Musings: Female Friends

My two favourite tv shows of all time are The Golden Girls and Sex and the City. Both shows feature four different women with very different and distinct personalities. Both shows focus on the importance of their friendship and the bond between the friends. They both show women coming together for each other. All of the women are strong.

One thing I noticed about the fairy tales children hear when they are growing up is the dysfunction in the relationships between the women characters. In the princess fairy tales, the princess is always beautiful, sweet and lonely. The only other women are the villians who are jealous of the princess because of her beauty, usually women from within the family, stepsisters, stepmothers, etc. (how sick is that, btw?). The princess doesn't have any female friends. She usually sits in the forest alone singing and dancing with little woodland creatures. No wonder she's put so much faith in her prince coming to save her. She has no life. I always wonder what happens after they live happily ever after. I imagine Prince Charming coming home from doing his prince things in the forest all day and sitting in front of the t.v. with a beer ignoring Snow White. Then she realizes that marrying Prince Charming didn't make anything better because she still feels lonely. I think she should get together with Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel for a girls' night. They should watch Sex and the City, share a bottle of wine and bitch about the annoying things Prince Charming does. A girl needs her girlfriends.

That's what I love about those two shows. They emphasize the friendships with the girls rather than pit them against each other to fight over a man. These stories that children grow up with condition little girls to start to look at other little girls as the enemy and on into adulthood.

Mothers especially need their girlfriends. We need some alone time to feel like women. We spend our whole day being a mom and a wife (if you are married), that at the end of the day we are so tired and just wanna pass out. We need to recharge to continue to be good mothers and/or wives. Motherhood is great and feeds you, but takes from you as well. My time at a second stage shelter taught me the importance of having adult time with your girlfriends. There were 10 of us women and the staff emphasized community, organizing dinners and girls' nights. Connecting with other women and talking about motherhood, relationships or just anything else going on in our lives was very important to our well-being. We as women always put everyone else before ourselves, then we wonder why we are always so tired and worn out. We also need that time to re-inforce that we are our own people with a life and not just "mom" doing everything for everybody else. We need each other to stay strong.

Women helping women.......