January 2013
It was a cold, windy, beautiful day in the west; out where the sky seems endless and blue. The sun was shining, but there was a prairie blizzard somewhere between the airport and my destination. My panic meds were still working...sort of...as the plane touched down. I was on my way to spend a week with my best friend. We had known each other for four years now; had shared things we could not talk about to anybody else; had talked each other through some of life‘s most painful and frightening changes; had prayed fervently for each other and with each other...but we had never met in person. Suddenly, I was afraid she wasn’t going to like me. But my flight back didn’t leave for a week...she was stuck with me. I headed for baggage claim and as I was getting my bags, telling her on my cell phone where to find me, she said, “I know, I’m right behind you.” Then I was getting a hug from this girl who had become the sister I never had...
August 2013
About four years ago, I was searching for natural solutions to some health issues when a church friend told me about a website where she found a lot of information on a variety of topics. The site did have a lot of information, and also a lot of chatting between moms wasting time on the computer. For a while, I also spent/wasted a lot of time scouring informational threads, finding natural solutions for anything you could think of from head to toe. One had to sift through an awful lot of useless information to find the useful stuff. I ran across a lot of good information...and some information I had no use for. Colonics? Seriously? It did not sound healthy. Or natural...oh my...
The site also had a feature that allowed members to send personal messages to other members. I had run across some information that was helpful to me, and I had a few questions for the person who had posted it. So I sent her a message. We chatted back and forth a bit and somehow in our conversation it came up that I was of Mennonite background...which piqued her interest. Could she ask me questions without my becoming offended, she wondered. So a tentative email correspondence began.
Then, one day, after typing for quite some time trying to put together a picture of a situation I wanted to ask her about, I thought how much easier it would be if we would just talk in person. So we exchanged phone numbers and hoped a conversation wouldn’t be awkward. It wasn’t. We talked for almost an hour till our respective children finally drove us crazy as kids do when their moms are on the phone.
The one conversation turned into another, and we began to joke that we shared a brain. We would often be making the same meal as we talked (without previously planning it), or washing clothes with the same laundry detergent...again, without planning it that way. We each had 3 kids, my daughter and one of her daughters had the same name, the two of us were the same height and shared a frustration with being unable to gain any significant weight even though we were both had times of being so thin that it affected our health. And...the most useful thing...we shared a love of God and our most common ground was that He seemed to speak to each of us through the other. As Anne so eloquently said once, “When we talk [about our problems] we don’t just want to vomit on each other.” We genuinely wanted to know when and where we were wrong and what God wanted us to do. So we could talk about the hard stuff. And not get upset at the other if she was the person God used to tell us something that was difficult to hear.
Our husbands were both in professions that took a toll on them...and their wives. Mine was in law enforcement; hers in the military. We talked about long working hours, deployments, and training absences. We both homeschooled our kids in order for them to have more time with their daddies. And because our families and friends mostly had not been in our shoes, we shared the pain of sometimes being misunderstood and at times feeling rejected by the tightly knit families and very conservative Christian communities we had grown up in. We were not living our mothers’ lives--with husbands who had weekends off and a regular schedule. We could not make our own schedules and our plans were often subject to change on short notice. Our schedules, and most other aspects of life, were at the mercy our husbands‘ occupations. We learned what Anne termed the “alphabet soup” of abbreviations they used on the job.
We attempted to do normal stuff. We tried moms’ groups, Bible studies, or other ladies’ fellowship groups. We did have friends. But sometimes being in those groups only accentuated the isolation we each felt. We showed up alone at church, alone at family gatherings. Sometimes simply wanting to skip the whole thing. Tiredly corralling our children homeward at the end of the service, at the end of the night. Wishing for our husbands to be able to be with us; knowing our husbands wanted to be with us but couldn’t. We tucked our kids in bed and curled up on the couch with a blanket and the phone. We became each others’ lifeline.
No comments:
Post a Comment