Groups Big and Small

This past week, I was at a couple of events -- a birthday party for a friend who turned sixty-five and a work lunch. These are kind of normal everyday, regular people things to do, versus, say, attend your son's wilderness graduation and then take him to therapeutic boarding school. Mostly, I've been avoiding groups, preferring to hide on the sidelines in one-on-one conversations with a very small and select group of people.

The only person I knew at the birthday party was the birthday woman. The invitation promised dancing, so hell yeah I was going. The birthday woman is in my writing group and therefore knows all of my shit. Writers are supposed to write about things that shouldn't be said, so when we talk, nothing is off limits. Things that might cause embarrassment or shame or would show extreme vulnerability are our daily bread. We scrape the corners of our hearts finding heartbreak and love, and bring it to the table to share.

"Isn't it nice to be in a room where no one knows your shit?" she said. I looked out across the dance floor and saw her twenty-something daughter shaking it up with her friends. The same daughter who wouldn't get out of bed for four months in eighth grade. The daughter who will soon become an orphan as her one mother died two years ago, and her other mother--the birthday woman--is dying of colon cancer.

Yes, it was nice to be in a room where no one knew my shit, the hard and tragic and tumultuous parts of my life that I share only with close friends and my blog readers, who are the same. For four hours, I didn't talk about my family or son or any drama in my life. I was simply a guest at a party.

A few days later at work, I had a team lunch at work in honor of our manager's birthday. Here, I knew everyone. These people are my everyday. They know my life, some more than others. Yet in this case, I didn't talk about my personal life either, or I should say, the rough and scratchy parts of my personal life. The conversation turned to the difference between how men and women assemble Ikea furniture (conclusion: women read the instructions, men don't) and grocery shop (conclusion: men buy only what they need, women search for what they might need). The two other women in my group were very curious about how and where I shop for shampoo and toilet paper living downtown. They understood that I buy my vegetables, seafood, butter and bread as Pike Place Market, but where do I buy deodorant and toothpaste?

The lunch was fun and light and the most I've laughed in a very long time. The group had a healing power that was different that my one-on-one conversations with friends.

I'm in grief groups, too, with other parents who are struggling to help their kids heal from inner demons, or more gently known as dragons in Wildie. I am on probably one of the smallest Facebook groups ever with three other women who had boys in the same wilderness program as the Boy. We posted messages sad and supportive back and forth during our kids' stay.

In another group, I found a miracle of social media. I'm a member of two larger Facebook groups for parents of kids who are in wilderness therapy and in residential treatment centers. Yesterday, a friend of mine from college sent me a message. She, too, is a member of those groups. Tonight, we spoke on the phone for two and a half hours that flew by.