I never intended to come to England and drive a car.

I could have lived the rest of my life NOT having driven a diesel car on the left side of the road, switching around everything I’ve ever learned about driving in the last 17 years to other parts of my brain. Somehow necessity makes one brave.

But I have to say, after about 85 collective minutes today behind the English wheel spread across three different excursions, I think I’m getting the hang of it.

It requires active thinking. I need to concentrate on what I’m doing, and I can’t even think about where I’m going. The only way I survived carriage roads, motorways, impossibly narrow streets with no room to spare on either side was because my sister-in-law coached me.

Hug the close side of the road when turning left. Drive out into traffic and around when turning right. Be careful on the roundabouts, and yield to all traffic when entering.

[My brother-in-law took a picture of me and my white knuckles that we'll pull off his phone later.]

Relearning something I’ve known how to do and do well for so many years was difficult. And I think sometimes I get fat in my non-brave life. I think taking risks, trying new things, and letting myself get “pressed” by life is a good thing.

I came here to reconnect with family and see some beauty, but I ended up relearning bravery instead.

There isn’t anything I can do about a crying three-year-old at midnight. Especially when she is one of nine people in the house.

No disclipline. No holding, soothing, or singing will quiet her. All she wants is her own bed, her own home and her own colored lights that hang in the corner of her bedroom.

Still, at 1:00 o’clock in the morning, “I WANNA GO HOME!”

She doesn’t understand that her home is wherever her family is. That if somehow she were to be magically transported back to California, her heart and home would be empty because her mother, father and sister would be across the Atlantic.

“I DON’T WANNA SEE A CASTLE. I DON’T WANT TO SEE THE QUEEN’S HOUSE! I WANNA GO HOME!”

I took her downstairs so she wouldn’t disturb the rest of the family and put on a movie. Wall-E, the same movie she has watched three dozen times at home, calmed her. The suspension of disbelief removed her for 90 minutes and she forgot where she was. Beside my own arms it was the only piece of home I could give her in the middle of the night.

[At 2:00 am my own stomach growled and I realized it was dinnertime on the West coast.]

After Wall-E and half a Tom and Jerry DVD, we both finally fell asleep.

And this morning, she is fine. She is happily mixed in with her cousins playing with new/old toys, every once in awhile stopping with a shell-shocked far off look. She’s tired like we all are.

And I’m home again too. I feel comfortable in my sister-in-law’s kitchen as we make out a shopping list for the market later in the day, downing a whole cup of coffee in about two minutes and shoving toys out of the way as I vy for computer time.

I’m home. We’re home. Because we are with the ones we love.

[Tomorrow, maybe I'll post about my upcoming experience with driving on the other side of the road....pray for me. No really, pray for me.]

My ideas of friendship are constantly undergoing some kind of redefining. So much so that I can’t seem to fix a direct gaze on it. It is such an easy thing, it would seem, and it comes so naturally to some people. I had assumed that I had finally “got it” about friendship, but I still feel confused.

When I was a little girl, a friend was someone I played with at recess. We shared giggles about teachers or mean playground supervisors. I was the one who got ditched in “Ditch ‘Em.” But the next morning, so eager for acceptance, I would reach out in a juvenile friendship to the girls who had left me in the dark the night before.

As I got a little older I learned that girls who were friends told and kept secrets. To be a friend, you had to know something private and hidden. I was often the third, not understanding the inside jokes and longing to be told the Secrets. I understood later that secrets are something that everyone has and those same girls would have much bigger and scarier ones as they got older. Those they wouldn’t share with anyone.

In the horrible years of Junior High School, I found friends and clung to them with both arms, so fearful of being left alone, or worse, left OUT.

In High School we all learned about betrayal and just how much is too much to perpetrate on a friendship and still remain friends. There were boyfriend-stealings, public-humiliations, and the horrible gut feeling of finding out on Monday you hadn’t been invited to what had happened on Saturday. But in a school our size, you still had to sit next to her in English. And then you could laugh, and talk about the quiz on Friday while trying to forget hurts.

