SISTERHOOD

As my ideas for this post began to coalesce in my mind the title of a Willie Nelson/Julio Iglesias song kept popping up – you may remember it, To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before?

I Googled it to refresh my memory of the lyrics.  It really is a pretty song, but the love that they sing of is the romantic kind – not where I’m going with this at all.

While this IS dedicated to all the girls I love it has nothing to do with romantic love.  The love I speak of is much more fundamental.  It is the unspoken sisterhood, the shared experience of being feminine, the mother/daughter/sister/friend role we fill for each other ... whether we have met each other, or not.

I may be wrong but the connection that women feel toward one another is something that probably couldn’t be explained to men even if we gave classes on the subject, but we know it merely by instinct. 

Even in the case of total strangers we offer each other support in times of adversity: imagine a scene in a grocery store - an overwhelmed mom, an uncooperative and angry toddler, defiance and howling in aisle 3.  This is the stuff of despair and loneliness until another woman comes along.  No words need to be spoken, all that happens is that their eyes meet in a been-there-done-that kind of way.  Kindness is shared.  A smile comes to both of them – a virtual fist bump of solidarity.  Some days it’s the difference between serenity and insanity.  We women are good at that.

That’s the broad spectrum ‘we’re all in this together’ way to describe this sisterhood we belong to, but there are as many levels as there are women.

Sisterhood, of course, begins with our flesh and blood sisters if we’re lucky enough to have them.  It’s where we learn shared experiences, empathy, and how strong we can be together.  I was blessed with five sisters but in the past decade have had to say goodbye to two of them.  The remaining three are now all the more precious.

Fate has given me an abundance of sisters-in-law, an extended family of girls with so much in common.  We have watched our children grow up together, laughed and cried our way through what life has thrown at us, and shared some darned good recipes over the years.

This special bond also bridges generations.  My grandmother’s strengths and ideals flowed through my mother and travel on through me to my daughters and granddaughters.  It’s done in subtle, quiet conversations over the years, and also in helpless, gasping, snorting laughter when the mood strikes us. 

And then there are the school sisters we grew up with and our work world sisters and our shared hobby sisters.  There are the ones we’ve known, but not known, all our lives whose importance bubbles up in our sixth decade because this seems to be our time.  And the ones who retreat into the background and then re-emerge over the years for the best kind of reunions you can imagine.

In the bigger picture we don’t even need to know our sisters to be able to recognise them. 

I have one ‘sister’ who lives two provinces away.  I’ve never met her personally and if not for a chance encounter with her mother and son during a monsoon in Beijing not even our Face book paths would have ever crossed.  That’s how heavy the odds were against us, but due to our long and heartfelt conversations on Messenger, I recognize her to be one of my special sisters.  Some day we will meet.  It is meant to be.

And then there is the friend who inspired this whole train of thought.  We only met in our mid thirties and although we worked for the same employer our connection grew from our shared experiences, not close contact.  We are both retired now and still only manage to touch base every once in a while, yet I feel her insights are at times vital to my psyche and I know she feels the same way about me.   Our conversations are like hitting the reset button in our lives.

I look at it as another, more advanced, version of a virtual fist bump, but it serves the same purpose: the difference between serenity and insanity some days.

This is dedicated to all the girls I love – we’re all in this together.