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Traversing Female Friendship

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It’s fall of 1982. The grass hasn’t started to crunch yet, but you can feel that Cheyenne Winter is sitting on his suitcase full of snow in a vain attempt to secure the latches. His flight is booked. His car is waiting to take him to the airport. I’m wearing ginormous brown glasses with a butterfly decal in the corner, but I can’t see anything because I’m crying tears that won’t stop. There’s a moving van, semi more-like, out front, and I’m in my bedroom that’s been stripped of all its Holly Hobbie decor. The cheery yellow walls look like rancid butter. My best friend Monica is there with me. She’s crying too. Our parents think we’re being melodramatic. They think we’ll forget each other. Make new friends. Get over it.

I don’t. Not really. Not for a long time.

Our moving van drops us off on Rodeo Drive, and I start 7th grade. Gillette Winter hefts a steamer trunk and five suitcases. He uses a valet. I sport a Dorothy Hamill haircut, a gaping overbite, and freckles too numerous to count. I’ve replaced the ginormous brown glasses with even bigger blue ones. I make friends with the most popular girl in school. Being with her feels like bright sunshine and extra sprinkles. We have countless sleepovers. We take trips in her folk’s RV to watch motocross. We write pale pencil letters to each other with hearts and BFF4Ever sign-offs. I love her more than Ms. Pacman and the fistful of spare change I’ve collected to go hog wild on sour candy at the gas station. Our friendship lasts just over a year until a new girl moves to our school. Jane…

Jane sweeps in as Gillette Winter is bidding us adieu. She’s full of energy and gumption, but must know intuitively to ease in between us slow—like a worm wiggling to the surface after the thaw. She includes me in plans and adventures, but it isn’t long before I’m eating greasy, lukewarm tator tots alone at a lunch table. The BFF4Ever notes fade, but the school yearbooks come and I write in my own copy the things I wish they’d say, and then I sign their names. I attempt to write them all differently so they’ll look real. I even use different colored pencils. Some I sign in cursive, others in print. I write things like: You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. BFF4Ever is penned in dark blue ink under the ones I longed to be friends with the most.

I looked at it the other day. Most of the autographs are variations of my juvenile handwriting. The BFF4Ever hasn’t faded all that much though.

We move to our next spot at the start of 9th. I don’t care about Denver Winter—whether it has suitcases or trunks. How much snow it packs. My glasses have been replaced with contact lenses, which I babysat a whole year to earn the money for. Mostly the kid slept while I watched Porky’s over and over and over. Yep. The beginning of my sexual revolution included Beulah Balbricker. I digress. Pimples sprout up, but I deftly cover them with orange foundation that I’ve stolen from the corner store. My face looks like an Oompa Loompa, but the makeup ends sharply under my chin, so from the neck down I am a nice, normal color. I make a lot of friends. A LOT. We start out the school year snorting crushed up Smarties in the bathroom. But then we graduate to smoking pot in the parking lot during Home Economics. Every day. I have a source that buys me bottles of Bacardi 151, which I pass around at the football games. I carry it in a crinkled brown paper bag. At the time, I don’t see the irony. I’m popular. The multitude of yearbook signatures are all real. I want nothing more than that $100 sweater, so I get a job sweeping up hair at a salon and I buy it. I get fired for doing cocaine with my boss in the backroom. I’m fourteen. My mom sees my decline, and we hightail it out of there. I’m so devastated over leaving my tribe that I forget to pick up my beloved cat of ten years at a friend’s house. We’re a few hundred miles out of town, when I lift my snot-covered face and remember her. My mom won’t go back.

We arrive in Utah. I start 10th grade at my new school because I was held back in Denver for missing 64 days in one semester. My gangliness is abating, but my face is still orange. I sew the legs of my Levi’s so tight that they leave ruts like the Oregon Trail down the sides of my thighs and calves. I have to stand on the cuffs to pull out of them. One leg at a time. Homemade skinny jeans. It’s a small town, and I feel worldly. I can drink my new friends under the table. I still smoke a bit of pot. I’m popular once more. It’s not hard. I learned a lot from Jane.

I had become the worm.

Salt Lake, West Valley, Taylorsville, Mt. Pleasant, Fairview, 2,000 miles to Cleveland, other places I don’t recall due to the brevity of my stay…

Twenty, twenty-five, thirty-two, forty years old…

Sweet friends, loyal friends, fucked-up friends, mean friends, friends for a time, not really my friends…

My guy told me recently that as we get older we realize we really only have a few friends. I didn’t want to believe it. I thought about it for days. I had gotten used to having a whole lot of friends because I thought it would make up for the one I’d had to leave. It didn’t. I thought it would give me a cushion for the ones I’d lost from move to move. It didn’t.

I’m no longer the worm.

I’m 45 and content. Back in the place I was born. Utah Winter is bipolar. Sometimes it packs a steamer trunk. Sometimes just a duffel. My glasses are much, much smaller. Stylish, really. And they’re red. I spend 99% of my time in my pajamas with no makeup on at all, while doing work I adore. I’m a perfectly normal color. I no longer steal, or do drugs, or drink. The wild ways of my first, (and my second,) childhoods are gone. But Monica isn’t. Our parents were wrong. We’re meeting up in Atlanta this year. I’ve visited her in Germany, Colorado, Austin… she became a nomad like me, though she didn’t imbibe all the substance and strife that I did. These days when we talk on the phone, I can see her beautiful 12-year old face. Her freckles were lighter than mine, but she too sported glasses. I don’t remember what kind of decal she had. She’s holding up a dollar, luring me to go play Ms. Pacman. Her smile is wide.

