we belong

After Steve and I woke up to "We Belong" by Pat Benatar one morning this week and couldn't stop singing it while we made breakfast, I commented to him that there are lots of song about belonging together.  And Steve said, "Because that's what everyone wants- to belong."
I thought about it all day.  I thought about how lucky I am to belong to Steve.  I thought about all the people that make me feel like I truly belong. 

Today is Natalie's birthday.  We're getting to the age where there are very few people we've known longer than each other. 

I know that some people think back on elementary school and remember being left out.  I remember waving to Natalie from the lunch line.  We were in different grades and couldn't sit together, but it was enough for me to know that we both wished we could sit together. 

I think some people remember middle school as feeling awkward and avoiding bullies.  I remember picking outfits together before sock hops and never feeling more confident in what I was wearing than when she gave me her stamp of approval.

High school can be a blur of breakups and not feeling popular enough.  I remember always having someone to stand with at football games and going to a dance once with just she and her date (which seemed regular at the time, but in hindsight appears slightly unorthodox). 

When you start college, everything is new and scary.  But as long as I could still stretch the cord on the phone in my dorm out into the hallway and lean against the wall to talk to her, nothing seemed that bad. 

And now we are grown.  Right now, our lives look pretty different.  She spends her days wrangling three small children, while I spend mine stitching.  And the amazing thing is, that even though I don't have a single kid and she can barely sew a stitch, we still belong with each other. 
Always have, always will.