As previously noted, I was the last of the Bethel Valley Girls to become a grandmother. My two grandsons are soon to be seven and four months old, and although one lives in Hawaii and the other in California, we were all together in California at Christmas and we Skype to keep connected. It's a new year, and I don't know when or if I will see either one of them in person during this coming year. After family trips to New Orleans, North Carolina, Greece, Hawaii and California three times in the past year and a half, we're staying put and they'll have to come and see us in 2013. This may or may not happen. But they are always close in my heart.
So God bless all of our friends who live close. God bless the Bethel Valley Girls! Girls??? In two months, 50% of us will turn 65---Hello Social Security! Hello Medicare! Is it time to 'pass the baton' to a new generation of 'girls' to carry on the BVG tradition? Do we have a legacy to pass down to our sons and daughters? Have they learned important things from us that will help them navigate through the 'Blur Years' of marriage, child-rearing and careers? Have we set good examples for them? These things are on my mind on this rainy morning.
As my readers might have guessed, I love BVG demographics. I already wrote that 50% of the BVG's turn 65 in two months. The other 50% are still in their 50's. However, as of this July, 75% of the BVG's will be in their 60's and only 25% will be in their (her) 50's. A full 50% of the BVG's have three children, while the other 50% have two children. Elletu is part of the first group, with two daughters and one son. I am also part of the first group, and I have two sons and one daughter. Interestingly, j has two daughters and Cool has two sons. To me, this is beautiful symmetry. In the grandchildren department we're pretty spread out. Elletu has ten of them, and yet she is the youngest of the BVG's. I have the two grandsons, as does j, but she also has a granddaughter, which I don't have, but Cool does have. Only Elletu has grandchildren living close to her, but she also has three grandchildren living far away in a foreign country, so we all do grandparenting from afar.
Alas, our child-rearing days are over, done with, we've moved on to a new season of life. We can only hope and pray that our children will be blessed to find lasting friendships like ours to carry on after their child-rearing days are completed. I think that's happening in my daughter's life, so I've made a mental note and I'm praying over her and her friends Nicole and Katie. It's not Bethel Valley, it's San Mateo, so I'll dub them the SMG's and picture them as grandmas years down the road. They'll be old and exhausted too and will need that yearly Spa Day to look forward to (ours is coming up in two months---yay!).
So Angela, Nicole and Katie are the SMG's (San Mateo Girls)--sort of like the BVG's: The Next Generation. Angela worked with Nicole years ago in California and then later with Katie as a different company. At some point he introduced them to each other, and the three of them became fast friends. Nicole and Katie were both married but childless at the time. Angela was "never going to get married, and I'm never going to have children"---clearly, she is not clairvoyant! When her job took her to live in London, I was sad to see her leave all her close friends behind, especially Nicole and Katie. Fast forward to last year: Angela moved back to California from London,and she moved in to a house just five minutes from Katie's. Then she had her wedding in Greece, and Katie was her maid-of-honor, Nicole her bridesmaid, and her other bridesmaid was a London co-worker, her friend Leslie who was there with her husband and their two-month-old son. Sadly, both Nicole and Katie had divorced, but Nicole had since married a wonderful, wonderful man. I got to see my daughter with a zillion of her awesome friends from truly around the world, but nothing was closer than her bond with Nicole and Katie, and Leslie seemed to fit right in with that tight trio of friends.
Now Angela is not only happily married to her soulmate but she is an awesome mother. I wondered if this would throw a monkey wrench in her friendships, but then the most amazing thing happened: Nicole announced she is pregnant, and what joy, she's expecting twin girls three months from now! As if that's not exciting enough, she and her husband realized their third story condo in a Victorian in San Francisco wouldn't work well with twin babies. So they found a fabulous smaller Victorian home to rent in San Mateo, and Angela is over the moon because they are going to be two blocks away from her. With Katie five minutes away, that makes the three of them exactly as close as I was to the Bethel Valley Girls when I was raising my children. Hmmm...could history be repeating itself?
My daughter said to me the other day, "Mom, when I go for my daily walk with my baby, I can walk over to Nicole's and see her twin daughters." She was excited at the prospect of this, and immediately this conjured up visions of me getting Angela and her two brothers strapped in to the car and driving the five minutes over to Bethel Valley Lane to play with the Bethel Valley kids, the children of Elletu, Cool and j. The kids played, we moms bonded, and what we realize now but didn't realize then is that those bonds were irreversible. Right now I'm praying a good man in to Katie's life, with healthy children to follow. I want these three friends to have what we BVG's had at that stage of life and have today. And why stop there? I'm bold--I'm praying that Leslie, the other bridesmaid, and her little family will move back to the States and choose San Mateo. The thing is, IT COULD HAPPEN! I was gone to Hawaii and Virginia for 11 years, and here I am. If the BVG's are a group of four, I think the SMG's should also be a group of four. So I pray big, realizing GOD CAN DO ANYTHING HE WANTS!
And that's what's on my mind on this rainy morning in..........well, here. And if we BVG's are here, it doesn't really matter where here is.
