Girlfriends? Yes please!

Being a good girlfriend is hard.  At least I think it is.  That’s why I spent the majority of my life making guy friends.  Then about two years ago, I was having a conversation with my sitter (who became more family than friend) and she said, “So I’ve never seen you have a girl’s night out.  Don’t you ever just want to hang out with girls and talk?”  My immediate answer was, “No way.  Too much drama.”

But the more I thought about it and the more I realized I tended to shut out women who made genuine efforts to befriend me, I asked myself why?  It didn’t take long to find the answer:  High School.  Girls were devastatingly mean in high school and terribly vindictive.  My guy friends were not.  Ever.  And so began the pattern of shutting women out of my life.

It’s not that I never made girlfriends.  I did.  I just didn’t make a concerted effort to maintain the friendships.  At the first sign of unrest, I would cut and run.  Only the truly persistent survived.  I put my friend Tracy at the top of that list.  And I can’t discuss our friendship without mentioning how we became friends.

When I moved into my first apartment, there was a tall beautiful blonde chick who lived upstairs from me.  She ALWAYS smiled and waved and I thought she was crazy.  I didn’t know her and couldn’t understand why she was being so nice.  For the longest time, I thought she had mistaken me for someone else and that’s why she waved so excitedly every time she passed me in her car.  Then one day she stopped me and said, “I’m trying to be your friend.”   That was in 1998.  Since then I’ve lived in California and all over Florida and she has hunted me down wherever I went.  She is one of my dearest friends.  She has the best heart.  And I’m incredibly thankful she never gave up on me.

Fast-forward to January 1^st, 2010.  I make a resolution to nurture the friendships I have and cultivate new ones.  And I can honestly say EPIC SUCCESS!

I have the most fantastically supportive, eclectic group of women in my life these days.  They range from the moms at Teague’s school now and moms I met in Gymboree years ago to my amazing friend Amanda who isn’t a Mom and willingly deals with my writing-induced daily deviations from sanity.  Some of my friends have trickled back into my life from college and others I have even approached in public (If you really know me, you know how shocking this is).  They are single ladies, married women, some are divorced or separated.  They are stay-at-home-moms, artists, writers, business owners, students, medical office staff, chefs, and reiki practitioners.  I could go on forever.  The point is I need these women in my life.  I need them almost every day.  And I’m grateful that someone pointed that out to me two years ago.  Even though it's not always easy, it has made a world of difference.