We meet...

Honey was my best friend first and foremost. Before she was anything else, she was that. A male friend of mine introduced us. He was, at the time, her boyfriend. Years later, she became my brother's wife. Now she was my sister too.

The three of us were tight and this bond remained throughout the rest of her days for about 20 years. When you think of a friendship in those terms, "I've been friends with her for over 20 years", it seems a long time; a gift.

Flip it over and look at it in different terms, "When I first accepted her into my life, and found her worthy of being a friend, I never dreamed that I would have only 20 years with her".

Since I am coming to learn about how powerful our perception is in creating the reality that we live in, I'm going to focus on how blessed I was to have had her in my life for 20 years. That IS a long time, from that perspective.

Those twenty years survived the Parent Test, that occurrence in a relationship that will weed out the frail or shallow friends from those that will watch you grow gray and become fragile. You know what I'm talking about, you have all these friends and then, once you become a parent you find that some of your friends just don't reach out to you anymore. You grow apart and soon, years will pass and when you think back of those types of friends, you find yourself asking your best friend, "Do you remember that girl who..." or "Do you remember that guy's name...you know the one who..."

Yeah, we passed that. I won't deny that it did mark the end of the Honeymoon of our friendship. After the kids (first a boy and then a girl), there was a little cocoon around their family unit, of which I was just an outermost strand. But I was still important. I was still family and best friend. I just didn't spend as much time there.

Moving out of town,  then out of state, making new friends since I was still single and going to clubs - but I would also devote weekends to hanging out with my family, and what good times we had too! I had the best of both worlds.

In my absence, Honey had other friends that she would hang out with and became close to. I won't pretend I was her only close friend. Even my sister and she were hanging out and becoming really close. They had their own bond.

And yes, at times I would feel a tinge of jealousy over the other friends she had. I consoled myself that their common denominator was that they all had kids and I did not. So, I could not relate to the headaches of the cost of diapers, or the best way to deal with a tantrum. I know now that there was a lot more to their relationships than that, but this thought soothed my ego a little at the time. 

As a family, we gathered for holidays and sometimes took vacations together, renting cabins or camping, going to the beach. These excursions usually included some alcohol although years later, once we got past the point of taking vacations together, when we did get together, nobody was really interested in drinking any longer.

Honey was a perfect addition to our family. Like us, she could be a dick at times. Too many of our gatherings inevitably included some sort of spat, or argument. Despite the love, we were a family of A-Holes. And despite the spats, we were a family - a tight one.