Chatting
Monday, October 5, 2015 at 8:26AM My social calendar is more full than it has ever been. I meet people for lunch. Rich and I get together with other couples for dinner. I have a Wednesday night dinner group made up of other ladies married to company executives.
(That sentence is funny to me. It brings to mind a group of women in dresses and heels, sipping martinis and talking about JFK. Or, as my children like to tease, it sounds like The Real Housewives of Thief River Falls. Neither is true. The dress code is very casual; most of us have jobs and the main topics of conversation revolve around the ups and downs of relocating our families.)
Of course we also have church and have made connections there. I have even signed on to be a mentor mom for a new MOPS group that is starting here. For those of you who don’t know, a mentor mom is someone who has survived the raising of preschoolers and is therefore considered qualified to advise other moms going through it.
Which is a long winded way of saying: I am old.
All of these activities involve meeting new people. Which, along with substitute teaching, means I am having to learn new names and faces at a rate which is taxing my brain and social skills. Then, of course, I have to learn the stories that go with the names and faces. For an introvert who generally tries to avoid meeting people, this is kind of a lot. I spend most of my days feeling like I walked in on a movie that started before I got here.
“Wait - now who is that again? And she’s married to the guy with the beard, right? Oh! The guy in HR? Really? I thought he was with Sue. Sue - the one with the three boys in college. Her name isn’t Sue? What is it? … “
And so it goes. I’m slowly getting up to speed with a handful of people I see regularly, but am still at surface level conversation most of the time. I appreciate everyone’s willingness to talk to me at all. They all have lives and families and circles of friends that existed before I got here. I’m sure they don’t need to add in another person. Goodness knows when I lived in Lincoln, I wasn’t seeking to add anyone else to my life. So I appreciate everyone’s patience with my fumbling attempts at conversation.
Do you think it would be too much to ask for the entire town to wear nametags and carry short bios?
Reader Comments (6)
You're doing great Mindee! Keep on keeping on : )
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