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Complicated Friendships with Christy Bauman and Sandhya Oaks
219 Plays1 year ago
Here's the truth: sometimes friendships are complicated, and when things get complicated, it can be hard to know how to muddle through well. Christy Bauman and Sandhya Oaks generously share stories of their own friendships to help light the way for us. In the process, they both reveal that how we sit with our own reality, and our own bodies, often opens up new possibilities for how to sit with a friend. Join us for this special conversation.
For more stories from brave, ordinary women, join us at Red Tent Living.
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Transcript
Introduction to Red Tent Living Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm Tracy Johnson and this is the Red Tent Living Podcast, where brave women host honest conversations about our beautiful and hard ordinary. This season, we tackle the messy truths of friendship. I'm excited for you to join us. Welcome to our table.
00:00:18
Speaker
In this episode, you get to listen in to a conversation between Sundia Oaks and Christy Bauman. I love these women and how they bring their whole selves to this conversation. They have such a connection to their own emotions and to their own bodies and how they experience the world, and in this case, how they experience complicated relationships.
00:00:44
Speaker
I think you're really going to enjoy it and I just invite you to join them and notice what's going on for you in your emotions and even in your own body as you're listening to them.
00:00:56
Speaker
And I want to give just a little trigger warning. Christy does use an expletive as part of the story that she shares, and it's a big one. So if you have little ears or that is something that you don't want to hear, just be aware that as Christy begins to share her story and talk about what happens around the table with her friends, that expletive is
How Friendships Evolve Over Time
00:01:20
Speaker
coming. Enjoy the episode.
00:01:23
Speaker
Good to see you, Kristy. I'm so glad to be looking at your face. Yeah, same. I was excited when I saw both of our names show up in that email and I was like, oh, that'll be fun. Oh, yay. I'm so glad I'm coming with not trepidation, actually a ton of gratitude to talk about complicated friendship. Like I just think it's under spoken about and it would really be nice to navigate those spaces.
00:01:50
Speaker
My story that I'm bringing is very real time. Actually, this part of my story just hasn't folded in the last couple of weeks and there's a tenderness there because I feel near to it. I am bringing a story from a friend and I really sweet, sweet close friendship. It's complicated and that's kind of where we're at today. And yeah, I will jump in here.
00:02:19
Speaker
How do you go from a season of waking up and sharing a pot of coffee every morning to spontaneous, want to go for a walk to the beach or want to go and work at a coffee shop for the next hour to living more than 2,000 miles away? It's hard. It's complicated. It takes intentionality and much effort and care.
00:02:45
Speaker
My friend A and I were brought together in a season of much disruption and uncertainty. We decided to road trip together for our summer ministry trip, where we would be serving college students for six weeks on the East Coast. This was a time when I was feeling quite thin, experiencing a lot of death, and relied on my coffee to give me a sense of energy. I was broken and torn up from a long season of darkness.
00:03:14
Speaker
What I didn't expect was that new life would show up in this season in the embodied presence of a friend who was equal parts of fun and kind. That summer our friendship grew through laughter, tears, and Friday evening trips to get fresh fish and wine at the local grocery store to girl out with our housemates in the backyard. This friendship evolved as I had a career move to the same city that fall where she lived.
Adjusting to Life Changes in Friendships
00:03:41
Speaker
I walked into the fall knowing this friend
00:03:43
Speaker
and I had shared life and adventures and a summer of glory and goodness. That fall, she and I hung out and worked at the same location for our daily campus ministry roles. We continued to share life outside of work and even brought together a small group of us that we called Live, Laugh, Lough, based on an epic road trip that we took together to see the band Lough. Our friendship grew and brought new life to places that held darkness and pain
00:04:13
Speaker
but also immense gratitude that God would be so kind to bring such goodness into our lives. A few months before the pandemic engulfed our city, A took a new job on the East Coast and moved. I knew this was coming and more than anything knew it was so meant to be for her and that new life awaited her. I want nothing more than to see my friends flourish and thrive in fullness and life and it was her time to soar.
00:04:41
Speaker
The pandemic gave way for Zoom happy hours and longer phone calls and eventually short visits to the East Coast. It was so sweet to see her life slowly unfold and her newness come to flourish. Eventually she found the love of her life and they got married last summer. He is kind, gentle and strong. I am grateful for her and him to have found each other. Another new for her is that she started PT school last spring.
