G is for girlfriends. I have a group of friends I met soon after we moved here, 18 years ago. We’re all still very close, although we see each other less now than we did when our kids were all in kindergarten. Now we either have teenagers, and/or are working to pay for those insanely expensive college educations, and it’s just so much harder to get even two of us together, let alone all five. But when you do manage to grab more than five minutes after church, and finally get that two- or three-hour break at Starbucks to catch up on everything that has happened in the last three months—it’s marvelous. Because it’s like no time has elapsed at all since the last time you got together. And you remember why it is that this person is your best friend, and why they hold such a precious part of your heart.
I believe every woman needs girlfriends. Because our husbands can’t provide everything we need emotionally. I’m all for legal and economic equality, but men and women are just wired differently. In my experience, men just don’t understand what we’re trying to say, no matter how many times we explain it.
I’ve heard a number of places recently about a growing trend of women, after their kids are grown and the “need” for a man is gone, leaving their marriages for other women. They say their relationship with a woman is better, that women understand them in a way men don’t. And I get that, I do. My husband (and I think most men) is clueless half the time. But that means you go have coffee with your girlfriends, not leave your husband.
OK, I’ll climb down off my soapbox now. And this Thanksgiving weekend I’ll just be grateful for the friends that have stuck by me for 18 years. Friends who have seen each other through childbirth, adoption, cancer, kids going off to college, job loss, the death of parents, problems with kids, extended family issues–you name it, we’ve probably been there. I truly don’t know what I would have done without them.
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! ~Eccles 4:9-10