As an adult, friendship has taken many forms. Some have been unhealthy and selfish. Some I have used to seek my own benefit or just simply to make me feel good, perhaps attempting to make up for the lost secrets of my girlhood. Grown-up girls still play Ditch ‘Em in grown-up ways and adult sized betrayals often have farther reaching consequences than those when you are 15. I have both done the betraying and been the wounded in different friendships.

Others have been healthy. There have been groups that have enveloped me and loved me, scars and all, for who I am. The girls I lived with in college, the women I met at my recent conference…these clusters have given me a different sort of confidence in my ability to make friends – that being myself is really all I need to do and good people will accumulate themselves near me.

Some friendships have burst into brilliant color and closeness and faded just as quickly. Some have been forged over mothering, over long early morning runs, or over frozen yogurt and have kept a steady pace.

So really, as I am thirty-three and married and mother of two and have had hundreds of different friends over my lifetime, I still am not sure what friendship looks like.

Is it talking to someone every day about crock-pot dinners and toilet-training? Yes.

Is it waiting 7 months to call someone to talk but when we do it is as if no time has passed? Yes.

Is it being sorry about words said and wishing things could be taken back? Yes.

Is it still feeling left out because I wasn’t invited? Yes.

Is friendship being able to sit with someone and watch TV and laugh without having to have a formal conversation? Yes.Yes, yes.

Friendship is constantly being redefined, daily, hourly. Every new or old friend is her own flavor of friendship and I am learning that the only real living moves and breathes within relationships, regardless of what those relationships look like.

Originally published as “Redefining Friendship” on April 13, 2008)

I’m over at Our Creative Community this evening.

I wrote a post about Decompressing After a Writer’s Conference: Blogging to Writing.

Head on over and check it out…

Oh, and by the way…I’m on the plane RIGHT NOW!! Stay tuned!

I am getting on a plane today with my husband, my two girls and eleventy-billion carry-ons.

Eleventy-billion is Annie’s word. I don’t claim to own it. And she will be staying at our house when we are gone.

Watering my plants. Taking in our mail. Keeping our cat company.

My girls love Annie. When they get sad about something they left at home, I can just say that Annie is taking care of it. That will be enough for them.

So here we go…our three uber-giant suitcases that I’m sure we will be paying for in overweight fees, eleventy-billion carryons and us.

Oh, and we’ll be ready for an adventure.

My husband and I have lived 4 places in our almost 12 years of marriage:

Apartment 1: One bedroom. Two cars stolen from the parking lot. We could walk to the mall. We spent our first two years of marriage here. This equalled slammed doors, raised voices and many midnight tears.
Apartment 2: Two bedrooms. Near the beach. Lots of cockroaches. We moved to get away from the roaches, but we will ALWAYS miss the coast.
House 1: 1928 bungalow in a historic part of town. Cute. Quaint. 1050 tiny square feet and a guest bedroom that slightly sloped toward the street. Had a baby. She learned to walk here.
House 2: More than doubled our square footage. Had another baby. Gained a view, a proximity to coyotes and wildfires and a microscopic yard. Let’s just say that we will be here for pretty much ever.

Even though we needed to, leaving our first house was bittersweet.

The kitchen was small and the cupboard space was deplorable. The breakfast nook was fit, for perhaps mice, but certainly not a family who might eat their first meal of the day. The “dining room” spilled into the living room, which itself was only large enough for a television, and two small sofas. There were three bedrooms, but the “master” bedroom which was next door to the only bathroom was only large enough for a queen bed, two nightstands and a small path around. The closets were strange, tiny and dark. The raised hardwood floor was in moderate condition, but echoed when any person walked more than two steps in any direction.

But the walls were green. A perfect green, with just the right amount of brown throughout that it wasn’t olive but it also wasn’t mint. It was calm and it soothed.

The yard was wide and had fruit trees. I made lemonade each summer.

My baby had her own perfect baby room with hardwood floors and two small closets. It was next to ours and I could reach her crib using about four steps. This came in handy during sleepless nights and in the one earthquake that shook when we lived there.