00:05:09
Speaker
It was a career change that was so meant to be for her. She holds a holistic view of the body and soul, and I like seeing her come alive when she tells me about her skeleton mannequin hanging around in her living room. I miss the old. I grieve what was and equally hold immense gratitude for where we've been and where we are. We still talk on the phone and occasionally land back in a city where we both once lived, but things are different now.
00:05:37
Speaker
We don't spontaneously share the same bottle of wine, but rather we pop our own corks and sip over FaceTime. We also don't see each other or talk every day, and we are both well with this and yet hold next to this the honesty of it's different. It's our most recent extended conversation that we gave language around what was and now what is. This language is needed and helpful for this new friendship
00:06:07
Speaker
We both need it to understand what our two bodies in two different states can't communicate or reveal to our eyes. We are using the language co-create new friendship rhythms. We realize there needs to be freedom for us to live our lives and yet want to live alongside each other closely as much as a phone or airplane ticket can allow.
Navigating Distance and New Dynamics
00:06:32
Speaker
We are leaving room for nuance and space and honesty
00:06:36
Speaker
And yet it's so complicated. What was, was so good and there's so much gratitude. What is and is becoming is unknown, is good and holds expectancy. Oh, just beginning with sharing the coffee pot. I can feel it. I'm almost in that apartment with you both or somewhere that season.
00:07:02
Speaker
of just the waking up and the being together and the shared space. And then 2000 miles away hits me and I'm like, oh, the reality of that. It's really beautiful to hear you try to honor, try to pick the words to explain the unarticulated about what is actually happening in the energy between you two and your friendship.
00:07:26
Speaker
It just, it feels so good to hear. I feel my own similar stories inside of me. But yeah, what was it like to read it and to honor her that way? And even the nebulous complication of not knowing what is to be. I can hear the grief in little parts of it. It was so good. And I can hear the ache buried in me of
00:07:54
Speaker
It was really good and it's not the same. And I live in a house with three other girls, then none of them really drink coffee. And so there's not a shared pot. And I love that you say like, there's a sense that we're okay with the individuation. We pop our own corks, but we sit there and we make a way. And there's a loyalty and commitment that feels really strong and secure.
00:08:19
Speaker
but the complexity of the disappointment and then how do we continue to co-create? You know, as one gets married or as you move with different roommates, it's like, what are we co-creating in this relationship when other relationships are now taking the place of different spaces that we want shared together? There's no good manual for something like this when your friends
00:08:45
Speaker
Either when one friend moves to a new place, it has a new job, and there's a thrill, or when there's a new person, like in hers, it's a man that loves her deeply, and she loves him deeply. And on that sense of like, we would spend Friday nights, or we would take spontaneous weekend trips, and she's like, I long to be back sometimes where you're at, because we had a budget conversation the other night, and my money is not my own money to go and take a trip now, it's shared.
00:09:15
Speaker
We joked about like the both and of what we both have to wrestle with and have to give words to because I think there had been a period of time where we both were feeling things, but hadn't named it, but we could sense it. So we gave room. We said, let's have an intentional call. And it was messy. Like there were tears and we don't have it figured out by any means, but we're like, let's at least just name some things here.
Balancing Romantic and Platonic Relationships
00:09:43
Speaker
Sunday, you're so right when you say there's no manual, that there's no good manual. I feel that because even when you do move towards partnering and getting married and then you start to think like, wait, that friendship or these friendships met something in me that my partner doesn't meet in me. And is that okay? Or is that wrong? I think there's something so healthy about the sisterhood because it
00:10:10
Speaker
takes off the pressure for one person to meet all these needs. And we just don't say that. We don't allow for that or the importance of that or the loyalty and commitment with some of our closest friends. When we move to partnership, it feels like all of a sudden we have to move fully our alliances.
