words: “Parent fail.” Her email both broke my heart and made me super angry because you see, she’s really a terrific mom. But today, she must have used someone else’s measuring stick to make that call. It troubled me in particular because motherhood and parenthood for that matter, is definitely not measured or won or lost on a battle by battle or day to day basis. We’re in this for the long haul people. Did your child watch six hours of TV today or eat pizza for dinner every night this week? What really matters at the end of the day? Let’s just admit my own bias here. If we are measuring this stuff on a day to day basis, I’m assuming I would have done a pretty sub-par job by most people’s standards. I brought my son to the grocery store in a rainbow colored clown wig and pajamas because it was the only way I co