Liars, Murmurers, Jason Bourne and Me

I have a core group of girl friends--
we see each other nearly every week
over lunch.
And it's not over chicken nugget Happy Meals
like in the good old days of young motherhood.
In fact,
I am the only mom that has young children.
They were all supremely smarter than me and stopped having children
by the time they hit 30
whereas that seemed like a cowardly way out
to me
and I continued to have babies until I was 40.
We're still friends--
I over look their cowardice
and they overlook my idiocy  lack of smarts.
In fact,
when we get together,
we breathe a collective "sigh" and congratulate ourselves
and each other for having survived thus far,
in the trenches of motherhood.
Really--
it is a scene right out of "Bourne Supremacy"--
we may be all beat to heck
after the exploding-rolling-car-scene,
but we can still chase the bad guys
in slip-on shoes and a no-fuss-no-muss hairstyle.
That's one of the liberating things older women don't talk about--
we don't really fuss over our hair like we used to.
If it takes longer than two commercials,
something's wrong and we need to get in ASAP
to get our hair done with the same gal whose been doing our hair
since 1993.

Anywho--
the point is,
and there is one--
I have friends.
And we go out to lunch.
N' when we go out to lunch
we talk about Life--
not the surface-y topics of Life--
no, we talk about it in full-blown 3D Digital Technicolor Dreamcoat.
There is little tip-toeing around subjects--
at our age,
it's not only unnecessary,
it's annoying
to make small talk.

It's like when you're a little kid
and you pull out your marble bag
(for younger readers: a marble bag was a little drawstring cotton bag that could fit into your pocket,
or hung onto the handle bars of your bike and it contained marbles of all kinds of colors--which had been won in a game of marbles with your friends. My favorites were the blue cat's eyes.)
Anyway,
when you play marbles,
you typically dump out the whole contents of the bag--
partly to show how proficient you are at playing the game
and partly so the other competitor knew what you had.
It's fairly simple.

When my friends and I get together,
we dump our marbles out on the table.
We've known each other long enough
that  it doesn't matter who has the most anymore--
just that you're still in the game is all that matters.
Am I making any sense?

Anyway,
yesterday I was with Kelly--
we've been staging an entire house
and took a lunch break and pulled out our marbles;
N' we got to talking about "liars and murmurers
and Relief Society."
She said a gal in her ward was trying to make a point about
"not murmuring" in Church, using a hypothetical situation--
(To "murmur" is not a good thing in Church--
it basically reiterates what Thumper's Mama said in 1959:

" If you can't say something nice,

don't say nuthin' at all.")

"Even if they serve cheese sandwiches at a ward Christmas party
because there was no budget left at the end of the year."
Kelly noted that several sisters response was in a similar vein:
"Oh that'd be okay. It's really the spirit that matters, not food", etc.blah, blah, blah.
Hearing this,
Kelly raised her hand in the class and said, flat-out,
"I'd murmur."
She said she'd wonder why noone had called around and made the dinner into a potluck meal,
or some other arrangement,
than showing up to a Christmas Party that was only serving cheese samiches.
And she turned to two women, whose husbands serve in the Stake presidency,
and they too, nodded in agreement and said they'd murmur too.
"Liars." Kelly laughingly declared, about the non-murmurers.
I admitted that I probably wouldn't say anything about cheese samiches,
but I wouldn't go to the event either.
When you get to our age, for whatever reason,
you can see past the fuss and focus on an easy solution.
(Except for finding things like car keys, eye glasses
and my favorite black sandals that have been
missing for 4 straight days so far.)

It reminded me of a luncheon I attended last week--
it was mix of women I do and don't know, well.
I mostly listened as they talked about things that were important to them--
and inevitably, the conversation got around to our children and the crazy-nutball-world
we live in.
The good influences we welcome
and the bad ones we try to protect our children from--
and to be fair in sharing this--
aside from en-capsuling our babies into protective Teflon bubbles
we came up with no solid conclusions.
But, what I noticed is that all of us want good companions for out children
to associate with--
even those of us who have children who wander off or separate themselves
from the "ninety and nine".
The truth is,
we especially want good companions/friends for our  wayward offspring
even when they don't "deserve" it.
But, we also fear that our faithful children may be more A-ffected than E-ffective
by associates that are struggling.
So what's a mother to do?

I've been on both sides of the fence on this one--
and it's tough.
On the one hand,
my yahoos have helped a struggling companion
to find their own strength and go on to do good things--
serve missions, get married in the temple, etc.
On the other,
I've also gritted my teeth and poured out my heart in prayerful agony
as one of my own was adversely affected by a companion
that pulled them down to depths that left my child barely hanging on--
and in that hour, I so wished a stronger companion would come along
and help me lift my charge to a higher place.

As I listened to the observations and fist-to-table declarations
from these sisters,
my thoughts came around that we want it all.
We want to Save The World
but not Be In The World.
We want a Garden-full of strong, healthy children
but heaven forbid we get our hands dirty
or chip an acrylic nail with a bedazzled daisy on it.

But, I'm like Jason Bourne--
to find out who I am,
I had to get knocked around a bit--
there is no room for delusions of grandeur in real life.
It's messy,
and uncomfortable and exhausting at the very least.
I will have to take-out some bad guys,
and pay attention to discover who the good guys really are--
cuz you know,
those bad guys are really clever at disguising themselves.
This much we've figured out
as we put our collective Mother-minds together
because at our age,
the more marbles there are to put together
the better.
I love my girlfriends
and their families.
Their honesty about family-life gives me
strength and courage--Jason Bourne-style.

And, seriously, isn't that what friends are for?

p.s. If you've seen my black sandals, please let me know.