00:10:29
Speaker
to one person and I think that's such a setup for that partnership and for this friendship that met so many needs and so many kindnesses and so many particularities that I don't need to find in someone else or I don't want to like I want to honor that friendship but
00:10:50
Speaker
You're right, when you said that, I thought to myself, I don't know where anyone gives me the okay, or helps me navigate these multiple relationships and my need for my friendships that meet me in a way that maybe my partner can't or doesn't. I'm really grateful for you saying that, because I have felt that so many times. Yeah, setup, I think, is a really good word. And I think early on, as I saw other multiple friends
00:11:20
Speaker
move or get married outside of this friendship. There was this setup of everything now goes to him, but then, you know, it would be months down the road and I'd have a friend say, can I just come over on Friday night? I just need some girl time. And I'm like, yes. And, but I wonder sometimes how relationships get set up for the one on one and we're not meant no one person
00:11:44
Speaker
is meant to fulfill our wholeness or our longings or to be able to bear that at all. Good words for me to hear. And thus it's so complicated. What else? Anything else you feel? I think one of the things is that conversation that we had a couple of weeks ago, we realized and we both said, we're going to do this messy. We're going to have more conversations because we're both committed to the friendship. Because we both are like, we miss each other and we want goodness.
00:12:13
Speaker
but we also have to live into a reality of what is and what was. And I think sometimes when you hold on too long to what was, it can lose its sense of taste and it can lose its sense of goodness because you hold it so tightly. And I'm sure I've had friendships where I've held things so tightly and then all of a sudden it has needed to shift and there hasn't been room for it to breathe or expand or to shift.
00:12:39
Speaker
And I think that's why this friendship feels so safe and so sweet. I love the commitment within the complication. It's really sweet. And again, another thing I don't feel like I was taught how to necessarily do.
00:12:53
Speaker
friendship even or relationship is that coming back and okay this isn't this is uncomfortable but we love each other or we're committed or we miss each other and we are for each other so we're gonna be with the uncomfortable and the complicated and try to grow something new and and co-create something new in this and that new might look like seasons of like frequency of connecting and it might not and this is what I ask myself and this is where the tenderness is
00:13:23
Speaker
Can I honor the grief too?
Confrontation and Repair in Friendship
00:13:25
Speaker
Can I acknowledge the grief and not just the language of where we're going, but also what I notice inside of me? Can I let the tears flow when it's Friday night and I might not have plans? And I'm like, gosh, that would have been so fun. Or when I'm ready to take a trip and she's like, it's not going to work in our budget in the next couple of months, will I let myself honor the grief? Because I think these small lowercase d deaths
00:13:52
Speaker
are happening in relationship all the time. And you're right, it's honoring them. And it doesn't mean that you eradicate something. It just means you honor them and you hold it and you honor her by missing her. It's actually really sweet. There's a ton of integrity in that, in grieving well. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So do you feel ready to share yours already? Great. I am with you.
00:14:20
Speaker
I entitled it stumbling through sisterhood because I also feel that similarity of moving away from my sisterhood and now having to renegotiate long distance. So turn down your volumes for a second. I'm going to curse and then you can turn it back up. Well, fuck you. This is what I yelled across the table at my friend of 15 years. I was so, so mad. I was also so very tired.
00:14:51
Speaker
Looking back, I was really insecure in that moment. I think a woman's rage is often the doorway to a woman's insecurity. Eight of us had flown around the country to Seattle to celebrate for a friend's 40th birthday.
00:15:08
Speaker
We then packed into two cars, traveled by ferry to a small spa on Orcus Island. It was early January. The remote island had a few restaurants open in the midweek winter. I was hungry. I was irritated at the lack of food options. This was the first real conversation with all of us actually together. While it was so good to be away on a girls trip, I hadn't seen my sisterhood back in Seattle since I had moved away the previous year to the East Coast.
00:15:35
Speaker
My body was feeling a lot having lived through a long season of exile for the past year. This coming together friends was actually exhausting and bittersweet. All of the feelings were welling up as we moved in and out of comfort with each other. Some of us at the table, we talked weekly while others of us hadn't spoken in a while. This once tight knit group was rusty and I felt on edge about it.
00:16:02
Speaker
Historically, I felt so welcomed with these women, except when it comes to eating food and our physical body types. I have not always traversed those places honestly with them. Many of the women that I'm friends with are athletes and I felt insecure. Amongst these women had been a longstanding internal and often unspoken wrestling with belonging and body image. Mostly I tried to ignore it. I coached myself that the essential thing in life is connected friendships.
00:16:32
Speaker
I treasure these women, have often bypassed the gnawing intuition of competition between us. My friend, Liz, was the midwife at my baby's births and championed me in so many ways. She's been one of the most amazing initiators in the stories of birth for me. We were years outside of that season of life, and I have flown cross country to cheer her in her triathlon after not completing it with her as I had intended.
