For the several years since the show was discontinued, I turn to “West Wing” reruns to visit with cherished but vicarious friends and colleagues, to bask in the camaraderie of shared mission, well-worn work habits, recognized foibles and strengths – and trust. I really miss the part of my life that got left behind when I moved out of the going-to-an-office life experience. I now have a different kind of community – although many of the players are women whom I worked with back then – which I have called my “circle of trust.” It is smaller – and tighter – than the workplace group, and we see each other less often – every couple of weeks rather than every day. But what it lacks in size and frequency it makes up for in intensity. So I am doing well in the community department.
But I am becoming increasingly aware that many women are not. Recently a couple incidents focused my attention on the longing that many women feel for more connection with other women who are in the same boat.
Last month I joined the therapists Karen VanAllen and Ruth Neubauer (who is a childhood “best friend” of mine with whom I reconnected over women’s midlife issues) to lead a workshop on the transition into Second Adulthood. We met on a Sunday morning (one woman said it was the first time she had missed church in as long as she could remember) in Chevy Chase, on the fringe of Washington D.C. We had a wonderful time – laughing about our predicament, delighting in the discovery that none of us was alone, and supporting one another in facing the tough decisions we described. But what struck me was how isolated these women felt, living in scattered suburbs around a high-power city, and how rejected they felt by the workplace community, where everyone was younger and more ambitious than they. It didn’t surprise me that the most concrete result of that workshop was a commitment to a regular pot luck supper to which just about everyone had signed up.
Another event that caught my attention was the response to the glorious Dove “pro-aging” ad campaign. We all loved the images of exuberant, proud, and totally beautiful women photographed in all their nude and grown-up glory. I am sure many women rush out, as I did, to buy the products in order to support the company’s support of us. And many rushed to the Dove website to register our delight and gratitude. But once there, those women didn’t want to leave – they posted long, passionate, honest entries about how they felt about their bodies and about being women in an ageist culture. They wrote like girl friends. And they wrote like women who didn’t have enough girl friends they could share all this with. I don’t think the Dove folks anticipated creating such a dynamic and meaningful community.
The third event that gave me pause was a visit with a cousin I don’t see very often. She was saying nice things about my writing, but she wanted to take issue with my wholehearted and unrelenting evocation of a “circle of trust” in the stories of the women I have talked to. Her experience has been different, she told me. She has never trusted women and still doesn’t. “If anything, I trust men more,” she said. This despite the fact that her first husband betrayed her big time. The lesson she took from that and the other events in her life among women is that they can’t be trusted not to try to steal your man. And they can’t be trusted to wish you well. Not that she didn’t long for a circle she could feel comfortable with, but when she went to a meeting of a group that sews for a charity gift shop, she was dismayed by the tone of the conversation and not surprised to find that the group’s nickname is “stitch and bitch.” She is still looking.
Her point of view made me reconsider some of my assumptions about a “circle of trust.” I had been writing from a perspective that assumed that our generation had outgrown that wariness of other women. But what about those who had been betrayed by women and couldn’t really buy into my rosy generalizations? I had assumed something else – that readers would understand that I knew not every woman was a potential “sister.” Well and good, but how do you figure out who has what it takes to join your inner circle?
I can see that there is a lot to be said about how we go about building those vital intimate support systems. I had already been thinking about the difficulties of making new friends at our age, but we also need to think about getting better at sizing up perspective friends with appropriate wariness.
What these random encounters with the notion of community tell me is that while many women feel cut off from the kind of friendships they are increasingly feel they need, they are going to find new ways to connect with each other and share their stories. Once again we are defining a life experience by living it.