Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
"Dear Friend" with Tracy Johnson and Katy Stafford
244 Plays1 year ago
In this inaugural episode of the Red Tent Living podcast, Red Tent Living co-founders and mother/daughter pairing Tracy Johnson and Katy Stafford share stories of dear friendship during a season of grief. Together, they reflect on the turns in the road we share as friends and the transformative love they each experienced from friends who chose to stay close in loss. It's a conversation you don't want to miss.
For more stories from brave, ordinary women, join us at Red Tent Living.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the 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.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is the beginning, the first episode of the much-anticipated and long-awaited Red Tent Living podcast. We've dreamed of this and talked about it for years. It seems fitting that my daughter Katie and I started out together. Katie's been there from the very beginning. She's a co-founder of this beautiful community that now stretches around the globe.
Focus on Friendship in the First Season
00:00:39
Speaker
Over the past 10 years, again and again, stories shared about friendship on the Red Tent Living website have resonated deeply with our readers. So months ago, as we began to chart the course for the podcast, we picked friendship for our first series. I know you're just going to love this conversation. As mother and daughter, Katie and I have certainly shared a lot of life together. We didn't talk ahead of time about which stories we would share today. And it was interesting that for the prompt, dear friend, we found ourselves in a similar space of time.
00:01:09
Speaker
Katie is a beautiful writer and a wise soul. Today's episode gives you glimpses of both. Enjoy. Hello there. Hello there. How's it going? It's going.
Navigating Friendships Post-COVID
00:01:30
Speaker
What we dream of for this space is a theme that kind of grounds our episodes each season and we picked
00:01:39
Speaker
friendship for season one, which I've been both excited about and intimidated by, especially in a post COVID world where so many of our relationships and the fabric of those relationships had to shift.
00:01:56
Speaker
some of that has been painful, some of that has been intimate, and some of it has just been ordinary, right? People have changed and drifted, but we thought this might be a really great time to engage the theme of friendship.
Lessons from a Broken Engagement
00:02:13
Speaker
So I'm really excited about the voices that we have that will be on the podcast in this first season and about the ways that we are going to talk about
00:02:24
Speaker
Friendship and I my hope is that this first season feels Validating for women in their stories around friendship that it feels Inspiring and that it feels empowering and permission giving well, let's jump into it you and I in this first episode the theme we gave ourselves was Dear friend, so we both wrote a piece inspired by that
00:02:53
Speaker
theme. Why don't you go first? All right. So I called this piece saying thank you. I was 26 when my then fiance called off our wedding five days prior to the big day. In the immediate aftermath, my thoughts were a numbed haze, disbelief serving as a kind of thick bubble wrap that initially insulated me from the pain I would befriend in the coming months.
00:03:25
Speaker
What did puncture my cocoon of shock that week were flashes of shame for how many cancellations had to be made by people who loved me. The venue, the catering, the flowers, the everything. Friends had booked their hotels, purchased their flights, made their arrangements.
00:03:49
Speaker
I had already unwrapped dozens of gifts sent ahead by these friends, seeking out the perfect place in our new little duplex for each item. The knives from Paul and Maureen in Seattle. The cream and sugar set from Dannon and Kendall in Colorado. The popcorn bowl and welcome mat from Chris and Lori in Texas.
00:04:12
Speaker
Even the absurdly expensive anthropology mirror I had registered for in order to get a bridal discount for myself, and then received unexpectedly from Lauren and Pete. Each item gifted with friends' love and anticipation now sat in a depressing pile in my parents' basement. Looking at those gifts, I felt like I had projectile vomited my innards onto all of my nearest and dearest.
00:04:42
Speaker
I felt like a mess and a burden. Not that that makes a whole lot of sense, but when does shame ever make great sense? The bottom line is that as a woman who is most comfortable planning my own birthday parties, I was not handling my current neediness and the way I saw that impacting my friends very well.
00:05:06
Speaker
With my face buried in a pillow and zapped of all motivation, I formed a very vague plan to thank everyone for their generosity and then apologized to all of them for buying plane tickets. I planned to hand write approximately 65 cards to friends and family in order to tend to their inconvenience.
00:05:29
Speaker
I decided I was going to ship every gift back or send store credit. Yes, I would figure out how to do all of that just as soon as I found my way out of the fetal position.
Reflections on Love and Gifts
00:05:40
Speaker
It was around that time that a small corrugated cardboard box arrived in the mail from a friend I knew in college and his wife. I opened Dan's box filled with desire for someone to slacken the aching inside of me.