00:17:01
Speaker
The lies I often hear in silence among this group of women is that my body can't keep up, that I don't have the same physical drive to pace with them. I should have known that her talking about the Grand Canyon hike that she did with another close friend would trigger me. I was so tired, I was unable to articulate all that I felt. I usually recognize the tightness in my chest when a conversation shifts. I know to refrain when I'm unprepared. Somehow not even 24 hours in, I'm angry with her.
00:17:31
Speaker
I'm seething. My breath gets constricted. I withdraw, appearing to listen, but mostly brewing. It wouldn't be long before her voice raised as she said, or what I heard her say pissed me off. I want you there, Kristy, but I just don't know if everyone can run the whole hike. I didn't wait to reflect on my anger before I blurted out, fuck you. Everyone around me stopped eating their meal.
00:17:58
Speaker
They looked up. Even my friend Heather, whose birthday we were celebrating, picked up a bottle of ketchup and asked if she could squirt us both, trying to help diffuse the frustration. We declined, laughed it off, changed the subject. Immediately, I felt the awe and the wave of shame. I excused myself. Soon after, I took a walk outside. I was exhausted, but more than that, I was offended.
00:18:24
Speaker
This sisterhood had been a safe place for me, so any fear or threat of exclusion was intense for me to process, especially after having moved away and learned how to do life without them. Alyssa's comment about my potential ability to track with the sisterhood on an athletic level hurt my feelings. I'm not even sure that this is what she meant, but this is what I heard. You might get excluded.
00:18:53
Speaker
It wouldn't take long for me to apologize and repair with her, luckily. The beauty of understanding ourselves combined with humility and a long time of loving friends can allow for repair to offer quickly if needed. I held Alyssa's eyes. I told her I was sorry. We would have three shorter conversations of repair in those next few days together. But overall, our blow up did not spoil the time. Within a few hours, we were fed, showered, and in our pajamas near the fire.
00:19:23
Speaker
catching up with each other's lives. It would later take two or three months of long intentional phone call conversations to navigate through that one moment. And I'm mad overall, mad that distance has changed what we could have probably repaired in conversations at the park every day or weekly with each other. But I know I am committed even to the most complicated of friendships.
00:19:52
Speaker
Your piece, your story holds so much emotion and even the physicalness of body and I feel like I could picture it as you were sharing it. And I'm wondering even as you're reading it in real time, where do you feel nearest to it? Yeah, I feel my embarrassment. I'm sitting at that table again. Like I felt tears come to my eyes when I read that part of at the table.
00:20:21
Speaker
means in some ways so grateful that I could like yell at a friend that she can hold that and I know that it it wouldn't you know destroy the friendship and also I think an annoyance that the female body and the comparison it's under talked about that's really unnerving for me because particularly this this set of friends has been with me through birthing they walk with me through these really intimate moments with my body
00:20:48
Speaker
So then, you know, 15 years later, to not know how to talk about food and body shape and image and either jealousy or fear of being left behind or not being able to keep up. That's disorienting for me. But I think, again, the change in relationship, we don't live next to each other anymore. And so the conversations are not as often when we see each other now, probably our bodies have changed in size because
00:21:17
Speaker
We haven't seen each other for six months or a year and there's been some shift. And even that all made me so mad. I just want to know that I'm loved and accepted and I belong. And so when any of those three are threatened, I get like overwhelmed and I think I get cagey too.
00:21:39
Speaker
But because of what was happening in me that I had not yet been able to share on a regular basis with my girlfriends, it all was building and came up, even if I was totally miscontruing the situation. Of course, the setup of you're sitting at a table, you're eating, so there's like an embodied sense. You're also around others' eyes, and these eyes have seen you.
Self-Awareness and Friendship Evolution
00:22:07
Speaker
and seen births and seen life, and yet you're eating and you're in company. And then a comment that comes up about body. I can only imagine that the FU would come so quick and so close. Heather tried to say, like, we're going to put ketchup. We're going to lighten the mood. And yet it doesn't lighten the mood. I felt so tender when I pictured you getting up from the table, excusing yourself.
