how to make me smile

Today my sister-in-law rang me. This, combined with seeing and catching up with another friend about two weeks ago, makes me feel so grateful for my lot in life. You see, the friend was a 'best' friend - in fact, a bridesmaid level friend, and a friend at the birth of my first child (which she wasn't but that was more for comic effect and a story to be told another time). But something happened - including a very dreadful email from her and subsequent exchange from me - that I'm not sure either of us will ever truly understand that just made being friends really hard. I hadn't seen her for about two years and we hadn't spoken for over a year. Yet when we saw each other the other week it was like one of those reunions you see on A Current Hysteria or similar program. Wonderful, lovely, spring-in-your-step kinda stuff. Then today, very unexpectedly, my sister-in-law rang. I say my sister-in-law because she really is/was the sister I never had and while my brother left her with a four month old baby about 14 months ago, she will never be an ex anything in my life. But, in the ugliest, darkest parts of their break-up I got narky about how she was treating Mum and a few things that had been fed back to me through Mum, which of course I should have paid no heed to as I know how Mum's squewed view of the world can turn an innocent comment into the equivalent of call for a Cold War Nuclear Attack, and told her so. It was messy. Not as messy as the friend incident, but awful all the same. I found it ironic that while Mum just copped it and maintained a relationship with SIL, we stopped speaking. So, earlier in the year, I swallowed my pride, stupidity and big mouth and wrote to them both. They covered many things but for me, most importantly told this two wonderful women that regardless of what had transpired, not a day went by when I didn't think of them at least once. I guess I just needed them to know that. Who knows why. And now, I have them both back in my life. And that my friends, makes me smile.