An old friend stopped by for dinner the other night. She was one of my best friends in high school and we keep in loose contact here and there. Her daughter is super smart and has been accepted to several really big deal colleges in our area and is waiting to hear from a few more and they were taking a trip to visit the campuses and would be driving right through our town between one tour and another.
Her daughter and my daughter are just over a year apart in age, but two years apart in school due to different states and different cut-off dates for kindergarten enrollment.
So we set up a dinner date for the four of us.
A lot of years have passed since she and my other high school BFF practically lived at my house. And a lot of life has been lived since we last spent considerable time together in her college apartment. But, it was so easy to talk to my old friend and her daughter. We talked about the college selection process that they have been going through and we are just beginning. We talked about what they have liked so far on their tour and what else they have to see. We talked about the future for both of our girls.
And then, we talked about the past.
"Remember when?...." was a common theme.
I think both of our daughters found it interesting and amusing and it probably gave them a different perspective on these people that they really only know as mom. Our daughters, who are living high school right now, heard about high school almost twenty years ago. And it is amazing how different high school is twenty years later.
"Remember when we ditched school and called ourselves off and went to the library on our ditch day? Remember that neither the school administrators nor our parents could really figure out what to do with two honors students who ditched school and went to the library all day? Remember that my parents had a hard time believing that we really went to the library?"
And, as we talked about religion and my friend and her daughter took the time to pray for their meal: "Remember when you called yourself agnostic? And we would have conversations about religion late into the night and that one night you said excitedly 'what if there IS something out there!' and I screamed, because I thought you meant outside my window and then you screamed because I screamed and it all dissolved into a fit of late night laughter as you explained that you meant God, not intruders?"
"Remember when our track team was really bad, but the two of us managed to score every point for our team, one of us in the sprints and jumps and the other in distance and we ran the relays together?"
"Remember when you snuck into my house in the middle of the night and went to sleep on my couch in my room, and I found you there in the morning and that really wasn't all that strange? Because you guys were ALWAYS at my house?"
And there was a lot of explaining about how we got from there to here. And it was an interesting look back and sideways and even forwards and we look at the young ladies sitting next to us, their futures ready to be made, as well as the changes in our own lives and our kids move on to the next big thing.
Mistakes were made. Neither one of us took the "easy" road to here. And we hope that our children don't make the mistakes that we made. But, here we are, with two pretty darn good kids next to us. And they will make their own mistakes, but as evidenced by their mothers, we are not defined by our mistakes; we are defined by how we pick ourselves up and move forward. And I hope that our girls heard through our stories of "remember when" that with your family and friends by your side, moving forward is always possible.
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