God Rest Ye Merry

What a weekend but an overall an excellent one. I am facing a really intense week here again but that's probably a good thing.

I had a really good conversation with my girlfriends yesterday about friends who never emotionally open up to you and be vulnerable. The issue is not so much nosiness but it's an issue that you need your friends to be there for you during your own tough and vulnerable times. If your friend isn't willing to be naked (not literally) and vulnerable in front of you in return then you begin to wonder if they don't trust you, or don't care etc. It's sort of the Mutually Assured Destruction glue that holds friends together. They were talking about an estranged girlfriend that used to be part of this group - who is single. All of them are married and I basically described the life of a single girl who is in her thirties - what going home is like. It's not like Sex & The City where there is this fabulous New York apartment loaded with Manolo Blahniks (I'm not even sure if I spelled that right!), a work from home job with a popular NYC newspaper. C got it right away - she understood that a half hour of loneliness at home equals about 8-10 hours of work in its intensity.

The crazy thing is, I was telling them this so they wouldn't be so hard on their estranged friend but be more compassionate to the hell she's living in (there's a lot more to this story than just being home alone at night). But what I found was they all were looking at me and realizing I was sharing my own life, what life is like for me when the friends leave, the family is in another state and everyone goes home to their family and their lives. Even my single friends who are single moms - they envy the quiet that I go home to versus the chaos they go to.

But the thing I think most humans want on some level is to be needed, to be wanted. Even if you go home to 2 screaming teenagers, they are screaming because they wanted you and needed you. There's very little understanding of the deafening silence that comes with the inertia of decades of being single.

As women become more educated, more vital in the workplace, this fragmented identity of What A Woman Should Be will continue to blindside punch women as we marry later and later in life. Society changes, but do our needs?

Last night actually was a great example - I noted sitting there that all the women were clustered in the kitchen talking about work, about the possible solutions to problems, meetings they needed to take. The boys were in the TV room watching some mindless cartoon with the kids. My generation has had a huge role reversal, and it's very unnerving at times.