Countless friendships. An abundance of amazing people, but only three or four have stuck like beautiful burs that latched on to me and dug in their spiny spurs.

I’m okay with that now.

The Other Women…

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I’ve just returned from an eight day trip wherein I was wholly surrounded by women.

Hence the blog silence and the anemia.

Mind you, I did have the briefest of contact with men – there was the barista who sprinkled nutmeg on the foam of my morning chai and the fiancé of one of my new clients who supported the two of us in lifting the heavy boxes and the two “handy” men who unclogged toilets at our venue, but that was it really.

This complete female immersion has found me thinking about women very deeply – my relationship to them, my angst around them, how I show up in the world as a woman and how I see other women show up. I’m pondering vulnerability, strength and transparency. I’m wondering why I’ve been bleeding for 16 days and if it’s because I feel the need to cycle with every. single. woman around me until the end of time.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this and watching two female friends embrace and say their goodbyes – they’re not back patting, they’re actually breathing, heart to heart, into the hug. Another group of women sit at a table nearby bouncing little man infants on their knees while they frantically attempt to connect – to say just a few words over the baby babble, to feel the feminine. I imagine they don’t see it that way. They may just be talking about sore nipples and the removal of skid marks from their husband’s skivvies, but it’s connecting with the feminine that they’re doing, whether they realize it or not.

Four days of this eight day dive into the feminine were spent at Mayacamas Ranch where we rented a mountain near Calistoga to take 35 women on a Vision Quest.  As the “handy” men steered quite clear, I was forced to sit amongst this sisterhood and deal with my fears, my past hurts where women were concerned, my jealousy and my comparison tendencies. I don’t know about every other woman’s experience, I only know mine, and I won’t share any of the details of this sacred time because I feel called to hold the container tight. But I will share what’s come up for me and tell you that my perception has been forever changed.

I have uttered these words in my life.

“Most of my friends are men.”

“Women are mean and catty.”

“I don’t trust ‘her’ around my boyfriend.”

And… you know what? Some of these things have been true for me at different times in my life. I have had girlfriends try to hook up with my boyfriends. I have been hurt more deeply in relationship to women than I have to men. I have experienced women who are mean, catty, and jealous and who didn’t particularly wish me well. And… admittedly, I’ve been guilty of those things as well.

I have spent many a decade comparing myself to other women, as well. “Oh, look at her, she’s amazing.” “See that girl? What a great ass, I wish mine looked like that.” “Wow, my cheekbones aren’t nearly as defined as hers.” “Look at her… she doesn’t look like a boy when she turns sideways.” “And her… she’s published her novel.” “What about that one, she’s beautiful, inside and out, how can my boyfriend not notice that?” Look at her… she’s (fill in the blank).” No where on earth has this been more egregious than on beaches everywhere during swimsuit season.

None of this is to say that I don’t appreciate women and what they bring to the world. I have actually prided myself on my wont to lift the women around me up. I compliment girls and women, to their faces and to others. I call out their beauty, inside or out. I really do want other women to succeed. I want equal pay. I steer clear of another woman’s man.

However, I think most of my life has been spent in comparison with them – in thinking that I’m somehow lacking because of their brilliance; that my core is diminished when I stand beside them.

Sadly, my story is that most of my relationships with women have consisted of my giving until depleted and not feeling particularly supported and replenished.  I think you know of what I speak – the friends who call to talk about their dysfunctional relationship for three hours. Again. And at the end of the conversation, right before they need to hang up, say, “Oh, and how are you?” And then there are the women in my life who haven’t wished me well, who didn’t want me to get the promotion, who got me fired because I was climbing the corporate ladder too quickly, or who tried to hook up with “my” guy.

We women have every reason to be wary of each other, but, oh, how I long for that not to be the case. I see a world where we lift each other up, where we refuse to engage inappropriately with each other’s partners, where we support, honor and nurture each other and meet up in red tents, and where our allegiance lies with each other – friends, sisters, maidens, mothers and crones.

I had that experience during those four days in Calistoga with forty-one beautiful women from all over the world so I do know it’s possible. The brighter the woman next to me shined, the more I wanted her to shine and was able to access the shine within myself. The more deeply vulnerable the woman sitting in circle was, the more I loved her and the more I allowed myself to be vulnerable. The more authentically a female spoke her truth, the more connected I felt with her and the more courage I received to tell my own.

And when a woman bled, I bled beside her. In more ways than one.

How To Be Alone

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I’m about to get real, folks. Really real.

I like to be alone. I’m not simply saying, “I like my alone time.” Nothing puny like that. I’m saying, “I utterly love being alone.” I take a lot of flack for this — from society, from those whom I love, from therapists around the world spouting “connection” and “human interaction”. I have frequent conversations with myself wherein I ask, “Am I normal? Is there something wrong with me?” When I allow myself to buy into society’s spigot of “norms”, I’m pretty certain that I’m whack. Except then I feel that rush of joyful bliss that makes me giggle out loud when I’m all by myself and all of those theories flush right down the drain.

The How

Make Thanksgiving dinner the night before Thanksgiving because you simply cannot wait and you’re not expecting company anyway. Prepare only the foods you love, mainly those with a sauce of some sort. Prep your $1100 mattress for a canvas o’ culinary goodness and feast on roasted turkey with sage, whipped mashed potatoes drizzled with real butter and smooth, creamy gravy, baked yams with bubbling brown sugar sauce, and Waldorf salad swimming in sugar syrup, minus the gross bananas. Watch Disney movies while you eat and spill blobs of said gravy onto said mattress. Lay there after your gorge, feeling like a sixteen year old boy who just lost his coveted virginity in 3.2 minutes. Sleep in the wet spot. Read more