Day 20 of NaBloPoMo 2014: Married to Amazement

Today goes to occasional friends. Not the lifelong friends I see occasionally, and not the core group of friends that live around me and feel essential to my sanity and happiness.

Occasional friends are those like HH. She is a Bay Area reader of That Wife who made it onto a list I keep of people who have expressed interest in getting together on the weekends (a list I’ll be referring to once again now that TH is working just as much as he was before; new job is not quite what we thought it would be). HH had never met me before but because she is the sort of a person who is open to possibility she agreed to spend an hour driving in the car with me to a food festival. We clicked immediately. She was also working to build up her friend base after a recent move to San Francisco, and we even got together one night for a kid-free double-date.

We live an hour away from each other, and we’re both moms, so we don’t see each other very often. When we do I really enjoy reliving the recent past as we catch up with each other. She adds a slightly different perspective on things than what I get from the friends I see on a more regular basis, and I really like that. I think finding the line between self-care and friend-care can sometimes be difficult. Try as I might, there is only so much room for daily/weekly contact with non-familial relations and I’ve found that spreading myself too thin neglects both myself and the people who deserve something better.

And so I’ve learned to create a new category, occasional friends. Maybe we live a bit farther away from each other, or maybe we lead drastically different lifestyles. Occasional friends meet me over a drink or at the park with our kids a few times a year, we swap stories, I listen to what they have to say and think “I hadn’t thought about it that way before,” and we part declaring that the exchange needs to happen again, soon. It never seems to happen quite as often as we promise each other it will, but that’s okay. We are occasional friends and we both know we’re good with what we’ve got.