To Be Understood, a "Friendaversary" Tale

One afternoon a little over three years ago, I sat on my living room couch trying desperately and unsuccessfully to hold myself together as I was explaining to a dear older friend how I was feeling.  I was drained from the day to day work with our special needs crew, I was growing ever more isolated as a stay-at-home homeschooling mom who didn't quite fit anywhere, and I was more lonely than I can recall ever being in my entire life.  Sure, I had friends I interacted with at church, and I had my family (Yea, YOU try maintaining your sanity with a houseful of teens and pre-teens 24/7! Hahaha!), but what was missing was a deep connection with someone who "got it".  Many of my friends were well beyond their parenting years, or had never parented at all, and they either shook their head saying, "Man, I have no idea how you do it!" or "I don't know WHY you do it!"...both similar words yet very different statements.  There was no malice meant whatsoever, but a simple lack of understanding of my singular life.

We had started homeschooling when Matt was in fifth grade, and it was like trying to jump into a well formed clique that was strong and had been for years before we came along.  This, too, was not out of malice, but is just sort of how life goes.  Being more progressive in my theological understandings and being in the homeschool arena also left me feeling uncertain, as the homeschool world where we live, as in most places, is largely Christian and can lean far more conservative than we are.  This isn't a problem for me at all, and I love my Christian friends of all ilk, but I was always afraid of letting the real me show and feared being rejected because I said the wrong thing.  Like millions of Protestant Christians in America, I do not take the Bible literally, but I do take it seriously...however in certain homeschooling circles that admission alone can brand you a heathen.  

The proverbial straw that broke the camel's back was after the first volleyball practice of the season, when I went in and politely chatted with a few of the moms as I always had in prior years, and one of them turned to me and said, "Oh, are your kids playing this year?" and not quite understanding I responded, "Yes, just like we do every year." and she looked at me quizzically and said, "I don't remember seeing you or any of them last year." and then turned to talk to another mom, totally clueless about the impact her words had made on me.

We had literally had five kids playing on three teams the year before, and I had visited with this very mom at almost every single practice and game.  We were so distant from being considered part of the "core group" and my family and I mattered so little that it hadn't even been noted that we were in attendance for an entire season.

I went to the car, more heavy hearted than I had been in years, and despite my best efforts started sobbing.  I had tried so hard to visit, to be warm, to engage others in conversation despite how hard it is for me as a bit of an introvert, and still it didn't matter.  Something shifted for me in that very moment, and I realized it was pointless to try and make much more effort to try and fit in where I truly just wasn't going to fit.  I prayed on the drive home for God to reach into my heart and help me cope with feeling so lonely, to help me learn how to live with this as it was imperative that we continued to homeschool for the sake of our kids and I was committed to that with my whole heart, but I was aching with the seclusion that brought.  

You see, I had even moved beyond my prayers for closer friendships and companionship and was simply asking for God to help me accept this as the way my life was going to be.  I had given up, and just needed to find a way to be OK with it all.  Aside from the lack of connection in the homeschooling community, our unusual situation with our kids meant that I didn't even have anyone who understood our life from a parenting perspective.  We have to make so many decisions that are counter to what other parents do, and we have to parent such a wide range of abilities and disabilities, emotional trauma, neglect, and more, and I have been the interpreter of the world to my children, but am also sadly in the role of interpreter of my children to the world.  Your standard parent hasn't had to deal with the rejection of an infant due to Reactive Attachment Disorder that takes years and years of work to heal, they haven't had kids hit their heads because their brains don't work and cry out as they say, "I am so stupid!  I am SO STUPID!", they haven't had to parent children who have witnessed murder, who have suffered institutionalization, who have had their hearts, bodies and minds crushed by the very people who were supposed to protect them. 

I had perhaps one or two people I knew at all via the internet who had adopted so many kids from orphanages overseas, let alone kids significantly older.  I had no role models, no one I could call with the sometimes terrifying issues we dealt with every single day, no one who understood how much damage was being done to my own spirit as I was the emotional sponge for all the very real pain I was absorbing in our home every day.  Don't get me wrong, we were truly happy, too, and still are, solely thanks to our invitation to God to be smack dab in the middle of our lives, but it has been harder than I can ever explain.

So as I sat there, unsuccessfully keeping the tears from flowing as I shared with my friend who truly loved me but  with whom I also didn't share much in common, how I was just wrecked, lonely beyond belief, and felt at moments like I was always going to be alone. I was fifteen years into a journey that I would STILL take over again, but was beaten down and declaring loneliness the winner.  I don't know if I had ever allowed myself to be quite so vulnerable up until that point.

