Everybody Dance Now

My baby belly is starting to pooch out a bit so that people are starting to clue in that it might not be the result of too many post-run Coronas at the river with Lora. And that maybe Andrew and I have been up to a little something or other.

It's a bit funny being in our situation. You wouldn't really know unless you're in it, what it's like. We know people who got divorced and then found love again and had babies together, but there's not a whole lot of us. Whenever we do catch eyes with "our people" we tend to glom onto them the way fat girls do at a freshman dance. It's just nice to be understood, right? To be related to. To relate.

People in our immediate circle obviously know our whole situation and so it's easy to just be around them. But often times we run into people whom we haven't seen in a while and I swear it can take us anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours to catch them up on everything. Now that my belly is baby-ized, it's become quite the information overload. I found the quickest way to break the ice is to pump my fist in the air and chant, "Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" and then they laugh and relax and we can all catch up with ease.

What we have often said is that we wish we could walk around with a billboard tied around our necks that give people all our basic information so that we can keep eating our dinner or doing whatever we were doing before we ran into them.

But one day something totally different happened. About a month ago I ran into a girl I knew quite well in university. Anna had NO CLUE about anything so I totally thought I'd be giving her a bit of a shock. Know what? She wasn't shocked. Even though her story was nothing like mine she still nodded along with me. Relating, understanding, connecting. She told me a story of her own that shocked me more than mine, and I learned a lesson that day. Again. That we ALL carry emotional billboards around our necks and that we can stay isolated if we really want to with our heads down, faces full, or we can look up and pull up a few chairs and invite other stories in.

I didn't need Anna's story to match mine in order for me to connect with her. Connection just naturally happened when we told our own stories.

Sometime last year Andrew and I went to a real estate awards ceremony and after dinner there was a dance. We watched a super large lady rock out on the dance floor. She owned that space like whip cream on pie. Her limbs were seemingly everywhere all at once and it was a miracle that nobody got carried out in a stretcher. If she waited on the sidelines until enough big ladies agreed to dance out there with her, she'd be waiting a long frigging time. She would have missed out on the dance!

We will share our stories and we'll listen to yours. Even if it takes 3 hours, and even if somebody gets carried out in a stretcher. Because Andrew and I would way rather live a little than sit on the sidelines. Let's cut a rug.