I didn’t really learn about true friendship until long after I was married. Until my life began unraveling in my hands, and I realized that friendship has nothing to do with looking a certain way or trying to keep up or preventing my friends from ever knowing the ‘real’ me for fear of them running away.

True friendship is about doing life TOGETHER. The messy, hard, real stuff of a very real life.

The other day, a good friend of mine called and said, “Hey, are you home?”

Turns out, her son was stuck at his friend’s house in a situation he knew wasn’t a good one, and she was over an hour and a half away at a game for another one of her kids.

She asked if I could go pick him up.

Her son was smart enough to call his mom to come get him from a tricky situation. His mom was comfortable enough to call me to go get him because she knew she couldn’t get there. AND her son felt safe enough to hop into my car from his friend’s house with a whole group of his peers, no questions asked.

Then I drove him to our house, and he sat down to dinner with our family.

And I think this is the village people talk about, you guys. It's the ones who will walk WITH you into the woods.

THIS is true friendship.