In late March I was able to get together with my families from the East Coast and the West Coast for the first time in 16 months. We met in Lake Tahoe and it was a wonderful trip. We celebrated my March 31 birthday on the outside deck of a lovely lakeside restaurant – one of my best birthdays ever! There was a family at a nearby table with what appeared to be the grandmother, an adult couple and 2 grandchidren. When the wait staff went over and sang Happy Birthday to the grandmother, I surmised that it may have been her actual birthday. Probably to the embarrassment of my family, I walked over to her table and asked if it were her birthday also. She said yes and then we had a short talk about birthdays, where we had lived, grandchildren and how nice it was to celebrate with our families.
When I returned to our table, one of my grandchildren asked if I knew her. When I said no, he asked what did we find to have a conversation about. I told him the few things but realized that there would probably have been many more things and times we had shared. She had lived in Southern California until she was widowed and moved to Northern California to be nearer to her family. Her kids and grandkids were a little younger than mine but basically she was at the same place in life I was.
I attended a small junior college in Raleigh, North Carolina. We did not have national sororities but did have local sororities that most of us joined to be part of a group in a new place. By the time I went to a four-year university, I had a husband, two young children, a home and a VW Bug so not much room for a sorority. I always thought I would have enjoyed it. I really believe that I now finally belong to the best, most prestigious sorority in the world.
Since retiring I have met and worked with many amazing women from all walks of life and from all over the country and the world. Some of them have been married, married and divorced, married multiple times and divorced and/or widowed. Some have children and some do not. Some have been blessed and are financially secure and some are not. Some have been super healthy and athletic and some have had to deal with illness and disabilities all their lives. However, I believe our commonalities far outweigh those different experiences and feel a true kinship with other senior women whom I meet and who are already in my world.
What is it that makes me so glad to be one member of this great sisterhood? I am an only child which may have made me seek out other girls to play with when I was young and to share with the amazing ups and downs of the teenage years. When I left home for the first time for college, it was the other young women students who helped me work through my initial homesickness and later the highs and lows of college romances. After college I moved to New York as a new flight attendant and the support of my roommates and fellow flight attendants got us all through some very exciting and sometimes harrowing experiences. My later work life was in the insurance industry where each of my promotions was at least in part due to supportive female co-workers.
Now as a retired “woman of a certain age” I spend most of my time with other women who have reached this same period in their lives. We did not all arrive at this spot by the same path but I feel confident that we all share many common experiences – some of them wonderful, some of them very average and ordinary and some truly devastating and heart breaking. But we have somehow managed to survive them, most likely with support of the women in our lives.
“Women understand. We may share experiences, make jokes, paint pictures, and describe humiliations that mean nothing to men but women understand.” This quote from Gloria Steinem in New York Magazine in December 1971 very accurately describes what it means to me to have had women in my life to celebrate the good times, to share activities with and to gather support from during difficulties. It would be impossible to thank all the women who have simply been there to make my life a whole lot better and without whom I would not be the person I am today.
So as not to appear sexist, I was married for 48 years to the love of my life who was simply always the wind beneath my wings and supported me completely through everything I wanted to try. I have a wonderful son and son in law and 3 even more wonderful grandsons.
At this stage of my life, I hope to be able to give back to other women I know or meet just a little of the help, friendship, enjoyment, fun and support that I have received over the years. I have learned that even strong women sometimes need a shoulder to lean on, someone who will simply listen without judgment and someone to remind her that neither good times nor bad times last forever and that she will be able to once again rise up, move forward and make herself whole again.