Filling Up

I had breakfast with a dear friend this morning.

She was one of my closest friends in high school. You know, those years. When everyone is crazy and knows nothing about anything and yet you're all thrown together for eight hours a day and expected to navigate the waters of tricky friendships and boys and pop quizzes and parties with invites and parties without and do it all while trying to look cool.

Whether or not your parents could afford Outback Red. Or Forenza. Or Guess jeans. Or Sperry Topsiders. (Are those back in? Someone tell me - cause I think I'm seeing those everywhere and yet - Sperry's? For realz?) Lord knows I've seen enough tight rolls to know they're makin' a comeback.

Anyway. Those are hard years. At least they were for me.

This friend was one of those true friends. You know the ones. My sixteen year-old self knew she wasn't talking about me behind my back - the greatest fear of most high school girls I knew then, and know now. I knew she cared about me. And, I knew while driving around town with her in her Dad's Chevy Blazer and singing "Everything I do, I do it for you" at the top of our lungs, that I was with one of my people.

As life would have it, she went off to college, got married and so did I. My family moved to Michigan at the same time they moved down South.

But, here we are - over 20 years later. Living 15 minutes from one another. In the same town.

As we sat at breakfast this morning, we talked about our families and life and friends and struggles and I love that she already knows. She knows my family. She knows what brings me joy. She knows what is hard on me.

She knows my story. And, I know hers.

We hugged and left from our morning coffee date and my cup was runnin' over. I felt so at peace and so full of life and...

She filled my cup.

For me, being with people - especially the people that I trust and that love me and that are real - that recharges me. It fills my cup and my heart and I leave with better perspective and better lifeview and better everything.

But, then - I have this boy who is so different from me in this way.

I have two of them actually. The one that I married. And, my third child.

And, they both recharge and fill up through time alone. Time separate from others. Even one-on-one time from their own people.

Lincoln will deliberately separate himself from his brothers - even mid-activity - just to recharge. To gain perspective. It's been fascinating for me to watch because this way of "filling up" is so different from mine.

My husband loves time alone. Curling up with a bottle of beer...er, milk {ahem}...and a good book? That time alone gives him energy. If we spend too much time with friends - even good friends - or if we're just immersed in people, people, people, he is pulling me back from planning anything else so that he can recharge those drained batteries.

Me? Let's get together with friends so I can fill 'er up.

We have found a groove - my husband and me - and I think we balance this tension well. And, I love that we're different and that God made me to pull him along to a barbecue (which would be called a pig pickin' down here, y'all) and he reins me in from jumping on every train that passes so that I can, too, see the good in quiet. In stillness. In just resting at home.

I'm glad Lincoln has us both - one to pull him onto the train and one to tell him it's okay when he wants to hop off.