6:35 p.m. - 2004-03-22
Thank heavens for friends.
After spending most of the morning at a funeral for a musician that both Jamie and I knew - the man who taught me how to improvise - I went back to Jamie's for lunch before driving him to school and taking his car. As we drove into the university, we started talking about guest list stuff. More to the point, we talked about our parents' friends. Or rather, my parents' friends, and his parents' lack thereof.
One of the things that I need to sit down and talk about with my parents, once they're both here, is who of their friends they'd like to invite to the wedding. They both have a lot of friends, many of whom I've grown up knowing and liking. It didn't even occur to me not to have them on the invite list - they're adults who have been a major part of my life for a not insignificant amount of time.
And yet, Jamie's parents basically have no friends. His mother sends Christmas cards to about three people, and the rest of her cards are to family. Granted, they have a fairly tight-knit family, but they don't get together all that often.
I've been raised in a household where everybody's friends are always incredibly welcome. My parents have close relationships with a lot of people - their friends and my friends. My sister and I know their friends well, and we've grown up with extra adults around pretty much all the time. And the thought of not having friends absolutely terrifies me.
I can't imagine how I would have survived the last five years of my life without my friends. Whenever stuff got crappy, whenever I was fighting with my parents or ready to kill my sister, I always had a friend to turn to. The idea that these friendships would fade into the background leaves me in the fetal position at the prospect of facing life by myself. When I stop to think about the amount of love and support I get from my friends, I know it's them who have made me the kind of person I am today. While I love Jamie to the ends of the earth, there's more to life than that kind of love. The stupid giddy girly laughter, hours and hours of it, that the Raisin and I always have whenever we're together. Listening to her message today made me almost weep with missing her so badly. I can't imagine letting her just slip out of my life, resigned to a Christmas card once a year and nothing more. We want to raise our kids together, send them off to camp together and hang out while they're gone, gossiping and laughing and crying like we always have.
Or when I think of how happy and excited Diana was for me when I told her about Jamie proposing, about how excited she is about the whole wedding, how enthusiastically she throws herself into the conversations, knowing that I can trust and count on her to be unfailing support and a hell of a lot of laughter through the whole process. The idea of living with her is so exciting, so thrilling, because I know that we understand each other in a way that's pretty hard to find. Not having those phone calls, those dinners where our food gets cold because we're too busy discovering another million things we have in common, those giddy high speed conversations that we can have that nobody else except our sisters could understand (the advantage of growing up with only sisters is that both of us can talk a mile a minute with no comprehension difficulties.)
The prospect of not spending my Thursdays with my girls - Stus, and Bear, and often Chnaners - is sad and depressing and something I don't want to contemplate. The hours I've spent on their couch, gossiping, reading, writing, watching tv, and knowing that no matter what I do they've got my back - I wouldn't trade that for anything in the world.
The endless groaning and laughter of an evening with Foreman. The endless conversations about everything and anything with Mama Bean, accompanied by the hilarious antics of the Bean. The infrequent but fabulous lengthy conversations with canoegirl. The list goes on and on, and not a day goes by that I don't stop and think of how incredibly grateful I am to have such a fantastic and extensive group of friends that I can count on for anything in the world. These friends, who rally around me when I'm down, who celebrate with me when I'm happy, who throw themselves into helping with my wedding with joy and energy, are the people that fill my life with the laughter and comfort that I love so much. While I can't wait to marry Jamie, I know that I will never be the type of person whose entire self is wrapped up in her husband. My friends are too important to me for that.
And I feel terribly, terribly sad for people who have never had friendships like that. Because without my friends, my life would be a dull place an awful lot of the time.
