It’s What We Did For Each Other

I don’t know about you guys, but this was a pretty challenging summer for me, and it followed and extremely challenging 18 months.

Getting divorced in the middle of a pandemic while homeschooling two of the kids and moving to a new house was, um…

Well it fucking sucked.

One of the things keeping me going was knowing we were going on vacation to my most favorite place in the world in August.

We just got back from that vacation a couple days ago, and I have A LOT of catching up to do, and rather than start from the beginning, I’m gonna start from the end and work my way backwards.

We have a cat.

We got her from a shelter when she was about two years old and her name was Amanda.

We didn’t really think she looked like an Amanda, but we couldn’t agree on a name, so we call her Kitty.

I needed to find someone to take care of Kitty while we were gone, and I put out a call to my Facebook friends to see if anyone could help me out.

A friend of mine let me know her daughter would love to do it.

So we were all set and Kitty was going to have a vacation buddy.

But my friend’s daughter isn’t old enough to drive, so my friend was gonna have to get her to my house.

Knowing this, I thought about asking my friend if she would do me a huge favor and grab a few things from the grocery store for me so when we came home (it’s at least an 11 hour trip) I would have some food for the kids and wouldn’t have to rush to the store.

But I never asked her because I didn’t want to bother her.

We had a rough drive home from North Carolina to Connecticut.

There was a ton of traffic.

It took us 14 hours to get home. That’s a lot of solo driving with 5 kids in the car.

So when I got home and found a loaf of bread, donut holes, milk, bagels, cream cheese, fresh fruit, and four foot-long subs (or hoagies or grinders or whatever you call them where you live) in my fridge, I just about burst into tears.

My friend had hooked me up without even asking.

I messaged her and thanked her and asked her how much I owed her for the groceries.

And this was her response:

This is what a village looks like.

This is how we women can be working together.

This is how we can get through the tough stuff (and the not-so-tough-stuff).

By looking out for each other and helping each other and supporting each other.

And I’m so grateful for my friend, because this is what we do for each other in Connecticut now, too.