My husband and I always felt at home there. We always felt like we belonged and that this home fit around us like a tailored coat.

We could have raised our girls there. But they wouldn’t have been able to ride their bikes in the street because it was so busy. We couldn’t have let them play in the front because there was always pedestrian traffic going to and from the university we lived 3 doors down from. With only one little girl running through the rooms, we were already starting to outgrow the thousand square feet of living space. Our best-friend neighbors moved away too, so the house felt empty even as we were beginning to leave.

This morning when I woke up in the bed that inhabits House 2, I was grateful that I could see the sunrise on the hills, hazy and warm. I could hear only one car as it passed on its way to work or school (rather than many). My girls were each still tucked in their own beds and the cat roamed the hallway. We are meant to be here, to bring up our family.

But our first house is still like an old friend to me. One who I will never speak to again, not because we fought or exchanged harsh words, but because she is simply unreachable. My old house, with its coved ceilings, vintage fixtures and tiny bedrooms, will never be mine again. It was sold, and since then, sold again, and someone else lives there now. Someone who I don’t know and has put two strange gold lions on the front porch.

(Originally posted April 28, 2008 as “Old Friend”)

I wasn’t here when Naomi ate the penny.

Or when she bloodied her chin on the driveway yesterday.

I wasn’t here this weekend when the girls went to sleep and they asked for me, or when they felt my absence in the mornings before school. I wasn’t here to check on them late at night and kiss foreheads one last time.

But I am now.

I am here to hear the giggles and laughter of tickles on the living room sofa. I am here to see a seven-year-old jump up and down in her riding outfit when I met her at her lessons straight from the airport. I am here to brush wet hair after baths.

I am home now. And this is where I belong.

• …an eleven hour plane ride with a three-year-old and a seven-year-old.
• ….and then a two plus hour car ride out of London.
• …customs agents, security personnel and long lines for both.
• …popped ears, aching necks, dry throats and cramped legs.
• …bad coffee, bad airline food, and no free anything.
• …too much luggage.

• …uninterrupted hours of time with our daughters.
• …time to talk to my husband over the sleeping heads of little girls.
• …the pleasure of hearing cousins squeal with joy to see each other after so long.
• …new experiences, new things to see and new laughter.

I call myself a leader.

I teach a Bible Study. For some reason, 5 – 10 women show up every other Thursday to hear what I have to say. I am a mother. Two short people follow me around wherever I go.

And apparently 10 – 15 authors coming writers do too.

On Palm Sunday morning, Mel and I participated in a Mount Hermon tradition. Meet at 6 am in the dark. Forget to wear gloves in 30something degree coldness. Follow 40 or so other writers and a Mt. Hermon staff member straight up the side of a cliff/hill to the top of the mountain and watch the sun rise.

So we did. We made it up to the top of the hill and watched the sun rise over the Santa Cruz mountains and the Pacific behind it in the fog.

And then we tried to get back down. Mount Hermon is a maze of narrow mountain roads flanked by houses unbelievably different from each other, but somehow all looking the same to me. To us. We left the group, just Mel and I, and headed down. About 10 people began to walk behind us.

We got lost. Sort of. We never claimed we knew where we were going. We just walked, and they all followed. No one told them to follow us. We never asked them. We just acted confident and confidence is attractive.

Published authors. Leaders in their communities. Teachers. Faculty members. Following us.

And we led them astray. We ended up in the forest walking down a rickety old set of stairs on the side of a hill the led out into a road about half a mile too far down the road. Mel and I didn’t care. We enjoyed the journey.

However, the rest of the group (none of whom were asked to follow us) were not as happy. There were gasps at turns in the road, murmurs at more hills and groans at the dusty staircase.

We made it to breakfast late and about 30 minutes after the rest of the group (who walked down the proper way).

The only reason anyone followed us is because of our certainty. We were confident that we would get down and that we knew where we were going (even though we didn’t). Leaders who became followers because they wanted to be led.

I didn’t want to be a leader yesterday morning. But confidence brings people along. My kids. My women at church. And a bunch of grumpy, dishevelled, early morning writers as well.