It was still incredibly stressful but this year, I think was my best so far. This year I had a friend. I still don't fully understand the concept of "making friends as an adult because all my friendships involved nomadic lifestyles of un-rich and famous military and if I was lucky enough to make a best friend who lived there the entire school year, there was an 80% chance at least one of us would be gone before the next school year started. So to me, friendships have to begin with a wager. chips on the table to make someone want to take a bet on your ability to not disappear.
It was easy when I was a kid. I would walk up to a girl, ask her if she wanted to play on the swings with me or sit with me at lunch or maybe even just share a box of crayons. If we became best friends, we showed our loyalty by trading one shoe. I don't know why or how this ever started but in the mid to late 80s, wearing your best friend's left shoe meant that no one in the world could come between you.
I haven't had someone's left shoe since 2006. But she still has mine and even though we're on opposite sides of the country and we only went to school together for one year before she moved away, she has still been my left shoe for the last 14 years.
Grown ups don't trade shoes. they go out and buy them together... an act of torture I will never understand because while most girls my age are spending a week's paycheck on something that sparkles and makes them taller, I'm still working out retail therapy by means of latent childhood rebellion. I own three pairs of shoes. And by shoes I mean sneakers. one pair is pink plaid with glitter and the other is teal and purple with glitter and contrasting laces so I can change them up depending on my mood. My boyfriend doesn't understand why I'd wear shoes that supposedly don't match anything in the world but they make me happy. And if I were 8, someone would totally want to trade with me. Just sayin...
So, there's this girl at work who smiles a lot and she's been really nice to me the last few months. I had heard of her before in the context that she's one of those girls who, when her name is mentioned in a group conversation, all the other girls in the room who know her do the classic head tilt and high pitched "OH I LOOOOOOOVE her!!" style recognition. I'm pretty sure I've never been that type of girl and that's fine, but I always look up to that type and for that reason, find them pretty intimidating.
But she was so nice. And well, people want to be around other people who make them feel happy and this blog is pretty much all about ebbs and flows in matters of the heart. So I don't know if there's an official club that requires trading cards acknowledging when you are officially friends but she needed her hair done for the party and I recommended her to my stylist and we traded phone numbers and she texted me so I think that qualifies as friends. At the very least, confirmation that she likes me enough to have a way of contacting her outside working hours. haha
Her hair turned out gorgeous (as if any alternative was possible) and my stylist texted me thanking me for sending my new friend and to tell me how sweet the girl was and that I was "the best" for sending her over what we secretly call "cool clients" who are nice people who you want extra bunches to make smile. :)
Every year, I make a new dress for the party. It started out as a resurrection of a family tradition and sadly turned into a bit of a coping mechanism. Every year growing up, my mom would make me a BEAUTIFUL new dress for Christmas and after Christmas was over, I was allowed to wear my beautiful dress to school or to play dress up in or to run around the streets in formal winter attire of the usually taffeta persuasion. Most of the time she would pick out the patterns and I would pick out the texture of fabric and she generally stuck with red or green. Regardless, I always felt like a princess. I remember wearing my fourth grade Christmas dress to school on my tenth birthday and it was forever memorialized in my very first coming-of-age military ID card so I could travel around on base and make purchases at the general store like a grown up. So Christmas dresses are pretty special.
The first year I made one for the company christmas party was the first and ONLY time I ever got a "WOW! You look BEAUTIFUL!" from my boyfriend and even though I hated my hair, I felt again like a princess.
Everyone at the company party that year was so taken with my dress that I decided to keep up my mom's tradition. But this year, I failed. I was super stressed out at work with way too much on my plate and after tearfully telling my boyfriend I just wanted to give up, he said "It's okay. You're still beautiful" and that was that.
Or so I thought... the next day I ran into my new friend and found out to my complete and utter surprise that apparently before she ever knew who I was, she knew I was "the girl who makes her own dresses" and apparently she looked forward to seeing my new dress every year. This kind of instantly shattered my heart because I didn't think she even knew who I was until she started working in my office, let alone CARED about anything so trivial as my wardrobe. And of all days, she happened to say it on the 12 year anniversary of when a close friend of mine was murdered.
I still have horrible insomnia but the loss of Mandie so deep in my heart coupled with the feeling of letting down a new friend whose smile vanished the minute I said "I quit this year" made me feel incredibly sad inside so I stayed up until 5am working on the dress. I wish I could say I finished it in time for the party but my sewing machine jammed when I was trying to put on the finishing touches. :S
Fortunately there's another party coming up soon that I can still wear the dress to but even for as much physical stress as it was to stay up all night and then work all day (I went to bed at 5am and got up for work at 7) I'm really glad I at least did as much as I could. The dress started out as a serendipitous find of end of the bolt discontinued GORGEOUS fabric in a summer sale. I painted a picture for my boyfriend's birthday of me in the dress at a picnic with him and he loved it even before the dress was cut out.
After a while though, it became thing "thing" I had to do for the party because people expected it and I would let everyone down. But I think in the end, even though I technically "failed" to make it to the traditional deadline, I think it's going to be forever remembered as my "happy summer friendship" dress. And maybe that's not formal winter attire but I think every girl deserves a dress she can still be excited to twirl around the living room with.
Maybe I'll never understand the shoe shopping bonding concept that is essential to all grown up female relationships but if "hey, wanna go twirl dresses on the playground?" worked as a kid, maybe some things can still transcend into that which we call "Adulthood"... I guess anything is possible.
(This is my very first Christmas dress from 1983. I was two years old. I still have the dress too and always wonder what Gracie might have looked like it it...)
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