No book, or kitchen, but thankfully girlfriends

I'm supposed to be writing.  I want to be writing.  But I fear that it will be messy and unmanageable.  Because my life and brain and my thoughts all seem to be very messy and unmanageable these days?

So here I am.  Writing.  About the messiness.  And the unmanageability.

Shouldn't there be a book?  Not a lot of books, plural, as there are now.  One book. THE book.  The book where all of it is written down.  Every important and helpful detail.  So that the wheel does not have to be reinvented, by all of us, every freakin step of the way.

Which subject? Parenting.  I want a big huge encyclopedia of knowledge.  I'm thinking that ginormous dictionary in the college library, the one you can't lift, except this one would be way bigger, like cartoon big.  And in it would be everything that every parent has gone through before, experienced, survived, learned from, and then all that wisdom is passed down to me, to us, we current parents, on this journey.

Oh, that's right, it's called Grandmas and Aunts and all the other female folk stirring the pot around the cave fire, or village fire, or kitchen stove.  But I ain't got those.  I have no grandmothers.  I have a mother and a mother-in-law, and they share what they remember and what they think, but their parenting years were many moons ago, and our conversations are via telephone, not in the same kitchen.  Zero sisters, no aunts, no cousins.

So, I have girlfriends.  Wonderful, irreplaceable, sharing, caring, laughing along the journey girlfriends.

And from them, I learn.  We learn from each other. We compose our own book of knowledge. Together.

And from each of them I learn many things I didn't know.  And they tell me I've told them things they didn't know.  Hence me wanting the all-encompassing book.

Just this week, I found out, all on my own, that yes, age 8 is the age when boys become snarky.  Not in a year ending with -teen, as I had incorrectly assumed.  I learned that working moms wish they were able to go on field trips with their children, and that stay-at-home moms sometimes have children who do not want their moms anywhere near the field trips.  I learned that a mom can think she is on her way to see her son play his first ever Little League game, when in reality she is on her way to Urgent Care regarding her daughter's ear infection.

And side-by-side, I learned that girlfriends are with me on this journey.  They respond to texts with support and humor, they make me laugh when I thought I was about to cry, they share the stories of their week, complete with self-deprecating humor, and overall their message is always a version of "Keep on truckin'."

Without the book, and without a kitchen full of female relatives, I'm keepin' on truckin' on this parenting journey, with my girlfriends along for the ride.