Dear Pinkies, Please welcome Dr. Suzanne Bouffard, a developmental psychologist, dancer, writer, and mom-to-be based in Cambridge, MA. Without knowing or intending to, Suzanne seems to have written the Owning Pink manifesto, and has articulated from yet another perspective the purpose and intention of our community. What she proposes is actually a wonderful exercise in seeing each other with magical eyes … but we’ll let her take it from here. Enjoy, Pinkies, and welcome Suzanne!
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I’ve never had that tight-knit group of women friends that “Sex in the City” or even “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” would make any woman yearn for. I’ve had female best friends, but few that have lasted beyond the geographic conveniences that created them. I’ve had female roommates, but not the kind who cycled together and binged on Ben and Jerry’s at 2 am. So I’ve never felt that womanly bond that people describe in reverent, spiritual terms, despite being an (individually) reverent, spiritual person.
But a few months ago, I had my first ever appointment with an obstetrician. In the waiting room, sinking into a doublewide chair that my still-slim, poker-face body wouldn’t need for several more months, I felt the giddy freedom and anticipation of entering a new world. Conceiving a child was a complicated business for me (and I don’t use the word business casually); arriving in this office was like finding the other side of the rainbow.
I expected the quiet delight I would find in seeing my baby’s arm buds moving on the ultrasound screen. I had read up on the blood tests and pelvic exam that would be conducted. I had even heard about my doctor’s “lovely” personality and been assured of the kindness of the nurses who have since come to be like personal therapists, wise aunts, and psychics all rolled into one package of compassion and care. What I didn’t expect is how I would feel sitting in a room full of other pregnant women, women of all ages, ethnicities, shapes, sizes, stages. I didn’t expect the fascination and awe, the sense of connection, and the compulsion to stare and the brazenness to follow it. I might have subconsciously hoped for, but never expected, how connected I would feel to these women. But suddenly, here I was, feeling a part of the sisterhood. And damn, it felt good. Women sitting with their partners smiled knowingly at each other, preggos sitting alone compared notes with their neighbors, soon-to-be first time moms unabashedly asked parenting questions of those with little ones in tow.
Why was this so different from the don’t-ask-don’t-tell-don’t-even-look land of the fertility clinic? Why was this so different from the I’m-your-friend-but-also-your-competitor classrooms and dance studios where I spent my adolescence? Come to think of it, why was this so different from every other woman-filled room I’d ever encountered in my life?
A whole new world of womanly bonding has opened itself up to me since I’ve been pregnant. When I introduced myself at my first prenatal yoga class, the other women – all well into their second trimesters – cooed softly at me like a roomful of big sisters who wanted nothing more than to shepherd me on this new womanly journey. My irritable neighbor, a recent first-time mom, has suddenly started saying hello and acting kindly. The crossing-guard down the street, always friendly but distant in that impersonal New England way, has started asking me every day how I feel and telling me about her kids. I had more conversations with strangers at Babies R Us last weekend than I did with coworkers for the entire week. I’m seven months into the baby-baking and I still feel like I’m blinking in the dazzling sunshine after staggering out of a lonely, dark cave.
Basking in this sunshine, I got to thinking: Why do we women reserve our words of support and encouragement and even love for certain times and certain people? Sure, everyone loves a newborn baby and pregnancy brings out the deep, primal urges to connect with each other that an evolutionary biologist can love. And no pregnant woman (certainly not me) wants to discourage the attention and privilege that she didn’t exactly earn but definitely deserves. But why don’t we connect with each other and support each other like this when we’re not pregnant? Surely we have many things in common that simply aren’t as visible but are just as important. What if we found those things and paid attention to them? Would we feel safer, stronger, surer? Would we be more healthy, happy, hopeful?
When the ebullient homeless lady who sells the Spare Change newspaper in my neighborhood congratulated me and guessed (correctly) the sex of my baby, I realized: We pregnant women have a great opportunity to embrace and then pass on the affection and camaraderie offered to us on an almost daily basis. But all of us women have the opportunity – dare I say responsibility? – to reach out to each other and find the things that connect us. These things may be harder to see than baby bumps and bouncing boobs and oversized strollers. But certainly they’re there. Whether it’s about body image, or career choices and successes, or health problems, or any of the other millions of things we all deal with as women in the 21st century, chances are we’re not alone. And yet so many of us feel alone: my friend who is in intermittent but terrible pain from endometriosis, my cousin who loves being a mom but is desperate to find a new career and get back to work, my overworked and underfulfilled coworker who can’t figure out whether or how to get off of the fast track treadmill… Whatever those things are, we should look for them, and reach out for them, and then hold on to them.
Doing so doesn’t have to be time consuming, and it doesn’t have to change the core relationships in our lives. We all want to connect with people who have common experiences, and so it makes very good sense that we gravitate toward people who are clearly in our shoes. It’s wonderful that new mothers join moms’ groups and that coworkers assemble for happy hour. I’m not suggesting that we replace those relationships. What I’m suggesting is that we open our eyes wider and look for the connections we don’t immediately see, and that we act on them in quick, everyday ways. I’m suggesting that we share the same kind of small kindnesses and connected gestures that we offer to the pregnant woman down the hall who we barely know. We don’t have to spend a lot of time with her or ask for intimate details of her life to share in some tiny way in her joy. We just have to spend a few short minutes with her to see her, and to see our common womanhood and humanity.
Let’s reach out for each other, in little ways. Let’s look at each other, and ask questions. And then let’s listen, really listen. We won’t always agree, we won’t always find connection. But sometimes – maybe even many times – we just might surprise each other.
Of course, all of this is what happens every day here and on the Pink Posse page. But where else do you find or bring this kind of fellowship and acceptance of sisters in other areas of your life? How might you begin to do this? Could we use our magical eyes to tune into one another as the divine givers and livers of life that we are, even if our wombs aren’t carrying another human?
Seeing the beauty in you (whether or not there’s another person in there too),
Suzanne
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