i like women.

had i understood that on the rainy morning ten years ago when i donned my something borrowed (amethyst necklace) and my something blue (periwinkle dress), and marched myself up that aisle of lawnchairs to say “i will” on a cliff overlooking the Northumberland Strait, then today my life would be…

nah, just kidding.

this is no coming out…i’m not even sure whether the title of this post and its first sentence are connected. this really is my tenth wedding anniversary, but i left that marriage nearly seven years ago.  i don’t regret that cottage wedding, nor the civilized divorce that followed deep sadness and unrest in the marriage.  and i do like women, quite passionately, but that fondness is a social proclivity on my part, not a missed turn in the road of self-hood and identity. (not that a sapphic confession would have surprised anyone coming back from BlogHer, anyway, with all the boob-groping that’s been advertised as having gone on there. ;)) i once used to swear to my best friend, who happens to like women in a more carnal, committed way than i do, that my ex-husband was my “last man”…because, in my late twenties, straddling the worlds of my second-hand army boots and my wedding ring turned out to be profoundly uncomfortable for me. but when matrimony eventually disintegrated and i went searching for that more comfortable skin, i discovered it didn’t belong to a woman. or any woman other than myself, anyway.

but i still like girls. my friends, my deepest friends? almost exclusively women. this has been true all my life, notwithstanding that awkward and confusing window where Dave was my friend before he was my partner. but outside of the circle of he & i, the people i gravitate toward, talk to most easily, turn to for understanding? women. girls. almost exclusively.

what i’ve been realizing over the past week or so of wild, hectic, almost manic sociability, as i try to catch up with all the pile of girls and women crowding into my world in this brief window, is that i was late in discovering that this was weird. i grew up in a family of women. i drew my soul and strength from the (occasionally fickle) friendship of my girlfriends, and, weaned straight from my mother’s milk onto the sweet cordial of Anne of Green Gables, i believed that all females were as i was, eternally searching for kindred spirits. i had no clue about the discourse of men; the teasing, the jocularity. through high school, i became a self-conscious, stricken moron the moment any guy i had the most remote attraction to came within ten feet of me. i was ‘that girl’ - the slightly awkward one, the funny one, no guy’s girlfriend but an awfully good friend.

and i lived a life of blissful ignorance. because i thought i was - in the way of adolescents convinced that the depths of their keening angst and individuality have never been plumbed by mortals ever before - normal.

it’s only over the past few years that i’ve come to notice that a significant proportion of the female gender don’t generally feel the same way about other women. and it’s starting to freak me out. because i’m hearing it even among my nearest and dearest, even among women i know to be capable of generosity and intimacy, women who are far more than the Shopaholic caricature of shallow feminine superflousness.  but the more i hear other women talk about women’s cattiness and cliquishness, the more i notice it, start to be influenced by those perceptions. yet…it’s not as if i’ve been in an attic all these years. it’s not that the closeness and ease of communications i’ve felt among girls and women haven’t been real.

like i said, i’m not sure where i’m going with this.

i know i struggled ten years ago to ratify my notion of self as funky young rebel with the choice i’d made to be married, because “married” to me meant all the social baggage of whitebread and settled.  it turned out that i was nearly a decade short of ready to fly that freak flag, which i now rock to the limits of its rather stale crustiness, despite the fact that i officially live in sin. ;)

but the female thing?  the friendship thing?  tell me, those many of you who said you’d hate going to BlogHer for all the airkissing and arsekissing and cliques, those of you who have long preferred the company of boys and men and the simplicity of how things are supposed to be over on that side of the gender divide, those of you who’ve simply been hurt irrevocably by women…is any part of the distaste about image of self vs. image of norm, about you not being one of those shallow princess-types that other women seem increasingly portrayed to be in our society?

and then…the real question….are they?

just wonderin’.  on this day when i look back fondly on my misguided choices of yesteryear, i’m wonderin’ about lots of stuff.  and if the kindred spirits thing was silly and foolish all along.

(some of my visitors? made me think yes.  others?  hell no.)

bon&girls

me & some college roomies circa 1989-92 in my backyard over the weekend.  i am, as ever, the one with my mouth open.