Friends that Make You Laugh

Oh my mercy y’all, I am actually cracking up as I type this post.  I love to laugh.  So it’s fortunate that I have really funny friends.  One friend in particular should be doing stand up on some of her motherhood observations. 

This year marks ten years of my friendship with this darling woman.  In November 2003, we traveled to Italy for two weeks together completely single and gorgeous and flush with freedom and fun.  I learned she has to brush her teeth all the time and she learned I can’t stand to hear people brush their teeth.  (It’s a weird tick.  I just left the room.) I wish I had the home technology to scan and post a picture of us from that trip.  I kissed an Italian Olympian named Marco in the Venetian moonlight…but wait, I digress.  We were blonde and 30 and single, and it was one of the most fun two weeks of my whole life. 

We are now 40 (almost, she beat me to it by a few months) and both have three year olds (me three of them, her one three and one two year old).  We’re both attorneys in the energy industry.  We both have to commute.  We both have to dress our bodies for their new shape.  We both have swimming pools that we live in with our kids during the summer, and I got THE funniest email from her on that exact topic.  We have a mutual friend who has lost weight and has a great figure that’s ready for her big 40th beach trip; she (innocently) asked if we’d go swimsuit shopping with her.  Um, no.  I won’t even try on the swimsuit in the store for fear there’s a camera somewhere.  And my hysterical friend sent this email in response to our beach body friend, “Have a wonderful trip and thanks for offering to shop, but I am swimming in a mu mu this summer. And eating pizza and drinking margaritas and beer.  I may be fluffy, but I will float!” 

Are you in stitches?  Oh how I needed to hear that!  Not only did she crack me up, but she made me a little less self-conscious about my size larger body this summer.  And for the record, she’s got an awesome post baby figure.  But it made me feel better.  And it made me laugh. 

She just knows what to say in the “moment.” I was upset a couple of nights ago because I was trying so hard to get home early since I wouldn’t see the kids the next two nights because of work.  There was a massive accident and four lanes of the freeway were shut down and it took me over an hour to get home.  She had the same thing happen to her a week before when she left early to get to her son’s first t-ball game – a traffic accident caused her to miss the entire thing.  She said she sat in her car and cried.  I was doing the same thing and thought of her.  I texted her from the road (because I wasn’t driving, I was sitting) to commiserate, and I got this in return:

 

I wouldn’t have thought anything could have made me laugh, but this did.  She got it.  She sympathized.  And then she cracked me up. 

You need a friend who makes you laugh.  You need a friend who gets your life.  I love that God has blessed me with many wonderful girlfriends – single girlfriends, widowed and divorced girlfriends, married girlfriends, friends with a passel of kids and friends with none, friends that work at being a mom at home and friends that have high-powered careers.  But there is something comforting in having one person who is in the exact same life stage – in her marriage, in her child-rearing, in her career, in all of it.  And we’ve been on the same trajectory for a long time.  I look forward to being on it for a long time in the future together (when our kids get married – I’ve already planned it, she’s got a boy and a girl so at least two my kids can marry hers!). 

Find a friend that gets the stuff you have crowding your life right now.  Find a friend that makes you laugh.  Nothing makes you feel better than sitting at your desk (or in your car, or in each other’s pools/living rooms) and laughing so hard that tears stream down your face.  Everyone should have one of those someone’s.  (Hopefully you get lucky like me and get several.)