00:05:57
Speaker
What I found, wrapped intentionally in tissue paper when I opened the box, was a home roasted bag of coffee and a note pinned on a simple card. Dear Katie, we had already selected the beans for your wedding gift when we heard the news of your broken engagement. I'm so sorry for the loss and the heartbreak.
00:06:21
Speaker
My hope is that the beans we chose for celebration may now be brewed for comfort and healing. There will be another day when you celebrate love fulfilled. When that day comes, we will send another gift. For today, I pray you breathe deeply and savor goodness. With love, Dan. There it was.
00:06:47
Speaker
The invitation from a friend to be exactly where I was, feeling exactly what I felt, even though I wished it wasn't true. I held the bag close to my nose and breathed it all in. The beans carried floral notes, bright and aromatic. The kind of coffee I like to drink early in the afternoon, after a bolder roast has already done its work.
00:07:16
Speaker
Those freshly roasted beans would not keep until I was in a different season of my life. They had to be ground, brewed, and enjoyed now. So I brewed them, and I drank the gift they gave. And between the cups of coffee I drank that week, I decided to believe that every person who had lovingly chosen a gift for my wedding was like Dan.
00:07:43
Speaker
They knew I felt overwhelmed. They wanted me to feel comfort and blessing for this new journey I was set to embark upon. And they wanted me to have some tools and comfort for an unwanted, fresh beginning. Perhaps these friends and family members also would want my nagging sense of duty and loss to float away. So I kept all of the gifts.
00:08:12
Speaker
and I didn't write a single thank you note. I decided to believe I was loved enough to receive gifts that I could not repay or find words for. These artifacts of friendship remain tucked and treasured throughout my home to this day. I think about Michelle every Thanksgiving when I break out her Waterford-Lenoo napkins to set our long Thanksgiving table.
00:08:39
Speaker
I think of Jennifer and Mike each time I pull out my stockpot to prepare my mom's homemade spaghetti sauce with oregano and red wine. For many years, I even kept the horrible wall sign from an older friend of my parents that was painted with watercolors and stamped with a typewriter font to read, life doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful. In the aftermath of the broken engagement, I wanted to burn that sign in a fire.
00:09:09
Speaker
but I kept it nonetheless. Those not wedding gifts, they felt holy to me, outward and visible signs of an inward and deeply felt grace. Those gifts reminded me that I was good and beloved and I could keep becoming.
00:09:33
Speaker
And though I did not have the capacity eight years ago to write each thank you note, I have whispered gratitude hundreds of times in the years since for the love I have felt. Thank you, dear friends.
00:09:52
Speaker
I'm not the average listener. It's rare to say that whole story to your mother who also lived the event. Yeah. You know, oftentimes when I'm going to respond to somebody, I'm like, I can just imagine this or I can just imagine that. And I'm acutely aware that like, I don't have to imagine it because I remember it. I remember the box from Dan and I remember the coffee beans and
00:10:19
Speaker
I remember them needing to be grinded separate from archeology because they weren't for us. They were for you. And they were for you. They were for you. I feel most struck by just how tangibly you had to choose to lean in to love
00:10:49
Speaker
and lean into your, your status as deer. It was a very vulnerable space. And I think we have those seasons of vulnerability for different reasons. There was something that I internalized about the fact that it was a broken engagement and that that might somehow be my fault that made it particularly loaded.
00:11:18
Speaker
I felt very responsible. How do you say thank you and I'm sorry when you are gutted and bleeding out? It's a very uncomfortable way to experience what is extravagant love. I mean I
00:11:39
Speaker
I think it was Kate Bowler that I was listening to and she talked about love is known in the moments where it's given and cannot be returned, right? It's not a tit for tat, you gave me a birthday gift, so I give you a birthday gift. It's a moment where the debt cannot be repaid and there's no expectation that it will be.
