I seem to have good thoughts at 35,000 feet. Even in the midst of absolute exhaustion.

I have flown on three different planes today and aside from the flight attendant  who told me I looked like someone on a recent movie (but-I-don’t-know-which-one) I haven’t had a single conversation with one single person.

22C seems like an oasis for me. I’ve made my final connection and I’m actually really truly on my way home. I’m working my way home from a conference where for the past 4 days I’ve been surrounded by 250 other women, some of whom are extroverts and some who are introverts pretending to be extroverts (like me) and with that as a context, I plop down in my seat.

I’m tired. Like really tired.

I’m not tired from my 4am wakeup call (although that and a lack of proper caffeine can have something to do with it). And not even tired from my dashes through both Washington Dulles and Chicago O’Hare because the airline-who-shall-remain-nameless rebooked my flights on a bad weather weekend forty-five minutes apart with no time to pee, grab the much needed cuppa or even find a suitable meal.

It was from the time I spent with people.

I love people. I do. One of my favorite things in the world, besides cuddling my daughters or sharing a glass of wine with my husband after the girls have gone to bed, is to sit across the Starbucks table from people like you. I love to laugh, to eat dark chocolate and to engage in smart female conversation with the friends of mine who help to rub off my rough edges and make me a better woman. And to be honest, the women I met this last week are among some of the most amazing i have ever met.

However, that defined, people also exhaust me.

And now, as I am in the middle of this once in a lifetime collection of people with stories and families and lives and jobs, and we are all traveling southwest headed for home (at least for me), I am so tired that I don’t want to talk to a single one of them.

Without reservation, despite recent trepidation and not counting the 7-plus minutes it took a friend and me to shove ice and snow off of the windshield of my rental car using only a DVD case and a credit card, I loved every single minute of last week.

I love you.

But right now I bury my face in my kindle and now monopolize my fingers on the keyboard because I really just need to be alone. I need to focus on the hugs and squeals that will come from my girls and the life that they can give me with their laughter and their drawings and their skinny arms around my neck. I need the life that my husband can offer with his strong arm pulling my suitcase for me as I arrive to my own family in my own car. I need the life that I can only get when I sit in silence.

Home makes me ME again only because I feel as if I have given so much I no longer have anything of my own left.  Maybe that makes me weak. Or maybe that makes me honest. I’m not sure.

So I sit, surrounded by people in seats all facing the same way and I have decided to release myself from making conversation to 22B.

I am giving myself the grace to be silent.

Which is also the grace not to always speak up and not to always know what to say. It is the grace to be okay with shutting my mouth and receiving that life that both silence and solitude brings.

We often forget that not only is it okay to be quiet, but sometimes it is right and good. And for me, it might be the only way to find an oasis in a sea of people.

Do people energize you or exhaust you? Do you ever give yourself the grace to be silent?

Loving each other is a choice.

Across the bed at night, lights bright and firm “discussion” faces on, we look at each other and say,

“I love you. It’s hard right now, but my choice is to love you.” We are making the hard decision against anger and walking toward love.

Getting along, giving grace, showing up, walking strong, joy, courage, and peacemaking: all choices.

Anger is also a choice. When my five-year-old stomps in a puddle after she’s been told not to. Or when my nine-year-old accidentally lets fly a stuffed animal toward the television set when she’s been asked not to fling her arm around in a group of people.

And what about me? Verbal hurts, overlooks, unreturned phone calls or texts: I can let it hurt me. Or I can shrug it off and let it all settle into the gravel as I walk by. That’s a conscious decision.

But it goes a couple steps beyond letting someone’s words “miss” me. It makes a step toward that person with love.

Today, simply, I’m choosing to make love my choice today and to do more than allowing hurts to run off of me like water. I’m choosing to walk in the direction of love.

Is love a hard or an easy choice for you? What about anger?

I’ve spending a lot of time with Denise since Monday.

She’s been down in Southern California with her kids spending afternoons at the beach, getting ice cream at Balboa Island and exploring the American Girl Store.

I spent some time with her back in December and then went to stay with her and her family at Bass Lake in May. But it hasn’t been until this week that have I felt like we’ve really gotten to know each other.

She only stayed at my house one night, but we stayed up past midnight talking.

She let me take her parking place yesterday at the beach.

She forgave my girls and me for dumping nearly a pound of sand from our bathing suits on the floor of the bathroom where they are staying.

She fed my girls snacks and still loves me after each one of us has thrown a tantrum.

I was grumpy and she didn’t care.

She’s shared with me her stories and I’ve told her mine. I’m learning not just who she IS but who she WAS and how beautiful God’s grace is.

And without our husbands around, I can begin to picture what life would be like if we lived near each other. Beach days, phone calls, sunburns and washing dishes.

I knew it before, but if I ever doubted if real friendship can be found on the internet, I now know for sure. Absolutely.

Today she is learning about girls.

She is learning that girls will hate each other. And that they say mean things. The kinds of things that you have to go to therapy about when you are 29.

She is learning that girls don’t know why they feel the way they do sometimes. She is struggling with this herself, fighting frustration daily.

She will have to learn that girls will say, “I don’t want to be your friend.” Sometimes they will say it with words. And sometimes they will say it with secrets whispered to someone else, a subtle scooting away from her on a bench, a seat saved for someone else.

I have to teach her that girls turn into women who act the same way. And that little girls who act despicably sometimes act that way because their mothers do. So I have to act like the woman I want her to be someday.

She will have to learn that as the girl who will always love more, she will always be left out.

But then sometimes someone comes along who knows you inside before you even meet. And she’s the one you call on the phone and say, “It’s me.”

