Sitting next to her on that first day we met, I kept trying not to stare. I thought she looked like Jennifer Aniston. She seemed put together and polished on the outside, but time would prove that on the inside she was as broken and full of pain as I.
Born and raised in North Carolina, conversation with Amy was like having a conversation on the front porch, sitting on a porch swing, with a tall glass of lemonade in your hand. She'd tell a story the long way around, full of details and names, and the last word in each sentence seemed to drag out longer than the others.
Having just moved to California at the time, and craving any semblance of normal, I thought it would be fun when she invited me one day to my first-ever shopping experience at the home decorating store, Ikea. For anyone living where Ikea isn't nearby, just know that you're missing out. Never mind the fact that anything you do buy from this store will make you cuss. Nothing is assembled, and the pieces you have to put together are done so with the aid of an instruction sheet, not a manual, and the instructions are all in picture. No words.
But I digress. Buying and putting together Ikea products may be hard, but shopping in their store is a treat. It's a maze of aisles, circling you inward, outward, throughout, and then back around again. You go up, then down, then back up, I think, but you don't care that you end up walking miles upon miles, because everything is so much fun to see. You see entire bedrooms all set up in mini-cubicles. You have the same thing with living rooms, and kitchens. You can dream, and can get inspired, and you can get ideas on ways to more efficiently decorate your home like nowhere else.
Unless you have 4 unruly kids in tow. I had two of mine, and Amy had two of hers. There were fights, and meltdowns, and kids wanting to walk, and kids wanting to ride in the cart, and no matter how many times I've shopped with my kids or even with my friends and their kids, I realized that day that we were way in over our heads. It wasn't until we were loading them back into our cars that we finally looked at each other and realized that something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.
It took me the rest of the day to process what had happened. I realized that even though I was a seasoned mom well experienced in shopping with kids, I was new to being a tired and overwhelmed mom with kids with behavior challenges due to all of the changes they had endured in the months just before our shopping trip.
But, the underlying issue, as I continued to dig, came from the fact that we didn't have a home. Not really. I had a condo I rented with the kids, but it wasn't the home I wanted to have. I wanted to have what we had before--a home with a family. One I was motivated to make pretty and efficient. A home where deciding the color of paint I would use in a room was my big decision, rather than having to decide whether I'd pay the electric bill or the water bill...because I couldn't pay both.
It seemed harder to keep the kids maintained when we had so much pain and disappointment wrestling in our souls. Life wasn't normal, no matter how badly we wanted it to be.
So much has happened in the 4 1/2 years of my friendship with Amy. She helped to bring me out of my frumpiness. She inspired me to want to be pretty. I hope I helped her to want to take better care of the inside of herself, in return.
We are given friends in the unusual or even bad seasons, as well as the usual and good seasons. But no matter when or how they come, at the end of the day, if they're here to stay it doesn't matter where they live. Amy went back to North Carolina, and as good as it will be for her to be back home with her family, I will miss her. But even though she is away, I know that she will always be my friend, she will always be in my heart, and she will never be far.
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