00:22:36
Speaker
What was that like to go and then now to remove yourself from others eyes? And where did you go? Right. I know I walked outside interesting enough and I just cried. And again, it was so different than any of my experiences with these women. Right. And so it's like now I'm embarrassed. I can't just shake it off. What does it mean to be honest about where I'm at? I'm still leaving the table at a place where I once
00:23:04
Speaker
felt so easily comfortable at the table. And for my own sake, I can't force myself to just move on. If I'm checking in with my body, she's not moving on. So I'm gonna care for her and I'm gonna step away. Something about taking up that space felt really hard and that was my most honest moment too. And I think it was really sweet that no one came outside after me.
00:23:29
Speaker
I'm okay. I need to excuse myself from the table. If anybody else does, that's for them. But it was it was complicated. I wanted to tend to the own friendship within myself for myself. Yeah, that is so sweet and so tender and so utterly kind. I think in some cases, people would want someone to come after and to go and find and then the embrace. But there's something so sacred about
00:23:57
Speaker
getting to tend to yourself first and that friendship with, how am I doing? What's going on? What is my body saying? And for you to have that moment to tend, I feel teary. And then as you gather and as you come back, there was like a sense of repair, it sounds like, or a sense of like just reconnection that also doesn't normally happen when something hits so to the bones.
00:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I feel like the gratitude for that was the longevity of the friendship and the commitment to each other, that we're committed even in complication. The sweetness of that was it didn't ruin that weekend, but it's still able to hold the honesty of like, it's not the same as it was. We are not in the same dynamics with each other anymore. And like you were saying earlier, to be grieved, like that is to be grieved and there's integrity in that.
00:24:53
Speaker
This is not what I wanted. And yet I have used my friendships a lot of times to tend to places in me that I needed to tend. And so even in that, the complication of untangling from places where I've been a master codependent and where I need to be my own friend first also felt important in that moment in that season. And I do think complicated friendships are an invitation for maturation. They invite us.
00:25:23
Speaker
to become more mature? Yes, I would agree. We're humans. There are no relationships that come without complications. What kind of friendship are you in if there's not known spoken complications and the freedom to say what you need to say in the moment? Because then you're honoring your own body and honoring the friendship. And that is so hard for me in particular to do because I'm so other focused.
00:25:53
Speaker
why can't I just move forward enough to be okay enough to be attuned to the other? And so actually it's really good work when I can attune to myself and count her in as mattering. We can do hard things and our friendships are worth it. Yes, you're hitting on some gold there and I think that those are some sweet words of count herself in. Your relationship with your body and yourself
00:26:22
Speaker
and the complication there, and then how that also is reflected externally with your relationships with your sisters and your friends. I feel like that's like the gold right there of what you're saying. It's true. I think what you're saying is there's gold there when we need to talk about the complication and the complexity of the friendship within ourselves, with our bodies, and then how we bring them to our friends. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for
00:26:49
Speaker
letting me journey with you in your story and an honor to get to be with you. Same. Thank you so much for doing that with me.
Exploring Friendship, Self, and Body Connections
00:27:00
Speaker
This episode was so provoking for me as I
00:27:06
Speaker
I thought about some of the things that Christi and Sundia were naming in the complications that come when relationship statuses change, when someone moves from being single to married or
00:27:22
Speaker
maybe divorced or some other thing that happens around their personhood that impacts the way that they are entering into relationship. Then as Christy talked about a change for her and the move cross-country and how for her it amplified
00:27:42
Speaker
what was there for her around body and body image. And those things are all part of what we as women navigate in relationship. There's a line where Christie talked about love and acceptance and belonging and that fear that some deficit or perceived deficit might lead to exclusion.
00:28:10
Speaker
And again, it felt like a place that we have all known.
00:28:18
Speaker
I loved Sandia's willingness to name the grief for herself and the choice in front of her to both feel her grief but then enter in with her friend. One of the things that came up for me as I was listening was just a reminder that I can't be with someone else more than I am able to be with myself.
00:28:45
Speaker
And that's something that I'm taking into this next week that I want to be thinking about. Being with your own body is what allows you to enter into complicated spaces. Maybe the most complicated friendship of all is the friendship that we have with our own bodies. Maybe it's something to think about.
00:29:10
Speaker
The Red Tent Living podcast is produced by Katie Stafford. Our cover art is designed by Libby Johnson and our guests are all part of the Red Tent Living community. You can find us all at redtentliving.com as well as on Facebook and Instagram. If you love the stories shared here, we would be thrilled if you left us a review. Until next week, love to you, dear ones.