I debated sharing this or not, but in the end I decided I didn't want to forget this experience.
A few months back I went to sleep, and I had another dream. This one was incredibly simple. I was in some house, talking to two of my friends about all of the adoption stuff. One of these friends knew quite a bit about what was going on, the other knew hardly anything about it.
That was all there was to the dream. Just the three of us talking about the adoption.
But I woke up with this crazy strong...need...urgency...to talk to one of those two friends from the dream. Like, direly needed to talk to her. I woke up from this dream in the middle of the night, that's how strong the feeling was, and it didn't go away for about an hour. I honestly debated texting her right there in the middle of the night. But that's crazy.
Anyway, I finally fell back asleep and woke up in the morning and still had this really strong feeling that I needed to talk to her about the adoption.
Which made NO sense to me. See me and this friend are certainly friends, but we weren't super close by any means. I'd only known her for just over a year because she moved in just down the street. And we really hadn't talked about the adoption stuff yet.
But I just couldn't shake this feeling that I needed to talk to her. I told Justin about it later that afternoon and of course he immediately said, "well, what are you waiting for, go talk to her." But I was all, "why? Why would I feel so strongly that I need to talk to her? Why so specific?"
So, I sat on this for a day or two, not sure why the heck I was feeling like this, or why her, or how I was supposed to just bring all of this up. So in the end, I took the simpler way. I texted her and invited her family over for dinner.
Our kids get along great. So this wasn't a big deal. They all played and ate pizza and had a good time. And our two families had been together plenty in social settings but usually with the whole group from our neighborhood. So this wasn't that odd of an invitation.
Thankfully the adoption stuff came up naturally and us two couples ended up talking about it for a really long time. And this friend of mine, she was so genuinely interested in it all.
Over the last few months, she's continued to ask me how things are progressing every time she sees me. She asks about the kids. And what's to come. And how it will all work.
And to my great surprise, she's become the person most invested and interested in everything in my small circle of people who know we're going through this. She's been even more caring about it all than most people in our family. I feel like a lot of the friends and family have simply forgotten that our family is going through this huge, mostly blind search that is forever going to change so many dynamics of our family. Sometimes it feels like some of them don't really care, or don't really believe that we're actually going to do this. And I can just feel it, she, this friend, really does care about this situation and is so supportive of us growing our family this way.
I did not expect her to become my biggest cheerleader in this process.
The other day when we were talking about it all at an event, I left and had tears of appreciation in my eyes as I got in my car. Because I just need to talk about this crazy search sometimes. I just want someone to listen and see in their eyes that they're hearing me. And she's there every time.
The other night I laid awake for quite some time, just thinking about it all, and I was just overcome with this overwhelming sense of gratitude for her support and friendship in this all.
I'm really glad I listened to that dream. I'm so glad I acted on the prompting and didn't just brush it off as something silly and ignore it. I'm grateful that our friendship has become so much more because of this.
I'm really grateful for you, my friend. Thank you, so much. It has meant everything to me.
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