I love Fridays. For me, Friday is the end of my work week and the beginning of flex time. Not that weekends are do-nothing days; but the doing is different, and somehow that makes it better.

Fridays have also become my time to have coffee and maybe even brunch with girlfriends. That’s one of the major reasons they’re such good days. Every woman needs girlfriends, but let’s define the term. A girlfriend is not just any kind of friend. “Close acquaintance” certainly doesn’t qualify. It’s pretty much a sin to even compare the two. And the mere thought of being pretentious, self-protective, or non-vulnerable is justification for excommunication in the real live girlfriend arena. The term is reserved for several really close, free-to-be-me kind of friends. You know, the ones you can be obnoxious with one minute and spiritually profound the next. And they’re perfectly okay with either or both…..even in the same sentence.

A couple of weeks ago, I was sharing with my Friday morning girlfriends a particularly tender moment I’d had that morning with my twenty-four year old son. I must have been pretty deeply touched by it, because I teared up when I told them about it. I try not to do that very often, which is undoubtedly a violation of the “non-vulnerable” girlfriend law.

“I love being a Mom,” I announced, grabbing a nearby napkin to destroy the evidence of my vulnerability. All my Friday friends nodded their heads in total agreement. Being a Mom is a beautiful thing, we agreed. Probably the most beautiful thing on earth. Okay, at least in the top five most beautiful things on earth. After all, we must leave room for The Grand Canyon, coral tinted sunsets over the ocean, and Richard Gere. Or maybe Sean Connery. Or perhaps Matthew McConaughey. (Okay, so motherhood ranks somewhere in the top ten.)

We chatted, griped about our newest wrinkles, drank too much coffee, sampled each other’s pastry without permission, and laughed about nothing. We had just lifted our mugs to celebrate a friend’s breakthrough, when my cell phone rang. It was my son, which qualifies as an exception to the “no phone calls during Friday friends” law.

“You did WHAT?” I said, conscious I was yelling, but incapable of taming the volume.
“What were you think–” Before I could finish the word, he hung up on me. I guess that wasn’t the response he wanted…or expected…or needed.

After slamming my cell phone shut and throwing it at my purse, I looked up to see the raised eyebrows and mischievous grins on the faces of my Friday friends. How quick they were to remind me that, “You LOVE being a Mom,” laughing hysterically at the irony of it all. As mad as I was at the moment, I couldn’t help but join in their all-out laughter. In less than an hour, I’d gone from being tearfully, sentimentally in love with my son, to, “I’m gonna break his ever-loving neck!”

Isn’t that just like motherhood? I’ve always known it is the source of our greatest joy as well as our deepest pain. What a mystery.

Life is full of mysteries. In fact, I’m finally coming to the place where I’m okay not knowing a lot of things about it. I know enough. I know God is love. I know He loves me. I know He wants me to BE love. I know I love my sons, and they love me. And I know I desperately need my girlfriends, and amazingly, they need me, too.

And that’s why I love Fridays.