Sharing Everyday Life

A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.

—Proverbs 17:17

It seems like Cooking Club has been meeting together forever, but it’s been three years this month, and that’s worth remembering—it doesn’t take a decade, and it doesn’t take three times a week. What it does take is sharing everyday life together, messy and real.

We’ve gone to funerals and birthday parties together, reported bad test results, gotten advice about sick kids, made trips to the ER, walked together through postpartum depression. We’ve visited each other’s babies in the hospital, and we’ve brought over meals and sleepers and blankets. We’ve talked about faith and fear and fighting with our husbands, sleeping through the night and anxiety and how to ask for help when we need it. Around this table we’ve mourned the loss of eight pregnancies, and even as I write those words, it seems a cruel and unusual number.

What we’ve built is impressive—strong, complex, multifaceted. Like a curry or Boeuf Bourguignon, something you cook for hours and hours, allowing the flavors to develop over time, changing and deepening with each passing hour on the heat, rich and lovely and unexpected.