The power of friendship

I have a confession to make. It's hard for me to keep friendships. I feel like I've spent the last oh, 5-6 years just trying to survive. Survive year long deployments, the terrible two's, moving cross country, and above all, surviving PTSD. It has sucked the life out of me so much that I havent had anything left in me to foster friendships. That sucked. Good friends can carry you through so much, and over the years so many of my friendships have withered from lack of effort on my part. Well, not anymore. I recently joined my church. I'd been going there for years but Hubs and I decided to become members. This involved going to some new member meetings where they filled us in on things the Church offered, stood for, etc. one of the speakers talked about a mom's group. I was hooked. Then, about three weeks later I had my second munchkin and life was chaotic for months with a new baby added to the mix. Well, this week I reconnected with the group by going to one of their meetings st Noodles. Then, today, I went to visit one of the moms at her house. My host offered up baked potato soup (yum!) and tried to teach me how to crochet. I'm not very good, but it was so nice to be able to relax, chat and just....be. I was comfortable opening up a little about my situation and it was almost therapeutic. She didn't try to counsel me, or offer up opinions on what to do, she just listened and was sympathetic. In short, she was a friend to me. I have a mission, a goal. My goal is not to allow myself to be so consumed by my husbands issues and stressors that I lose me in the process. I've got to reach out to people and foster those relationships, because friendships are so, so important.