That was fourteen years ago and now, when I take stock of what's important, I count these women. These women who I've known for varying lengths of time, these women who have been there as I've cried on shoulders or made the right choices, these women who've nodded in compassionate understanding as we went from diapers to backtalk to teenagers.
Last night, I sat at my dining room table surrounded by almost all of the women who make up My Village. These are the people who have witnessed my life and whose lives I have witnessed in return and we've hit this new middle place. We aren't new at this any more. We aren't these twenty something girls balancing our first babies on our hips and trying to understand how mortgages work or when we won't have to buy diapers anymore. We are in the place where we've discovered mostly who we are or at least we are trying to because we now know it's part of The Path. We've passed by that place where we made impulsive silly choices because we've learned from them. We know now whether we want more children or whether we want to just get the ones we've almost finished raising out, we know whether we want to be in school or whether we're on the career path we want to be on already, we know that we don't know all there is to know anymore and we are ok with it. We can sit down together as grown women. We've become our own versions of our mothers... or at least the quintessential mother.
Doesn't just about everyone have a memory of their own mother sitting around with her women, those women you had known your entire life, those women who could tell you they'd changed your diaper when you were a baby and who you could go to when you didn't want to talk to your own mother about birth control? Those aunts who weren't really your aunts.
I have found those women. These beautiful sisters that I've been blessed enough to acquire over my thirty years. Last night, I reminisced as far back as the few years of being a teenager before I became a parent straight through the birth of the most recent baby in this circle. I listened to them talk about school and husbands and kids and laugh hysterically about That Stuff We Did When We Were Younger. We drank endless bottles of wine and I just enjoyed the fact that we could all be in the same room together for a few stolen hours before our lives took us back.
It was precious time, priceless time.
Labels: Being a Chic, Being Mommy, my crazy life, soul sisters
