Sisterhood

I’m writing the part of my book where I am around the same age as my own daughter. It has been eye opening to return my mind to back then while watching how she navigates the world. My father kept me out of school from the middle of sixth grade until tenth. I went from a small school on the coast of Maine to being thrust into a giant city and living with him in a dirty loft in lower Manhattan. I was cut off from my peers and all other family for nearly four years.

While I’ve always known this as a fact of my life, I only thought of it in terms of the schooling I had missed and how luckily, I was able to catch up and even excel academically. I was grateful that my absence of education did not retard my opportunity for college and a career. What I didn’t acknowledge, or frankly even realize, is that academics were the easiest to catch up, the really impact of my isolation was socially.

I’ve always felt a bit split in two. Not in a personality sense, but deeper. I have aspects of my life where I feel strong and confident but others where I feel weak and uncertain. These aspects directly stem from those four years. I think about it now and it is obvious. I remember how different my daughter was in sixth grade to how she is now in tenth. I think about all those personas she played with, all the changes she went through and is still going through. As she has grown, her circle of friends has changed, her sense of self has matured.

I missed the opportunity for all of that. I had no one to build me up, to encourage me to laugh and play with life. I had no one to help me in relationships, to remind me of my worth and what to allow in my life. I became serious and shy. When I did go back to school, I had no idea what to do or who to be. It was a terrifying time. I buried myself in books and ignored everything else.

Fast forward to present day. I’m 55 and until recently, I was still carrying around that sense of self from way back in tenth grade — the part of me that feared being the butt of jokes, of not fitting, of being left out. Those four years held so much of my true personality back. Now I live in a lovely community and know lots of people who are friendly to me but even so, that ghost of who I became still lingered. That is until I found my tribe.

I don’t quite know how I found this private Facebook group of women. Someone must have invited me to it a few years back. I remember I decided to go to an event one night and stayed shyly in the background. Months later I went to another. For over a year, I would dip my toe in the water of friendship and quickly pull it out again in retreat.

Then one day I went to one of their events after being absent for a while and the woman who started the group greeted me exuberantly “Eliza!” she said loudly and ran up to give me a big hug. I was taken aback. It was so unexpected. I even looked around to see if she meant someone else before she wrapped her arms around me. That one gesture was remarkable and I found myself believing that she was really happy to see me.

Now this may seem like a minor thing but for me, I had created this image of myself as unlikeable. Friendship was serious and rare for me. Yet here I was being welcomed so enthusiastically by someone I didn’t know all that well. I started going to more events and made more friends until something wonderful happened. I finally shed that shy, wounded shell I had encased myself in and allowed my true self, one that is playful and fun, to have permission to emerge.

I spent so much of my life being serious, surviving ordeals from numerous hospitalizations to an oppressive father, that I had forgotten how to be playful, to be free, to enjoy life. These women may not look like shamans, but their very act of unconditional friendship has freed me and I am forever grateful. I was inspired to write this poem.

Sisterhood

my friendships were so fleeting
milkweed wisps in the wind
fragile tendrils of connection
far too easy to rescind

for years I never trusted
still flinching from the spurs
mean words, sideways glances
waiting to be mocked once more

some women become weavers
spiders spinning from their soul
they bound me in acceptance
until my heart healed its holes

we cannot live as nomads
so search for ways to intersect
a tribe that always welcomes
with laughter instead of regret

©2023 Eliza Alys Young

Featured image credit.