Friendship

I guess I can blame moving across the country as a legitimate reason for neglecting this blog. But my last post was 2 months before moving...

I do have two drafts in the works. Does that count for something? Honestly, lots of times it's uploading pictures that slows me down. I want them in there for when I print this blog out someday, but having to organize them on my computer before uploading them to the blog is usually a huge impediment. If only blogger were iPad compatible!

And now we are in Richmond, Virginia, a place I never thought I would live. I have actually visited a handful of times over the years for various reasons and always liked it just fine, but never imagined myself as an east-coaster. But we go where the job takes us.

The Job. It's good. Pays well. Decent hours for a doctor. But it hasn't been as awesomely wonderful as he hoped. It's fine. Maybe it'll start to turn awesome as he gets more time under his belt. But we also fear that, if after a year here, we start to look somewhere else, only to find that everywhere is only just 'fine.' He is dreaming of working at a hospital like he did in Milwaukee. They do the whole gambit of what an interventional radiologist can do. And the hospital is big enough that they are busy all day, with 3 or 4 interventionalists working non-stop. Here, he is the only interventionalist at the hospital every day. He rotates between 4 hospitals (supposedly he'll be rotated to 7 eventually) but still, he is always the only IR doctor there. He misses working with other doctors. He misses the camaraderie and teamwork. But not very many hospitals (at least private hospitals) are set up like the one in Milwaukee, so maybe even if we uproot ourselves and move again in a year he will still find himself working alone every day.

This is a little funny if you know my husband. He is not exactly ultra-social. I never would have guessed when I married him that the biggest point of dissatisfaction with his job would be the lack of interaction with peers. He doesn't crave social activity. He's an introvert.

But he does have a hidden social side. In Wisconsin, he finally had friends. I mean, real friends. I have never met any of his high school or mission friends, and the only college friend I met was his brother. He just didn't do friends. But Wisconsin changed that. We had friends that felt like family. We had friends that make us ache to go back there. We had friends that made it so that whenever we move to a new place, we immediately start searching for new friends, only to remember how long they take to find and how sometimes you just don't find them. Lots of people don't really want friends. They are happy having only their family. Or, at least in our church, sometimes friendship comes in the form of a responsibility. But I think true friends make us a little selfish. We spend time with them because we crave their companionship, not because we were asked to reach out to them. We come up with any way possible to hang out with them, while still trying to fulfill work, family, and church responsibilities. As we have moved around, our friends have become more and more dear to us.

We are going to Wisconsin next week to visit. We are all ridiculously excited. It'll be somewhat bittersweet knowing we will go home to the work of creating new friends. Don't totally misunderstand me. I don't hate making new friends. I made some amazing friends during our year in Albuquerque. But finding a couple with kids sort of close to our own kids' ages that we actually get along with and want to hang out with can be hard to find. We count ourselves lucky that we found numerous such couples in Milwaukee. We still call Wisconsin home, mostly because of those people we left behind.