Last summer, Oprah was planning a show on creating your own women’s group. Janine, one of the members of my Girl Group, had read about it on Oprah’s website. Oprah was looking for testimonials from people who had started up their own women’s group, in order to choose one group in particular to have on her show. Janine became fired up with the idea of all of us on Oprah, so she asked the group to write an essay about our experience, and to send it in to the Winfrey website. We all obeyed (Janine is a high school teacher, so we were definitely afraid of the schoolmarm wrath). Needless to say, Oprah did not choose us, but one of our Girl Group meetings was devoted to each one of us reading aloud our essays. Oh, the TEARS! It was an incredible evening.How the tears flowed!
Here is my own essay about Girl Group.
JERSEY CITY WOMEN’S GROUP
The idea of gathering together with a group of women to share, discuss, debate, validate, question, support has always intrigued me. I have been involved in quite a few — but for the most part, the group would meet a couple of times and then, for scheduling reasons, or because of waning commitment, the group would fizzle out. It is definitely a challenge to set up a structure for the group that works for everybody.
The group I am involved in now, though, has been different. There are nine of us. We have managed to stick with it, meeting every single month, come rain or come shine. It is a little miracle; perhaps a big one. We all have busy lives — with husbands, careers, kids, dogs, condos — and yet one Friday, every single month, we convent, rotating apartments.
The more I grow and learn, the more I realize that life, a full life, is about creating community. We choose our communities. And this group of women is one of the most necessary and essential communities in my life.
We talk about everything. Through them I learn commitment, humor, forbearance, communication. I also learn about their sonograms, their sexual fantasies, their mortgages, their first kisses, their favorite recipes, their hopes and dreams. One night we all brought our prom pictures (those of us that had them) and told our long-age stories. The laughter! Tears of laughter streaming down our faces. There have been times when our conversations stay in the realm of the surface of things, the external details of our experiences (no less important): planning a wedding, buying a house. And then there are times when real struggles or difficulties have befallen one of us, and the group swoops in to support. One of the members in our group lost both her parents in a tragic and sudden accident last year. The marrieds in our group share their problems with their respective spouses. And then, of course, there was September 11th. This affected all of us deeply, living, as we do, in the New York area.
It doesn’t even matter the content of our conversations. What matters is the bond that has been formed. I always come away from each one of our evenings a deeper and more connected woman.
Our group reminds me, at times, of the beautiful story told to me when I was a child. A man dies and goes to heaven. He looks back down on his life, which appears to him as a beach, the sands stretching out forever. There are two tracks of footprints in the sand. God says to the man, “See, my son? I was walking beside you the whole time.” But the man notices something troubling. “God, I don’t understand. I see that during the most difficult times of my life — the darkest days — there is only one track of footprints. Why would you abandon me at my lowest moment and make me walk alone?” And God smiles gently and says, “Oh, my son, don’t you see? During those lonely hard times, I carried you.”
The women in the Jersey City Women’s Group, for me, are an invisible force for good in my life, hovering over my path, and bearing me up on their shoulders when I need them the most.
On September 14th, 2001, we met, as scheduled, despite the disaster in our city. We stood on the dock in Jersey City, looking across the Hudson River at Ground Zero, which was still burning. President Bush visited Manhattan that day, and the air was filled with the roar of fighter jets, swooping over us fiercely, protecting him, protecting us. We held candles, with other Jersey City dwellers, struggling to keep the flames lit. No easy feat, with the wind. We were all so happy to be together, after such a devastating week, that there was almost a giddiness in our behavior, as we stood together, huddling over our trembling frail candle flames. Being together was an affirmation of life, in the middle of all that death.
How important it was, to each of us, to not let those candles go out.
The world is such a dark and frightening place right now. The chaos and death on this planet has entered my own mind, making it hard for me to sleep, to even get through the day, on occasion.
But — In my opinion, the darkness cannot triumph completely, as long as there are nine women, standing together, holding up their teeny beams of light.
