We teach and run businesses. We care for aging parents. We work from home and in hospitals and for the government. We have marriages and in some cases, divorces, to envy. We are mothers both through chance and through choice. We have lived forty plus years since we were the “Girls of ’78” in gold graduation gowns, anxious for life to begin.
Roots deep, we branched off into different cities…different occupations…different lives. We married, had children, had our joys and sorrows. We lost people, and sometimes lost ourselves for a bit, too. Chaos will do that. Some years we exchanged Christmas cards; some years we didn’t. I don’t think it was carelessness or apathy or intentional – that distance. We were just in the eye of the storm, diapers and degrees and husbands and house payments swirling around us all, taking up the free time.
But then…things seemed to settle down. Or maybe we just did.
And then, one of us had the foresight to use technology to draw us together again into a wonderful, cyber ‘slumber party’ where it is never time to pack the sleeping bag, the record albums, the Seventeen magazines or the ghastly baby blue eyeshadow. No mothers telling us to quiet down or to pick up the popcorn from the family room floor. This Wise Woman invited us to a social gathering we could not have envisioned in 1978. The World Wide Web. Facebook. A place where we could finally get caught up..gripe….brag….laugh…cry….find each other. Find ourselves. “Mother” each other. We are both better at telling the truth and daring each other to embrace what matters than we were at 18 because we are now masters at both parts of that game.
What a gift.
We are still the girls we left behind. We always were. We branched out. But our roots held.
Pure Gold.
The Loon Whisperer 