As I write this, my dear friend Barb Cooper is in yoga
teacher training for ten days. I’m very
excited about this for a number of reasons and it’s exactly where she should be
right now.
But.
Oh, don’t worry. I
have absolutely no reservations about what she’s doing. My “but” is purely selfish.
See, other than a brief bad period a couple of years ago
which I mention here only because I’m compulsively honest, Barb has been at the
other end of my keyboard for more than a decade.
She was there when my 17-year-old started school and when I
made the difficult decision to rescue her from the school system four years
ago. She was there when I started out on
my own for the first time after ten years with my husband, and when my mother
had a triple bypass and when I got my first full-time job in a dozen years and
when I lost it.
And now, while I’ve never been a needy or constant-contact
kind of person and I know she’s still there in spirit, STUFF IS HAPPENING.
Would I have written that ill-advised email to a man from my
past yesterday afternoon if Barb had been around to screen it?
And the night before last, I was up half the night because
my teenage daughter shared a letter she’d written about her middle school
experience—an experience from beyond the depths of hell that Barb lived with me
from the other side of the country.
And today…well, today it occurred to me for the first time
that the “less/fewer” rule DOESN’T SEEM TO APPLY TO “MORE”. That was very disconcerting for me,
especially since (if true) it suggests that “more” and “less” can’t be precise
opposites. I need to dig into this
further. And really…who else isn’t going
to think that needing to know is a sign of some kind of neurosis? You’re thinking it now, aren’t you?
However it may seem, the point of this story isn’t actually
to complain about Barb’s absence. The
truth is, I’ve been pretty busy the past few days with a new client (after
three months of medically-induced downtime!) and finishing up a project that
got put on hold when I got sick. The
point of this story is that so often I see people online talking about how you
don’t really have a relationship with someone until you’ve met in person and
that sort of thing.
I know where those statements come from; in emails and
forums relating to my relationship blog, I’m forever seeing people who are “in
love” with people they’ve never met—usually people they’ve been corresponding
with for one to three weeks. And it’s
true that it’s easier to mislead people or only show them a particular side of
you online.
But it’s also worth noting how much a person on the other
side of the country can become a part of your everyday life. I just took a quick look at my gmail account—which
I’ve only had for about half the time I’ve known Barb—and it’s showing about
7,000 THREADS between us. Some of those
only contain a few emails, but others contain dozens. All told, I suspect that we’re over the
100,000 mark at this point.
Somehow, I find it hard to believe that I’d magically know
her better (or vice versa) if we’d sat down for coffee or shuttled our kids to
the same dance class.