00:12:03
Speaker
Ultimately, that being a window into the heart of God. It was such a kindness that you did for yourself in releasing the responsibility to write those notes. And I watched you wrestle with it and then I watched you release it and was so glad that you did. Katie, I think the truth is, you know, it would be years before you had access
00:12:33
Speaker
to the words that you would have wanted to send to people. Access to you again, because it was taking all your energy to just survive. But that's not the space to try and excavate a well-crafted place. True. I do think there's something
00:12:57
Speaker
that can be really significant in things that we hold on to and pass down. So many of the friends who sent those gifts live in other places. I perhaps have not seen their face in years and years and years, but it is brought to mind in the gift that they gave. And it is this moment
Supportive Friendships During Tough Times
00:13:20
Speaker
to express gratitude and to savor
00:13:25
Speaker
the people who built a foundation for my life, the people who were my closest friends at the time, like Dan, it doesn't necessarily mean that something's broken to know that time has passed and relationships have changed. And we can still be really grateful for who those people were in our lives. Yeah, and I think we're meant to be. We won't hold all of the same people
00:13:54
Speaker
for all of time in the same place in our heart. The season comes to a close, not because of a failure of love, but I would say maybe even because of an unfolding of love that takes us into her direction. Absolutely. I feel the most faithful metaphor
00:14:13
Speaker
It's not that we're all intended to journey together the whole time, but that we're all on a pilgrimage and pilgrims travel together for a few stops and then they're called to different bends in the road. And you might meet again at a site down the road, but there's a preciousness to knowing that you might not. And so savoring what is, is always a gift. Your writing is always
00:14:40
Speaker
like it's like sitting in front of a really extravagant painting. So I'm gonna bring my stick drawing now. Shut up. Oh my gosh. So it's interesting that we found ourselves at least in part in a similar space and time. It feels important to me, you know, as I've sat and I said this earlier and thought like dear friends, like faces,
00:15:08
Speaker
coming to my mind. This story that I'm going to tell, I could have written about several other women who are really dear to me. My eight and 10-year-old girls are in the backseat of my car. The sunroof was open, soaking up the last warmth of mid-September on our way home from school. Are we out of the woods yet? Are we out of the woods? Are we in the clear yet? Are we in the clear yet? Are we in the clear?
00:15:39
Speaker
were somewhere between singing and yelling so loudly I could barely hear Taylor Swift. Her latest album had become a staple to every car ride. The lyrics of so many songs seemed to fit our reality. Coming into the driveway, I noticed the box sitting near the red front door. Okay, girls, I said grabbing my computer bag in purse. Let's go.
00:16:03
Speaker
My youngest ran in through the garage, quickly appeared at the front door, very interested in the big box. It's addressed to you, mom, and it's heavy, she said, as she pushed it and pulled it and tried to pick it up. Carrying the box inside, I remember my exhale as I set it on the wood top of the butcher block in the kitchen. My exhale was something my spiritual director had noticed, inviting me to be curious about what it was saying, tired, exhausted.
00:16:32
Speaker
weary. My world felt heavy, like the box. I slid the scissors across the packing tape and pulled open the styrofoam box inside. Two bottles of wine and a handwritten note were there. Thought these might help you mark what you are stepping into this next week, wishing I was there to sit alongside you. I love you, Jamie. Unwrapping the brown tissue paper tightly round around the first bottle, I took in the label. Grease.
00:17:02
Speaker
Vineyards, Cabernet, Sauvignon. I felt the tears come to my eyes. In the months leading up to that day, what I now call the tsunami that hit our family, a perfect storm of layered losses, devastating betrayal, and unbelievable conflict inside a ministry where I worked. My dear friend had listened to me so well, listened to my life so well.
00:17:30
Speaker
Despite the 1800 miles separating us, she had found a way to let me know that she was with me. She chose a gift that spoke to the gravity of the season my family had been in and to the absolute dread I had for some incredibly difficult meetings I had scheduled for work over the next several days. Jamie was just a baby when I started volunteering in the nursery at the church we both attended. I was 10 and helping the kids on Sunday mornings was one of my favorite activities.
00:18:01
Speaker
The 10 year age difference put us on different trajectories as I went into high school and then adulthood. I would hear about her life via Christmas cards her parents sent to my folks and occasionally I would see her at weddings or holiday parties. Proximity and same life stage is not what cultivated our closeness. We haven't even lived in the same city at the same time in over 35 years. We really found our way back to each other as we both began to look at our stories.
00:18:32
Speaker
Therapy, story work, and many cups of coffee cemented us back together. Jamie's house held the graduation party when her son Steve finished college, and Allison got her master's. A few years later, she hosted Steve's wedding reception and marked 60th birthday all in the same year. This spring, we flew back and forth to help one another move, and then I flew back again just a few weeks later to celebrate her daughter's high school graduation.
00:19:00
Speaker
My kids are quick to say, Jamie is the closest thing mom has to a sister.
Significance of Gratitude in Friendships
00:19:07
Speaker
Shared history is certainly an important piece of our friendship, but what makes Jamie dear is that she has held space with me and for me when it was time to celebrate and when it was time to go. As I've sat and pondered the words, dear friend, I realized that for me, dear friends become family.