She might hurt you too, but at least you know she’ll always love you.

She’ll have to learn, as she grows, to do what she can to protect her heart from the girls who will never like her, but keep it soft enough to be open to love. I will have to teach her something I don’t even know how to do myself.

But then there is love. And there’s nothing wrong in that.

We’ll get through this together. I’m learning as much as she is.

Sometimes I wish I could be seven and be her best friend.

I’d be the friend who always saves a seat for her at lunch, always shares a knowing look across the classroom. I’d be the friend who still loved her even after she couldn’t stop her anger or her tears. I’d be the friend who always invited her to spend the night, sharing my toys, my pillows and my dog.

I wish I was seven so we could share first grade laughter on the playground and plan elaborate spy missions during recess. We would run to the far corner of the field to look at the sky in spring. We’d dream up names for our imaginary horses we would own when we grew up and live next door to each other.

I wish I could be her best friend and begin to walk the journey with her as a peer and an equal. I’d be the friend she would always search for in the crowd at birthdays, graduations, weddings. I would hold her hand through breakups and laugh at her quirkiness (endearing her to me) when everyone else thought her strange. I would be the friend who would call and say, “It’s me” with no more explanation.

If I was her best friend, I’d be one of the first to hold her newborn baby at the same time remembering that we used to tell secrets with dandelions in our braids. I would never let her feel alone.

I wish I could save her from loneliness by loving her fiercely as only a friend can do.

Instead I am a mother. And a mother cannot fill in those holes left by friendlessness. And I cannot be seven again.

I can only love her now, the way a mother does. And love her then, the way a mother still does, but filtered through the adult eyes of her child and coupled with the maturity of adult friendship.

And maybe, somehow, she’ll find that “It’s me” friend along the way, the one who will stand beside her at her wedding and will love her fiercely… almost as much as I do.

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 had a really rough day.

The kids screamed at each other from basically 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm. Wait, strike that. 7:27 pm.

The girls ran through the upstairs overturning my stacks of neatly folded laundry.

I had to pay $1500 for roofers to fix the leak in our roof.

I got in a giant (stupid) argument with my husband at noon and then we didn’t resolve it until he got home.

But…

I danced with a three year old in pajamas. And I snuggled her on the sofa and kissed her bath-fresh toes.

My after dinner treat was a beautifully crayoned coloring-book page from my my seven year old. She presented it to me as a surprise so I’d feel better.

I got a phone call from my sister. Talking to her made folding clothes bearable. (even if the stacks did get toppeled 15 minutes later)

My husband is home and safe.

I called a friend on the phone. And I felt loved by her.

We have food to eat (leftovers to warm) and a non-leaky roof in the rainstorm.

My girls have warm beds with quilts to stretch their growing legs in.

Even recounting the blessings of my day, woven in with the trials, helps me not to remember so fiercely the minor pains of my afternoon. The joys outnumber the difficulties by far.

I feel my blessings tonight.

Sometimes I don’t realize that amazing friend I have in you, perhaps, maybe because you have become so familiar to me. As if we were in some strange way, the same person. No book I could ever right would be able to put the things that have happened in proper words. So our words are shared between us in silence, and in laughter and in eyes that have no need for speaking.

You captured my heart even before you became a father. So, because of the way you love our daughters, you are my hero.

My grandfather has been quoted to say that he was “outnumbered and outvoted” in his house of women. Because of the burdens you bear for your three girls (four if you count the cat), you are my hero.

Because of the way you have continued to love me, even when it has been close to impossible, you are my hero.

Because of your spontaneous-soul and your wild-humor, I love you. And you are my hero.

Heroes are hard to come by, and I have found mine.

In our home, the time after the baby goes to bed is usually a quiet hour that we can spend with our oldest. Tonight she was working on a “letter” to a friend of hers, a boy that she’s known since they were in the nursery at church together.

Chad was reading a book, I was (of course) working on my laptop and Hope was vigorously coloring, stickering and concentrating intently on getting a picture of a train for him just perfect.

“Mama, will you help me with my words?” Of course I will, because I know that to a five year old whose reading capability far overshadows her writing just yet, writing an entire letter can be a daunting task. She has always been one to verbally lavish affection on most people she knows and often tells people how she feels about them in that unabashed, unashamed way of a child.

She dictates and I write, in marker: “I love you. And, I am so happy to see you on Wednesday and on Sunday”…she pauses….”and I love you.” You already said that, Hope. She knows that, but wants to say it again so that he won’t forget.

“What else do I say, Mama?” I ask her what else is in her heart. She doesn’t know…but he is her friend. I write, “I am glad you are my friend.” Another, “I love you” and then her name. For a second, I reflect on how I will be able to help her find her words in life, help her to give words to the feelings she will have. Maybe I will be able to help to walk her through some of the heart-wrenching times she will have (that all girls have) for which there are no words.

Her openness, her transparency convicts me. I realize then, sitting so close to her I can smell the damp hair from her bath, that she is helping me find my own words. I don’t unabashedly tell my friends and my family “I LOVE YOU!!!” over and over again, like she often does. (The best gift from her five-year-old lips comes when she expresses her love for me out of the blue – “I love you to the moon and back, Mama!”). Why don’t I love my friends like she does?

I’m glad you are my friend.
I love you.
I will draw a train for you simply because you like it.

This is my girl. She is helping me find my words even now as I write this: my silence, my inwardness in writing for the past 10 years. I’ve only now blossomed and found my footing in writing because, I think, of my children. They inspire me. They help me find my own words in this life.