best friends | erica nichole

ARGH!!! I am so frustrated with myself and my lack of posting. In all fairness, I have been pretty busy and one of the projects I have been working on is actually what I am going to post about today.

I really don’t have many friends. I am trying to make some in my new location (for crying out loud, I’ve lived here for almost 4 years! Go out and make some friends, damn it!) and I have a handful of “friends” that via Facebook or otherwise manage to keep in touch with me here and there. But for-real, hardcore, deep down, true friends come few and far between in my life. I am okay with this. I am a huge people person, and I love meeting new people, and I really love making new friends. But as far as super close friends, I’ve got those spaces filled.

My best friend of over 20 years, Raven, lives about an hour away from me, so we don’t get together as often as we wish we could. I decided that I have got to do something to contain our memories- we don’t have tons of tangible things to come back to over the years- so I decided we should make a video. We had so much fun making it and we will be able to come back and re-watch it time and time again, year after year after year.

If you so desire, for your viewing pleasure, I offer the end result, after hours and hours of my sweat and tears went into it:

Anybody who knows me, will at least know of, if not know, my best friend Raven. We have been best friends since we were 10. It is so ingrained into our minds of being best friends forever that one time when some guy was asking me about my significant other “So, how long have you guys been together?”, Raven, without hesitation, answered “13 years.” not trying to be funny, but really thinking he was asking about us. (It’s now been 20 years, dear me, that makes me feel so old!) We are incredibly close, but are also each incredibly busy, so some time might pass now and then between visits. She lives in Bexley (Columbus), Ohio, and I in Yellow Springs (Dayton), Ohio so it’s not just a trip around the corner anymore, and takes a little more planning and a little more effort.

“We’re ‘E’ ‘R’ and we’ll send you to the *clap* EMERGENCY ROOM.”

Raven has two boys, Jon (13) and Eliot (12) from a previous relationship. I have Ziven (13) and Calum (10) from a previous relationship. They all grew up together and were very close, more at some times than others (at the end, right before Raven moved to Bexley and we were all still in Toledo, we were helping babysit each others kids at least twice a week each). When she moved, I was crushed. I went down twice in a month the very first month, and then real life took over and I realized that I couldn’t make that kind of a trip that often. Fate stepped in when I met Caleab, and I eventually moved to Yellow Springs, which in addition to living with the love of my life and finding the best community on Earth, brought me much closer to Raven, from 3 hours down to just 1.

Fast forward just a wee bit, and Raven married one of the greatest men on Earth, AJ, in July of 2010, and I married Caleab (you got it- the other greatest man on Earth) in September 2010. While wedding planning, just a short time away from our big day, Caleab and I got the most exciting (and slightly terrifying) news we could imagine- we were pregnant! I wanted so badly for Raven and AJ to join us, as I knew that they were possibly planning on trying shortly after their wedding to get pregnant, and lo and behold, just 3 months later, Raven and I were sharing morning sickness stories. (I will never forget the phone call I received from Raven. I screamed, I cried, I wanted to run all the way to her house and give her the biggest double pregnant hug in the world!)

So. Two old boys and two old boys. And now, as we could not believe we were lucky enough to achieve, a baby girl each. Although, “toddler” might be the technical term now, as Rudy Mae is 15 months, and Sam just had her first birthday. I know we cannot force friendship on them, but with moms like us, and it being in their blood, how can they not be? ;) We jokingly say that they are best friends, but I really do dream of the day when Rudy Mae looks at me with her huge, saucer eyes and refers to Sammy G as her “very best friend”.