00:19:27
Speaker
because they know and hold and bring their presence in both grief and in celebration. Oh, so good. I think the invitation of your relationship with Jamie is not to close ourselves off to the people who might not be the most obvious friends but are indeed the dearest ones. I found myself kind of rolling around in my head that it's often
00:19:57
Speaker
moments when we're overwhelmed or there's heartbreak when it's crystallized who our dear friends are. I don't think that's incredibly true. I've spent so much of my life in different locations, moving, moving, moving. And so part of why the story with Jamie emerged and why I picked her is in part what you named that I don't think I've known anyone
00:20:26
Speaker
longer than I've known Jamie. That's very precious to me. It's not about life that we actually lived together at every point, but it is about life that we know so well about one another because of that shared history, because of this thread that we can both pull. Did you feel like in the gift of the bottles of wine,
00:20:53
Speaker
was Jamie responding to a vulnerable expression of your reality that you'd sent, or was she the one taking the risk in sending the wine, believing that she could imagine what was going on for you? That's a great question. I think with me, the people that are dear know me well enough to risk moving towards that vulnerable space inside of me. I think a lot of people
00:21:22
Speaker
because of kind of my confidence and the bigness of what I bring are hesitant to name vulnerable space or move into that. I think the grief that we were in as a family, we were talking months that had unfolded, right? Part of that grief included the cancellation of your wedding, but there were so many other things that were part of that season
00:21:52
Speaker
that I think so many people really, it's like they didn't know what to do with us. There was no relief. It just wasn't letting up. I called it a tsunami, right? There was more and more and more and more devastation. So it was a small handful of people that I would say kind of had this staying power to remain with us. A bottle of wine from Jamie with the words of greed was like, yes, thank you.
00:22:21
Speaker
Just such wisdom on Jamie's heart, such knowing inside of her where it's like, there aren't words to unpack or smooth or lessen the pain. There's only naming and recognition that can be done. And naming and recognition is enough because to know that your suffering and your tsunami has not like
00:22:50
Speaker
ostracized and isolated you from the regular world. You are still a part of the narrative of life and life will keep moving. It takes a friend saying, I see it and I name it and I hold it with you. So one of our hopes for these conversations is that the women who share their stories can state with intention how they're hoping to walk into tomorrow.
00:23:20
Speaker
based off of the stories that they've heard. What do you want to carry into tomorrow based off of today? Well, the first thought that came to my mind is I'm always in need of permission to not be responsible. So I think that's one of the things that I'm taking from your story is just, again, that reminder, that belovedness and
00:23:48
Speaker
The belief of being held in love is permission giving and doesn't require perfection and be always ever timely. Thank you note. That probably feels pretty important to me. So that would be one of the things that I'm taking and that I hope some of our listeners would take. Just, you know, imagining if you're beloved and you're held in love by dear friends,
00:24:16
Speaker
Is there some burden of responsibility you could release? Or maybe that you could offer, maybe you have a friend that needs that release. That's the space I was in holding your story. I was thinking about it's never too late to notice.
00:24:36
Speaker
I've felt lower capacity to be close to friends recently and with the pandemic. I think that can sometimes feel like an insurmountable gap to re-engage, particularly my friends who live across the country.
00:24:55
Speaker
like Jamie and 35 years of relationship. Her gift came at the perfect moment and you two have not always been as close as you are today. And I love that she risked it and decided to notice and to be present. I just felt like that was a beautiful exhortation for me with my friends too. Yeah, it was risky to notice.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah. Cause you can't always know how it's going to be received. Sometimes it, yeah, it's a risk. It's a risk. And sometimes it isn't what somebody needed. That's okay. You can release that. Release that also. Well, thank you for sharing the space. It was, it was good. We don't often revisit that space in our lives and an outwardly facing.
00:25:53
Speaker
way. Yeah. So love you. So I wonder what stirred in you as you listened. Do you have unwritten thank you notes like I do left undone by a season of stress or loss? Maybe you've lost friends who didn't know how to remain when your life became messy.
00:26:14
Speaker
I wonder where you've been a dear friend, showing up with a presence that risks moving into vulnerable space for someone. Or maybe where you've known a simple act of kindness arriving as a gift in the mail, a note, some coffee beans, a bottle of wine, a tangible reminder of your belovedness. C.S. Lewis once wrote that friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, what? You too? I thought I was the only one.
00:26:44
Speaker
So friends, we leave you with the question, what will you carry into tomorrow from our conversation today? See you next week.
00:26:56
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. Love to you, dear ones.