It’s Saturday. I am finally addressing the Talk Thursday topic, Sisterhood “assigned” by Cele.
When the assignment came down the wire, I was decidedly pissy about it and said as much to Cele. I felt so UNsisterish at the time. I still do. I was startled when I felt my hair bristle on end when I read the topic. I was even more taken aback when I realized that I had no idea what “sisterhood” really means.
Sisterhood, for me, has some conotations with which I am highly uncomfortable, stemming back to my religious days. In The Church, men are “Brothers (Elders, Brethren)” and the women are “Sisters.” Nobody has a first name. For a long time, I thought that every adult’s first name was that and that somewhere along the way there was some sort of stripping of the unique first name and everyone became generic Brother or Sister.
Also, I am of the belief that women, in general, do not play well together. My life experiences have supported this, unfortunately, more often than not. I have very few “real life” female friends because, plain and simple, I don’t trust them. I have experienced women throughout my life as being petty and bitchy and willing to do just about anything behind my back. Women have proven to me time and again that they are not here to support me, but rather to tear my hair out strand by strand, douse me with gasoline and set me on fire.
Nowadays, I am still very limited in the number of close friends whom I allow to really begin to know me. And, honestly, I think I still am guarded enough that there is no one single person that really knows who I am. In that limited number of close friends, there is one woman. She is someone who has known me since I was 11 and, even with her, I keep her at a distance.
In the one relationship where the terminology “sisterhood” should most directly apply – with my sister – I am unclear. My sister is five years younger than me. When she was born, all I could think in my five year old brain was that there had to be something much more special about her than there was about me. That was the only way I could figure out why she was seemingly more important than me. That feeling has carried on throughout my life – this sense that I am less than my baby sister. She’s a college graduate. I am not. She’s married with two children. I am divorced with one. She has her own home. I am living in a petite guest room. She is near to debt-free. I am drowning in debt. She is running her own highly successful business, bringing in five figures in some months. I am struggling to stay afloat. This less-ness is purely self-imposed and, frankly, insanity. I am just so different from my sister.
All of my life I have had this part of me that seemed to be missing. A hole. I have sought to fill it with stuff that didn’t fit. Men. Food. Knowledge. What I mistakenly thought was love. In the end, I was (am) still left wanting, aching and wishing for this Norman Rockwell painting of a life where my Sisters gather around me and hold me up. Where they are beside me, cheering me on and wanting me to succeed. Where the women of my world want me in their presence and are women who I want in my life.
I have this sense that, as I journey ever further into the depths of the power of Me, I am growing farther away from the possibility that I will be a part of a Sisterhood. I feel a desperation of aloneness that calls to me from the darkness. A sense that, as I grow in my divine power, I become less able to blend with the humans, I become more alien. I feel scared that I am to find myself forever in a life wherein I am alone, without a pack or a tribe and without a partner.
And then I feel sad.
Yeah… Sisterhood… what is it, anyway?
