The Price of Glory?

The Price of Glory?

A reflection on female friendships & a celebration of International Women’s Day

I could tell so many stories about the women in my life.

I’m envious of the writer Amy Silverstein for coming up with the title “My Glory Was I Had Such Friends” as the name for her memoir. I’m also grateful to her because that exact phrase often runs through my head as I replay memories or spend time with one of the women I am fortunate enough to count as a friend. 

Friends are amazing.  

Women are amazing.  

Having friends who also happen to be women - unquestionably amazing. 

A few nights ago, I was talking about friendship and school with my 11 year old son. Simon commented on the “drama” he often observes between the girls in his class. 

“With my friends, we just get mad and call somebody a jerk and then move on,” he said. “With girls, there’s always someone upset about something someone else said or did. The next day, they hug and cry.”  

It is so very easy to take myself back to the days of best friend necklaces and the heartbreak and angst that feels so sadly integral to female friendships in their earliest days. 

Kids can be cruel, arguably never more so than when in a 7th grade female body. When the arguments and chosen sides began to emerge when my daughter was not yet out of preschool, I wondered if this dramatic dynamic had to be the case. When I contrast it with the warmth and support of my female friendships now, I cue my internal Carrie Bradshaw.  

Is the initial discord which often features so prominently in younger female relationships a necessary component to establishing the strength of the bonds women are capable of later in life?  

I mean, I hope not. But when I think about what my son tells me about the dynamics with his friends and I see their seemingly laid back approach to friendship, it does make me curious. 

My daughter, who will turn 8 in April, cares very deeply about her friends, and seems to be in a stage where inclusion is not possible without exclusion. When a BFF is chosen, others are not. Through the years, clumsy and sometimes hurtful communication turns, for the lucky among us, into abundant laughter, deep trust, and shared history.

I would really like to live in a world where this hierarchical dynamic doesn’t need to play itself out in order for women’s friendships to evolve to the place where I am fortunate enough to have landed. 

Where, as poet Kate Baer so brilliantly penned, we find women friends who “arrive with a bag of clothes, four tired lemons, half a story from her sister’s trip to Paraguay…The ones who will be there even then (even then) to walk us home.” 

Perhaps, as Gen X, and Millennial, and Gen Z women, we can show up for our daughters in ways that don’t necessarily eradicate the messy evolution of friendship and the development of healthy communication, boundaries, and trust, but perhaps make the road there a little less fraught.  

Are you raising a daughter? 

Do you have success stories to share?  

Can we make a village that not only shows up for each other, but shows up for those we walk home to? 

To those who have walked me home in both literal and proverbial ways, thank you. Here’s to women.