Pitching a Red Tent

In distinguishing the feminist movement's myopic focus in the 1970's, bell hooks spoke about the joy that white suburban women where finding in their newfound community.  She, however, "had not known a life where women had not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply."

The Red Tent is a book I recently read (as an aside, I am not supposed to read fiction when there is anything I have to do, because I get obsessed).  It's the alternate story of Dinah of the Old Testament, Jacob's daughter, as if it had been told from women's perspective.  (Women who also clung to their family's polytheism and did not embrace Jacob's one and only God).  The story is about what it was like in that primitive time, when women shared everyday life in ways we can't fathom - daily chores, child rearing, and all the rhythms of women's lives.  The red tent was the women's tent, the place where births and deaths occurred, and where the women sat for 3 days together during their time of the month.  They ate sweets, braided each other's hair, and took nature's opportunity to escape the demands of life and rest with each other's company. Whenever I read accounts of tribal life, ancient or relatively currently, I miss some of what we've lost in our modern bargain.

I am a white suburbanite, and I have lived life mostly in my own house with fences and boundaries and schedules.  I think the closest I've come to this community is when we've camped with 3 other families of dear old friends.  The kids all run around together and entertain themselves, we share a common fire.  And when the tents leak, we get wet.  Keepin' it real.

If you don't live surrounded by your kinship group, it's a good idea to find a group of women to do life with.  I took awhile to get here, but that's the focus of today: finding your support group of women.

I've had the amazing privilege of having some wonderful female communities around me.  I have 2 sisters, but not everyone is born with 2 ready-made friends for life.  Sisterhoods can be made other ways. In Michigan, a group of us got together every Tuesday morning for coffee and under the pretense of doing a book study (we never finished a book).  Our kids played, and we shared the details of our lives, laughing and crying and raging together, exchanging recipes and insights and parenting stories.  These were my best friends in Michigan, and I felt like something was missing every Tuesday for a year after I moved.  I still can conjure up the warm, safe feeling of sitting at Nichole's table, the vision of the smiles on my friend's faces and the sound of their laughter.

The 3 women whose families camp with mine every summer are women I actually used to live in proximity to.  Two of them, at one point, had houses I could walk to from mine.  But life has scattered us  across the U.S. We have a closed blog that we communicate by daily, because our schedules are busy and everyone has kids and commitments and no one has much time to talk on the phone.  So we still know the up to the minute details of one another's lives: Carly's kids have had too many snow days, Courtney scored a great find at Goodwill, Amanda launched her new Etsy site (hidden plug!), and Tiff fell off the wagon and read a book for fun in 24 hours again.  It keeps us sane and connected.

In New York I have become part of a group that meets Monday nights.  This one existed long before I came around, and some of the women have been friends since childhood.  It was difficult at first, because I was the new girl, afraid to be myself.  Would they like me? Think I'm crazy?  But a year later, I guard Monday nights like the last chocolate in the house.  These women have become my oasis in the week, the place I can share what I'm learning or going through, and hear the same from them.

Who are the people you can cry with, even if you don't have a particularly good reason to be crying? Who can you tell your latest blunder to without judgement? Who would come right away if you suddenly ended up in the hospital? If you don't know who they are, I encourage you to find them. If you can immediately identify them, bask in this blessing.