Affiliate links may be included for your convenience. View our privacy and affiliates policy for details.
I’ve always read things where people say how important having girlfriends is for adult women. I chose not to believe it for years because I never have had that. I had a couple of great girlfriends in high school who were in my wedding, and we’re still Facebook friends, but we all live in different cities and have different lives and don’t get to see each other much.
And the friendships you form as an adult are different from the ones you form in school, which is not to say those friends are any less dear.
Lately I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to make friends of any sort. I work from home. I don’t get out much. I hang out with my husband’s friends and, once a month or so, get to see a changing circle of bloggers at a local meetup.
But it was through the connections of that blogging group that I met and then got to spend the weekend with some really amazing women I am now proud and honored to call my friends.
Some of us were in Listen to Your Mother together; others had never met. But we came together for a weekend that was billed as a way for us to work separately on whatever needed doing. No planned activities other than simple shared meals. Just lots of time and space for work and thinking.
The guest list seemed to fall together rather serendipitously. On woman’s in-laws had the perfect house in the woods — on 245 acres a 20 minute drive from my house — and happened to be out of town for the weekend we’d been planning for.
Though I would say very few of us were close when the weekend started, it was as if we’d all known each other for ages. There was never any awkwardness at all. We talked and laughed like we’d been doing it a long time.
And we did work, of course. I meant to get a lot more done than I did (though 4,000 words of the next book, a few blog posts and the start of an ebook is not a bad weekend’s work). But who could resist a four-wheeler ride around the property on the first day of modern gun season? Or a chat on the balcony overlooking the woods about inputs and outputs? (I might have more to say about that soon.)
It was a really beautiful weekend in every possible way. And these girls — we’re connected now in a way we never would have been without this weekend.
The plan is for these events to happen a few times a year. I’m already looking forward to the next one.
