Lunch Break

If there's anything better than the combination of delicious food and heartfelt conversation, I haven't discovered it, although I'm pretty sure that Ryan Reynolds and anything would certainly be in the running. Since that scenario is unlikely to present itself, I'll state my case for the beauty of the whole eating and talking thing.

Now, most people might not take it to the extreme that my very dear friend, Kirsten, and I did today (is a four hour lunch really all that extreme?) but, let's face it, any meal that you don't have to cook or clean up is a meal worth lingering over. And any friend that can engage you in meaningful, intelligent, funny conversation for 240 minutes is worth dealing with the rush hour traffic that is waiting for you when you're done.

What the heck did we talk about? A better question would be, what didn't we talk about? By the time we were done we had covered religion, husbands, work, food, politics, travel and our kids. Okay, the kids got the majority of the talk time but is that really a surprise? We're both moms who are moving out of the motherhood (if there really is such a thing) so we had a lot to sort through. She has twice the amount of children I have but we've parented in similar fashion - with lots of love tempered with a bit too much enabling and too few consequences.

Maybe that's why it was so great to spend the afternoon with her. We're two kindred spirits wrestling with equal parts of regret and relief; guilt and pride. It's so easy to take the rap for problems that your kids are having that, every once in a while, you have to be reminded that your every move was not a disaster. You need someone on the other side of the table to listen and nod in silent affirmation when you talk about how much your kids' lack of communication hurts. You need a good friend, armed with forgiveness and encouraging words, to talk you off the ledge.

And if you can help each other over sausage and ricotta flatbread and Chicken Romano, so much the better.