When you’re younger, making friends is so simple.

You meet at the playground and an instant friendship forms. You sit next to someone at your desk in class and in no time you’re best buds asking to sleep-over.

When you’re an adult it’s harder.

You have a lifetime of experiences, traumas, joys, and broken hearts to muddle through.  Walking up to a random stranger in a grocery store and creating a friendship seems – well weird to our grown up brains.

A few weeks ago my friend Heather was talking about a book she’d read – [amazon_link id=”0345524942″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]MWF seeking BFF[/amazon_link] – about a woman that set out to find a new BFF by going on one ‘friend date’ a week for a year.  Something I would never have the courage to do.

After I stopped working to take care of my girls – my ‘friend’ world sort of disappeared.  I’m terminally shy when I’m not in a theater situation. Even meeting my own neighbors gave me a case of the nerves.  Erik is similar for different reasons and in different ways.  For a long time I felt a isolated. I loved being home, but I missed having friends to chat with. While I’d gone to high school in Indiana – I didn’t know anyone in the town we live in now. I also didn’t like going out with two very young children, one of whom gets over-stimulated in crowd situations.

Through the past six years of blogging, and most especially the past three years of becoming more involved in the local blogging community, not to mention it being easier to get out with older children than with two babies – life has managed to help me find those elusive adult friends.  Somehow life has even managed to do the same for my husband.

We’ve met intentionally, accidentally, incidentally, and yet somehow all of the friendships were destined-to-be.  From neighbors that I finally got out to meet, to bloggers that totally used to intimidate me & now make me laugh harder than I’ve laughed in years, to people life threw into my (or Erik’s) path at just the right time.

I’d forgotten what it felt like to have a circle.

It’s a really good feeling.