Barely a month later, my sweet friend Mary who heard my heart that day introduced me via Facebook to someone she had met at a conference a few days prior, someone the Spirit had told her to connect with, and she listened and felt something strong that she couldn't ignore.  Through a series of "Divine Coincidences", Mary stumbled upon the person who would quickly become the best friend I would ever have...all because she listened to the Spirit guiding her to keep nudging us together.

Tentatively, trusting Mary's gut, Rev. Candi Ashenden and I began communicating through emails and Facebook, trying to ascertain what it was that Mary saw might be there for each of us.  Our first real communication was when she asked me to send her the copy of a sermon I had just delivered, wondering if maybe she could find something for us to talk about, as Mary kept bugging us :-)  That was all it took (not that the sermon was that good, trust me!) as Candi was able to see my true heart somehow in the lines of that sermon, and we began to develop a deeply meaningful long distance friendship that sustains each of us today.

Three years later, on this day we celebrate our third "Friendaversary".  At first glance, it would be hard to see how we could have anything in common at all, me a homeschooling mom of five kids most of whom have learning disabilities, no college degree, total Southern California attitude at times who also has a lot of Colorado rural common sense, straight and married for 30 years to my high school sweetheart...then there is Candi who is a highly educated fairly naive (versus SoCal!!) pastor with a bit of a typical New England insularity, who has two academically high performing kids who attend private schools, with her spouse, Pam, who is an attorney.

But you know what?  First glances can be so deceiving...

We are both committed to our families and would do anything for them, and we love our spouses and work to keep our marriages strong like any long married couple does, gay or straight (She and Pam have been married 20 years).  She has a child who struggles with high functioning autism and it brought to her a sensitivity and understanding about my own kids...as it did to me with hers, each of whom I love as fiercely as I do my own.  We both love to write, to talk about ideas, to brainstorm.  We both talk...a LOT! Hahaha!  We both are INFJ's on the Meyers Briggs personality profile, that oddball 1-2% of the population who are intuitive and have a unique set of qualities that few others have (quirky, we are!).  There is a love for learning that comes through with each of us, to the point of being annoying :-)

But it is perhaps in the area of our faith where we most closely align, walking it with all we are worth.  It doesn't matter at all that she is a pastor for she would be the same way whether she was a secretary or a teacher or a pastor, but with Candi I can share my daily interactions with the Spirit and my faith and not worry that I am making someone else uncomfortable.  The biggest part of my life doesn't have to be hidden...my excitement when God 2x4's me, my seeking prayer for God to reveal the right path for me to take, my abiding sense that God guides all our family does...it can all be talked about as we actually DO talk about it in our family, as part of our regular old daily life and not as if it is reserved only for Women's Group or for sharing Joys and Concerns on Sunday morning.

This friendship has saved me in a very literal way, and it was God who saved me through it.  I suspect she might say the same thing.  I have never met a kinder, warmer, more authentic, loving human being, and the lives of my entire family are richer for the presence of her and her family.  She is the sister I needed and never had.  No one has ever treated me with as much respect for my intellect despite my lack of education, and has seen more possibility in me, nor encouraged me as strongly as Candi has.  

I remember after the second email we sent back and forth going to Dominick and telling him, "I am getting to know someone Mary introduced me to who I need you to know feels like a 'keeper', it is the same sense of knowing I had with you and with each of our kids...I'm just letting you know someone important may be entering our life." and my dear husband, having years and years of being part of that unusual "knowing" I seem to have and being blessed by it with our kids, trusted me 100% and took me very seriously.  He also trusts how God works in our lives, and that in this arena, it is me who hears, and in other arenas, it is his job to be hearing and my job to trust.

This is the friendship that shouldn't be...the one that distance alone ought to have kept from blossoming.  We should have never met, we should have never found our common ground.  This is the one that was truly a gift from God, one that could never have been orchestrated by either of us.  This friend is the one my children and husband needed, where aunties and cousins were included.  This is the one who would drop everything and "show up" to be beside me as my kids suffered through surgeries, as they experienced new self awarenesses that were hard to accept, and as we work our way gently and steadily toward adult independence that will take longer and look quite different.  This friendship is the one with wisdom to share that helps me be more creative, more honest, and most certainly more whole.  This friendship is the one where God can also be placed in the middle without reservation or concern.

English may not offer us other words as some languages do, and it inhibits us from expressing the many different kinds of love we all experiences.  We hear of "love stories" and we think of romantic love, but every once in awhile God offers love to us in extraordinary ways, through the unlikeliest of relationships.  Friendships, when deep and true, can fill us up in completely different ways.  We can love others' children, we can love entire families as they join ours, we can love other couples who fill grandparent gaps in our lives...love is in short supply in the world these days, so why limit it??