Sunday With Friends

It feels a little strange that, as someone who has spent most of her life writing, I’ve never actually had a blog.

I have written books and essays, filled countless notebooks, and accumulated an alarming number of half-finished thoughts in the Notes app on my phone, but there has never really been a place for the things I want to write about that don’t belong inside a novel. The observations about friendship and marriage and motherhood, the places I travel, the things I’m reading, the ridiculousness of raising five children, and the bigger questions about life that I seem constitutionally incapable of not asking.

So, here we are.

And it seems fitting that the first thing I write about here is something new I’m starting, because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to begin again when your life is already very, very full.

I’m 44 years old, married to the man I’ve loved for nearly two decades, and the mother of five children who range from still thinking I’m pretty cool to finding nearly everything I do deeply embarrassing. I have a home I love, friends I adore, books I still want to write, places I want to see, and more laundry than any seven people should reasonably be capable of producing.

I am incredibly grateful for this life.

And I think, for a long time, I believed gratitude meant I shouldn’t want anything more from it.

Not more in the bigger-house, better-life, greener-grass sense. I mean more of myself in it.

Because somewhere between babies becoming kids and kids becoming teenagers, building careers, keeping a marriage connected, worrying about our parents, remembering who needs to be where and when, and carrying the thousand tiny responsibilities that make up a family, I realized how easy it is for the things we once did simply because they made us happy to become the things we might get around to eventually.

Friendship became one of those things.

Not friendship itself. I have incredible women in my life, some of whom have known and loved me through so many different versions of myself that they could probably write this blog better than I can. But actually being with our friends is different now.

There was a time when seeing your girlfriends required little more than figuring out whose house you were meeting at and whether anyone needed you to stop for something on the way. Now, a girls’ dinner can require six weeks of advance notice, three calendar negotiations, two reschedules, a Venmo request, and the collective determination of women coordinating a minor military operation.

I started wondering when friendship became something we had to squeeze in.

And then I started wondering when fun did too.

When did I stop doing things just because they sounded fun? When did trying something new begin to require a reason? When did adventure become something reserved for vacations, and friendship something maintained through text messages sent while waiting in the school pickup line?

More importantly, why did I assume that was simply what happened next?

I don’t want to go backward. I have no desire to be twenty-two again, although I would happily accept her metabolism and ability to stay out past midnight without requiring three to five business days to recover.

What I want is to bring pieces of her with me.

The girl who said yes before checking the calendar. The girl who made friends in bathrooms and believed a random Tuesday was reason enough to go somewhere. The girl who could be completely impractical every once in a while because whatever was happening sounded too fun to miss.

She didn’t disappear totally. None of those versions of us do.

Life just got loud.

And that is how Sunday With Friends began.

Every other Sunday, I’m going to spend the day with a woman in my life and do something we wouldn’t ordinarily do. Sometimes it will be one of my oldest friends, sometimes someone I’m just getting to know, and maybe eventually someone I haven’t met yet. We might take a class, explore a new place, get on a plane, embarrass ourselves attempting something we have absolutely no business attempting, or simply go somewhere we’ve both driven past a hundred times and always said we should try.

The adventure will change, but that isn’t really the point.

The point is what happens when we make the time.

I want us to talk about the things we are already talking about when no one else is listening. Friendship and marriage, motherhood and careers, aging parents and changing bodies, the dreams we had when we were younger and the ones we’re brave enough to have now. I want to talk about why making new friends as an adult can feel so strangely vulnerable, why some friendships survive every version of us while others belong beautifully to a particular season, and what happens when we finally have enough life behind us to realize we still have an awful lot of it ahead.

There will undoubtedly also be discussions about pop culture, teenagers, questionable fashion decisions from 2003, and perimenopause, because I don’t believe a group of women in their forties has gathered in the last five years without eventually discussing their hormones.

But I don’t want Sunday With Friends to become another corner of the internet telling women that we need to reinvent ourselves.

I don’t think we need to.

And I certainly don’t think we need one more person explaining how to become the best version of ourselves before breakfast.

What I’m interested in is remembering all the versions that are already there.

I can be a wife who genuinely loves being married and still need my girlfriends. I can be a mother who would choose her children over everything and still have dreams that belong only to me. I can love curling up on the couch with my husband on a Saturday night and also want to get on a plane or dance until the sun comes up. I can be deeply grateful for the life I have built while remaining curious about the life I haven’t lived yet.

Maybe those things were never contradictions. Maybe we were simply taught to think they were.

The older I get, the more I believe there is something incredibly freeing about the word and.

We can be mothers and women with wild ideas. We can love our homes and want to see the world. We can cherish old friendships and make new ones. We can be responsible and occasionally ridiculous. We can know exactly who we are and still surprise ourselves.

We can have everything we once prayed for and still wonder what else might be possible.

That is what I want Sunday With Friends to explore, and I suppose it is what I want to explore here too.

This blog will be about my books and writing, of course, but I have a feeling it will also become a place for all the things that find their way into my stories in the first place: love, friendship, family, women, adventure, growing older, starting over, paying attention to the strange ways life seems to nudge us forward, and trying to make some meaning out of all of it.

I don’t know exactly where any of this will go yet, which might be the best part.

For now, I know that every other Sunday I’m going to call a friend, get out of my routine, and go see what happens.

Because life did get really full, really fast, and I wouldn’t trade the fullness of it for anything.

I just think there’s still room for more.

So, what is Sunday With Friends?

Sunday With Friends is a biweekly Instagram series where I’ll be getting out of my routine, grabbing a friend, and trying something new. Every episode will pair a friendship with an adventure and the kinds of honest, funny, sometimes deeper conversations women are already having about who we were, who we’ve become, and who we still want to be.

New episodes will be shared every other Sunday on Instagram at @sunday_with_friends_official, with more stories, thoughts, and behind-the-scenes pieces here on the blog.

Come hang out with us. And don’t forget to call a friend and make some plans of your own!

Beginning Sundays, Fall 2026