National Friendship Day: Staying Close with Long Distance Besties

We all know how important it is to find your Mom Tribe–that special group of women who you do motherhood with, who are by your side through all the good, bad, messy, heartbreaking, and exciting moments of being someone’s mama. Some of us don’t find our tribe until we become moms ourselves and maybe some of us were late to the party but had a tribe waiting for us to cross that threshold. Maybe you’re like me, and some of you have had your tribe since you were 10 years old.

I have three best friends: Amy, Jessica, and Karen. Add my name, Megan, to the bunch and we like to call our friendship magic…or, “MAJK.” (because how perfect is that?!) We’ve all known each other since elementary school. We grew up together in the little beach community of Pensacola, Florida. We’ve all become moms at different times, in different ways, and under difference circumstances. One of us had an unplanned pregnancy and then married an amazing man who adopted her daughter, brought another daughter of his own, and then they had two boys together. One of us had a son soon after marriage and then brought said baby across the globe when they moved to Korea where she will give birth to their second son, as well. One of us struggled with infertility for almost five years and then welcomed a beautiful miracle baby boy via IVF this year. One of us had a baby after several years of marriage and dealt with gestational diabetes and a pretty severe mastitis surgery. (Well, actually two of us had mastitis surgery and have matching BFF scars.)

Over the past 20+ years and especially through all these unique voyages into motherhood, we’ve all been there for each other. Distance has kept us physically apart pretty much since we graduated from college. But with a little effort and technology being a beautiful thing, we’ve been able to keep in touch and a part of each others lives in some really awesome ways. In honor of National Friendship Day, which is the first Sunday of August, here are my favorite tips for staying close to your long distance besties.

1. You just have to make it a priority. It’s almost too easy to lose touch with childhood friends when school, work, kids, and just life in general starts to bear down on you. However, you have to find creative ways to keep in contact. Take advantage of any pocket of time you can carve out for a phone call, FaceTime, or even a little text convo. Stuck in rush hour traffic? Perfect time for a 30 minute chat. With one of us in Korea, the time difference is nuts and real time conversations are very difficult to time correctly. But when pregnancy insomnia hit me hard, Karen would just be getting home from work and she was always available for a fun Facebook chat. Just make it work. Any and all small connection with your best friends keeps the bond strong over time.
2. Plan vacations together. With kids and/or husbands or just the girls. However you gotta coordinate it. Even if it’s 18 months out. But just get it on the calendar. Don’t count on weddings to be your only convenient excuse to reunite. Put in a little effort to plan a trip specifically for you guys. It doesn’t have to be fancy. We all met up in Vegas one summer with our husbands, and my favorite night was spent in the hotel room playing cards in our pajamas. Just find a spot to hole up together for at least a weekend and reconnect. If it’s true friendship, it will feel like no time has passed at all and you will just pick up right where you left off.

   

3. Facebook Messenger group video chats: I’m the lone Android holdout of the group so I mess up any attempts at group FaceTime and iMessages. #sorrynotsorry Did you know you can do a group video chat in Facebook Messenger? I didn’t, but it’s super easy. Again, just get a time on the calendar and have your husband take the kids for an hour or two. There’s nothing better than a long chat over coffee with your girlfriends–even over the interwebs!

   

4. Marco Polo: This app is amazing! Marco Polo is a video messaging app that allows you to leave videos as long or as short as you want for recipients to watch at a later time. They don’t expire after 24 hours, and it’s extremely user friendly. There’s a kind of “group text” feature so you can send one video to everyone in the group. We’ve been doing this for a few months now and I love it! We use this to stay up on the everyday happenings in each other’s lives and to see each other’s faces (and children) frequently but don’t have to all be available at the same time for a video chat or other real time conversation.

   

I don’t think it’s super common to still have friends all the way back from grade school, so I feel incredibly blessed to still have these ladies in my life. That’s why we all try to make a strong effort to stay in touch. And the commitment is so worth it.

What other ways do you stay in touch with long distance girlfriends?