Three Sisters...

My teenage daughter gave me reason the other day to consider how many girl-friends I ‘have’; she had been asked by one of her own ‘friends’ to rate her popularity. As I swallowed down the maternal rage at such a ‘bitch move’ of a question, my daughter totted up her current running total, and I quietly joined her in this particularly female kind of hell.

The answer? I have less than ever before and that is from a lifetime of only ever having a handful. Do you think this a terrible admission? Shouldn’t I be boasting of my many hundreds of friends, like an Instagram influencer would?

Apparently, Aristotle classified friendships into three types (way before Facebook, obviously) – friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure and finally, friendships of the good. This third one being the deepest and most meaningful. Separately, some psychological texts state the minimum number of ‘close’ friends an adult requires in order to be ‘happy’, is three (nothing like a scientific finding to make one feel inadequate is there?).

I do know that when I got radically happier with myself and significantly more “me”, I frightened some friends away. No longer acting the same play as them, we moved into separate theatres. Now I no longer have an unhappy marriage to make snide, comedic comments about, and no stressful office job to moan over, I am, perhaps, a lot less interesting to hang out with!

In the bestselling book, “Three Women”, author, Lisa Taddeo explores the dynamic of female relationships further, particularly how it is women who more often influence women when it comes to romantic and sexual relationships. The author’s mother says to her – “Don’t let them see you happy”. She meant other women, and when asked why, her mother goes on to say “because they will try to destroy you.”

Wow. It is the women in women’s lives that may do the greatest damage?

But, here’s the thing, I feel the truth within that statement. Because I do not have a great relationship with my sisters, in fact I believe they do not even like me. So, this question of female friendship, female influence, goes to the heart of my deepest, darkest soul injury.

Women are thought to be not generally capable of warlike, outright aggressive behaviour. We are schooled to associate this with our biology and the archetypal role of ‘mother’. We have to be less confrontational, more nurturing and inclusive. This is, I guess where the legend of ‘sisterhood’, women supporting other women, has its formative roots. Well sure, that happens too. But when I was growing up there wasn’t much open talk about how in our day to day lives ‘sisterhood’ can also, occasionally, feel dangerous.

Perhaps every woman does feel this too, but we never speak to one another about it, do we? Well here goes, dearest reader; this is my experience of being a sister. It is, as I say, one of my deepest shames.

I am from an overtly female family. There were three daughters and a mother in the house. My father was a lone male amongst us; his rule that the family dog be of the male variety and never castrated is a possible clue as to how he felt, surrounded by so much female energy!

Growing up, my relationship with my sisters felt like one of emotional withdrawal, fearful co-dependency, simmering passive-aggressive silences, jealous territorial battles, and tsunamis of sulking, all dressed up with polite, ‘look, I’m being nice’, face to face conversations that remain to the present day most definitely in the safety of shallow small talk.

My eldest sister is five years older and continually distant. My first memory of her is being pushed out of her bedroom and instructed never to enter again. Okay, that’s not so unusual for siblings to do to one another, and I don’t blame her for this behaviour. But there was a permanence to it in our house. I never got to really know who she is. To this day, I know only the surface of her, and she of me. When younger, I would try to provoke her; enter into arguments for the sake of just shouting at her. Was it an attempt to be seen? My memory of those moments is that they were more knee-jerk; the expression of a child’s barely understood anger.

My other sister is my identical twin – I am the elder by 10 minutes. As youngsters we were extremely co-dependent. Shy and sensitive by measures, it was to one another that we clung when being pushed into the world – from within the womb and as an ongoing habit afterwards. This sister no longer speaks directly to me, but she will send thank you notes for birthday and Christmas presents. Her written word is formally jolly and precisely polite. It is sad. It makes me sad all the time.

I’ve learnt to have boundaries and strategies that help me contain the sadness – and, yes, the anger. Also, I acknowledge that no matter how “good” I think I might have been, how righteous I was compared to ‘them’, that I am without doubt jointly culpable in constructing and maintaining this weirdly combative barren landscape that we three inhabit. With each day, we lose track of who we are to one another. The family tree tells the story of our connection, but we ourselves do not. I feel deeply ashamed admitting this.

To be a woman and to know that my sisters do not like me is a complicated mind-screw to unpick. For this is the question I have buried deeply within - if my sisters do not like me, how will it ever be possible for other women to like me? The real me I mean. The occasionally challenging, difficult, ‘yeah-but’ me. The me who wants to call out my bullshit and yes, probably your bullshit too. The one who quickly tires of wearing a plastic-polite smile. The me who wants to whisper to another woman just how goddamn happy I am, without fear that as she smiles, she is also judging which of my vertebrae she may choose to stick the dagger between.

It is my time of life which brings this question closer. I feel the need to answer it with as much positivity as possible. Not least for myself, but for my daughter too. In the midst of her battles to fit in to female friendship groups, as I watch her having to navigate their often bitchy-waters, and listen to her describe how terribly touchy they all seem and how hard it is to feel safe within the embrace of their brittle, polite, power-based companionship, I find myself at a loss for good advice.

If I am pushed for an answer, well at this point in my life, I think it is more important to have ‘friends for the good’. Friendships founded upon mutual respect, admiration, and appreciation for the qualities we each bring, the grumpy moments as well as the finer – and that this should not be gender specific. In fact, gender might be the least relevant qualification for friendship. This is my head talking. My heart still aches with the absence of my own personal ‘sisterhood’ and returns to wondering what it is about me that is so unlikeable…?

I am not unique. Living with deep seated shadows is experienced by everyone of us. These dark and painful spaces are within all our hearts. The topics of, the reasons for them, belong singularly and wholly to ourselves. The point of our pain and suffering? Good question. Possibly it is to consider how we may shine light into these spaces and grow up and beyond them, transmuting the experiences into something more mindful, more heartful?

At this point in my letters to you I would normally relate my thoughts back to a story that I have already written, reflecting upon how my perspective on the letter’s topic relates to one of my characters and reminding myself of how I resolved the theme within the book’s storyline. I cannot do that with this letter. This question – of and about my relationship with my sisters and therefore with women in general, is my work in progress. I am minded to write a book about it – what do you think? Should I? How do we judge the ‘quality’ of our female friends, and is it different from other friendships? Does my shameful admission resonate at all with your life’s experiences?

Rachel