My kids are at camp for the week, and I’m taking the time to catch up at work. You know, the job that ACTUALLY pays the bills. So I am featuring two guest posts. The second (and last) is from Kelli (aka GuiltySquuid). She has become a close friend, and I’m lucky to have found her. She made me promise to publish this before I saw it, I swear I didn’t pay her to write it. And it may have touched my heart. Could have been indigestion, who knows. You can find her here. You can find Tuesday’s guest post from Bejewell here. These two women deserve to be read, a lot. Go do that. Not now, AFTER you read this post:

Last week, before Amy went to Blogher, she asked me to write a guest post for her. That night was insane. The same day she asked me I was coming off of two anxiety attacks in 24 hours, I was getting ready for my photoshoot for BBC2011, and I was packing to take my kids on a last minute vacation out of town.

In a nutshell? I was a mess. A hot mess. A horrible, barely held together mess who was likely to crack into a million pieces at any time.

For anyone else last week I would have said no, but this was Amy. Because Amy does a lot for everyone in her online network and she does it while asking very little in return. She will happily and cheerfully fix a broken blog while wielding snarky comments to keep you laughing and recognizing that the world has not ended and that yes, it can be fixed. She can be the glue that holds it all together.

So, after a late night of frantic packing, planning and downloading my Tom-Tom updates to install on my iPhone 4, I shut off the outside world and worked on a piece for Amy. I was actually pretty proud of it. It’s funny and full of pictures and basically the kind of post that makes me happy. Then I copied and pasted the code into a notepad file, attached it to an email and finally drug my tired ass to bed to wake up a few hours later to drive 100 miles to get my picture taken in a closet. (True story.)

I guess that in the updates on the phone and my exhaustion, I didn’t notice that the email came back as undeliverable.

And as we all know, Amy had a hard time at Blogher.

But she posted something else and I guess I just assumed that she didn’t like my post, or it didn’t fit her site, or something.

She assumed I hadn’t done it and blew her off.

Tonight we IMed about it all and all is well and I said I’d fire up the laptop and send her post off to her.

But instead? I have all of this rattling around in my head and I wanted to give y’all a little something different.

The Amys of the world are few and far between. Very few people give so generously of themselves and ask nothing in return. Amy has been really good to me since I came back and really started blogging to blog for real. She’s been a support system, a fantastic and selfless promoter of me, and she’s read every word I’ve written and commented on it. She’s included me in the amazingly awesome Blogger Body Calendar and given me an opportunity to do something for my daughter I would have never had the courage to do on my own. In short, she’s been a real friend.

The thing about me? Is that I think I’m probably a difficult friend to have, really. I am alternately needy and then so busy I don’t have time to talk for days. I get caught up in things and people have to practically YELL at me to get me to focus on something else for even a few minutes. Sometimes? I think I just imagine that my friends will be there to pick up where I left off and it all be okay.

I have a difficult time navigating the world of “girlfriends”, and that’s not easy for me to admit to you all.

I suspect it’s probably because my largest formative influences weren’t women at all. I’ve never been great at sustaining relationships with women and it’s likely due to the fact that a girl’s very fist real “girlfriend” is usually their mother and believe me when I tell you that I never had that kind of relationship with my mother.

So, I often miss the subtle context clues that other women pick up on with each other. I gravitate towards friendships with guys who don’t notice the awkwardness in me as much as women do. Or, if they do, they’ve never said. With guys, I can just hang. It’s all good and I don’t feel like I have to think about it as much. It’s a little different if it’s a guy I have real feelings for, because then? Like all relationships, it has the potential to get complicated and I don’t do well with complicated. I end up locked in a closet having an anxiety attack. That actually happens to me more than I care to admit.

Anyway, I’m getting off topic here. The point I’m trying to make is that I’m not good at the girlfriend type relationships. I have a few close girlfriends. I’ve made a few recently that I’m as comfortable with as I am with any guy. I’ve made one who is so perfect at just TELLING me what I’m missing and WHY that detail is important. But as far as I’ve come in this area (and believe me, it’s really come a long way) I’ve still got a long way to go.

I need to be better at noticing when a friend says something that is to point out that something is wrong. I need to be better at asking questions. I need to not feel (thank you all of my guy friends) that every problem a girlfriend has is one to be fixed. Sometimes, a girl has just gotta vent.

But mostly? I need to remember that friends like Amy are few and far between and sometimes. They need a little of what they give out to be given back to them. And I feel like lately I’ve failed her in that.

I hate that she didn’t have a great time at Blogher. Blogher, quite frankly, scares the holy hell out of me. It’s a social minefield that I’m not at all sure I’m prepared for navigating. But, I am sorry mostly that I couldn’t be there to say, “You know what? Let’s just go see the statue of liberty and talk.” or something that would have given her a good memory of her trip.

Basically, this whole new post is to say, Amy? Thank you.

And also? I’m sorry.

I know I’m an asshole, but thank you for being my friend in spite of that.

Diving back into blogging like I meant it has meant I’ve had to do a lot of things differently, and Amy has been there for me. To answer questions, to listen, to encourage or to just listen to me bitch. I’ve made more friends through the social networking involved that I could have possibly imagined.

Basically, I learning what’s so great about having a network of girlfriends and one of my biggest supporters has been Amy from the beginning.

Today I am appreciating Amy.

That is all.

P.S. This post may not seem like a typically Guilty Squid post, but that’s because I have DEPTH people. Layers, even. I’m a veritable seven layer did with two kinds of chips for sampling.

P.P.S. Unless some of the layers are fish and/or mushrooms.

P.P.P.S. There isn’t another one, I just liked the way the post scripts were flowing. I wasn’t ready to stop.