Thursday, June 16th, 2011
Rewarding Work
Yesterday we drove my friend Molly up to the Portland airport, where with a quick hug and a “love you, see you soon” (we were running a bit late, as per my usual), she disappeared into the terminal and presumably caught her plane back to Maryland. Gil and I went on to “adventure” a bit in Portland—we visited some good friends and ate at an absolutely delicious Paleo diner, among other things—but on the way home I had time to reflect on my visit with Molly.
I have been blessed with a number of amazing friends—friends with whom I feel confident that I share a view of what is most important in this world, with whom I can trust everything from my silliest whims to my most serious fears—and I treasure each and every one of them because each of them has witnessed an important part of my growth as a person, and each of them has left their own unique, indelible stamp on my psyche. I honestly can’t imagine my life without any one of these girls. And Molly is one of them.
Molly and I entered each others’ lives at a Gutenberg “Freshman Tea” one Sunday afternoon now almost five years ago. I’d like to tell you that we had a magical “friends at first sight” connection and that our relationship was smooth sailing from there until she was my Maid of Honor, but the truth is more like this: I latched on to her right from the beginning of our Gutenberg career—latched really being the appropriate word. Molly was the first of my friends to give me a real lesson on boundaries in a friendship; namely, her boundaries, and how I was blatantly unaware of them. Not a very pretty picture, is it? But it’s the truth, and the sometimes-ugly truth of our stories is often also where the beauty lies—because, though it so easily could have been, that confrontation was not the end of our friendship. We both adjusted, and grew, and we came back together as slightly stronger friends.
Also of particular significance to our relationship was the year that we decided to be roommates—our junior year of Gutenberg. We approached the idea with appropriate caution, I think, given our history; but I, at least, couldn’t help feeling a bit giddy about how cute we were going to make our room, how wonderful life was going to be, etc. (This is the way it goes when I approach a new living situation: the ways in which I believe it will improve my life know no bounds.) But reality, as it always does, interceded. We did, in fact, have a great time decorating our room. (It was amazing, if I do say so myself. I’ll have to post pictures of it sometime.) But it didn’t take too long for us to realize, individually, that we were stressed up to our eyeballs by the other person; by our communication, by our lack of communication, by our assumptions, by our fears and worries and annoyances. We got to the point where, in a lot of ways, it would have been easiest to give up on our relationship—to remain cordial roommates but not really friends.
But that is not what we did. Somehow, miraculously, we both resolved in ourselves that we were going to make this thing work, and we opened up. We took emotional risks and resolved things that desperately needed to be resolved. We dug deep enough to build real trust between the two of us—something which I don’t think had ever really been present before.
I thought about all this as Gil drove us home down I-5 last night and the sunset-lit fields flashed by my window. And I thought about how now, on this visit, even though we hadn’t seen each other for almost a year, being with Molly was as easy as breathing—how she and I have both grown and deepened and settled into our own skins, and how that has only made our friendship richer. I also thought about how having a friend like Molly is pretty much one of greatest blessings you could ask for in this life and how our friendship never would have come about without a lot of hard work.
Hard work is not something any of us tend to seek out, especially in our relationships. We would much rather take the easy way out—not admit that we were wrong, not apologize for hurting the other person, not open up about our fears and concerns. So I am thankful for reminders, like my friendship with Molly, that if, by the grace of God, you can make the choice to work hard, there are great rewards to be reaped.




