Digital Friendships

My two best friends are still my best friends from middle school. Aren’t I lucky? Christina and Sarah have been my ride-or-die for almost my entire life (give or take a few years in college when Christina and I didn’t talk for a few years which I now regret so much because those years were so formative and I wish I had known what was going on in her life and I wish she had been part of what was going on in mine… but we don’t have regrets and we don’t look back, so moving on…).

None of us live anywhere close to each other. Sarah moved back to our hometown to raise her family with her sweet husband, Scott, when she had her first daughter seven or eight years ago. And Christina has lived all over the place, thanks to her husband and their careers. She most recently lived in Oregon for the past three years and just moved last week back to Florida!!! Sarah and I are so happy to have her back in our time zone again!

Keeping in touch with long distance girlfriends has never made me more thankful for technology! The three of us have a few daily rituals that keep us connected and involved in each other’s lives, even through the distance.

First, every morning, we send each other an “outfit of the day” picture (OOTD, thanks to Stassi!). We started this a couple years ago as a way to keep us accountable for getting up and dressed every day because at the time, both Christina and I worked from home and we DEFINITELY needed that accountability! Now, it’s just a fun peak into our real lives since we can’t see each other in person. Usually, we also send a little blurb about what’s happening in our day that day. Like, “OOTD: Grocery shopping and errands!” or “OOTD: Work meetings and happy hour!”

Another way we use text messages to keep in touch with our real, every day lives is through this thing we call “Stop, Drop, and Shoot” or SDS for short. At anytime, one of us sends a picture of what they are doing right at that moment with the text: SDS. The rule is that whenever you see the text, you have to send your SDS picture of whatever you are doing at that moment. Some of them are super funny – like using the bathroom or locked in a fitting room trying on bathing suits. Some of them are just boring and plain like parenting or chores. Sometimes, we pick a winner, too. If one of us is at the beach and the other two are working, the beach goer wins that round. It’s silly and fun, but most importantly, it connects us to the small in-between moments in each other’s lives that we might miss normally.

For daily conversations, the three of us use the Marco Polo app religiously. Marco Polo is kind of like combining FaceTime and voicemails. They can check them at their convenience like a voicemail, but there’s video so you can see them, too. We leave each other MP’s all day long, about all kinds of things. This is really the meat and potatoes of our friendship, I think, because it’s where we bear it all for each other. We’ve cried together after losing loved ones, raged to each other about things that are really pissing us off, worried together over big decisions, laughed a LOT, prayed together over even bigger decisions, shared home life and decorating tips, gossiped, told funny stories about things that have happened to us, and even just left long, rambling messages about nothing in particular, just because we missed each other.

One of my favorite things about these MP’s are that they aren’t about my kids. I know that sounds so horrible to say, but there are so few friendships as adults that don’t revolve around your kids, you know? I mean, it’s not a rule or anything and we certainly mention our kids from time to time (well, Sarah and I do; Christina doesn’t have kids, which means we live vicariously through her fabulous child-free life!). And if there are certainly issues we are dealing with, we talk those through with each other. But it’s not like when we give an update on our lives, it is really an update on our kids’ lives. It is so nice to have friends who see you for YOU and not just as the mom that you have become – no matter how awesome that mom life is. Sarah and Christina are interested in my kids and family, but also in my job and my feelings and my opinions and my mistakes and my triumphs and my health and my wellbeing. Those WHOLE SELF friendships are rare and gold. Hold on to them tightly when you find them.

No friendship can last as long as ours has without some true face-time, though, and so we also try to make an effort to see each other in person a few times a year. Since we all grew up together in Gulf Breeze, we all still have ties there (and Sarah lives there now, which makes it even easier). We usually see each other when we get back to town for family visit. But we also don’t hold it against anyone if they are swamped with family obligations and just can’t get together even when we are in the same town. Also, Christina and I used to travel for work and occasionally, our work trips would bring us to the same cities or close enough for a hug.

But those kinds of get togethers are usually just two of the three of us and they are shoved in between family and other things. So, once every two years, we’ve made an effort to have a girls weekend somewhere. Our last one was to the Hamptons in New York. We rented a house there and basically ate and drank our way through the islands there for a long weekend. We stayed up late talking and got up early to read our books and drink our coffee in silence. It was a perfect weekend. Our next one is scheduled this fall in Nashville and we are so excited!

When I think of the important people in my life, Christina and Sarah are damn near the top of that list. I can’t imagine my life without them. They know me inside and out and love me anyway. We know what each of us wants to be buried in and what things we need to find and hide from our husbands and kids in each other’s houses after one of us dies! They are those kinds of friends. Those intimate, vulnerable friends who make you feel like you just crawled into your favorite pajamas after a long day. They are my soft place to land where all my walls can come down and all my masks can be shed. They are one of the greatest blessings in my life and so we all work hard to keep ourselves part of each other’s lives – for the simple and the complex, for the deep and the ridiculously shallow. I love ’em.