Saved by the sisterhood
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 8, 2012
Section: Opinion

The sisterhood is one of my most precious possessions. After children and the love of a husband.   (Though sometimes my girlfriends understand me in ways he couldn’t imagine.)

It’s not just about the X chromosome. My metaphorical sisters have been my lifelong companions, a good handful of them since I was 15. They have been in and around my life, often daily, for thirty years or more and rarely have we had a cross word. We have been through awful boys and lovely ones, broken hearts and narrow escapes, white weddings, the blackness of divorce, grand achievements and career stalls, the trauma of death, exhilarating births and the terrible trials of the tracksuit years – those seemingly endless days when babies and small children left you with no fashion sense save for the trackie dacks you thought hid all the sins of procreation, but didn’t.

The sisterhood has been created for all women to dip into whenever and wherever they need it. Some are quite self sufficient and only need a couple of its members on occasion, others like a whole tribe, in constant communication. Some you keep at arm’s length, and some are your bosom buddies for life. You can never be too giving. But you can be too demanding. Sometimes, the truest marker of a friendship is seeing how much it can withstand.

I have one who reads this column, before you do, just to make sure I’m not making a fool of myself. That could test a friendship, but she dishes out constructive criticism like expensive perfume – it packs a punch but then drifts to a soft finish. Our friendship has reached new levels of trust.

Do men have this intensity of friendship? I hope my husband does, though the evidence is sparse, and couched in rhyming slang and blokey deadpans. I’m not clear if it gets much deeper than that. Who knows how many men discuss the things (we hope) are most important to them – the state of their relationships, worries about children, careers, whether their wives are pulling their weight around the house. On nights out I ask him: ‘What did you talk about?’ and he’ll reply: ‘football, Ricky Ponting throwing in the towel, man-opause’ and I’ll reply: ‘How’s such-and-such’s wife? And children?’ And he’ll say: ‘Dunno. Didn’t ask’.

Male friendships are the unthinkable female ones – the kind that if you didn’t ask about someone’s husband or children, or how their job was going, you’d never be invited out to a girl’s lunch again. Perhaps men just don’t want to waste time weaving over and under the same emotionally fraught subject until someone finally breaks the deadlock and says: ‘Okay, it’s settled. Wear the red one’.

Is the much celebrated tradition of Australian mateship, with its ribald humour and jocular put-downs as alive and well and living in the suburbs as it was for the diggers, and drovers, the shearers and bushrangers? When men yarned over a pint in the pub, or spent a larrikin’s Saturday helping a mate move house, or worse, building one. I think mateship is as ship-shape as ever, it’s just that the business and busy-ness of mens’ lives got in the way.

I think for that reason, men’s friendships are about escapism. Of being freed from work and responsibilities to have a belly laugh with mates who keep their angst to themselves and enjoy the process of looking outwards onto the world. I think I envy them. They don’t obsess like we do. Women often churn inwards, needing to share experiences in mind blowing detail in the safety of the cone of silence. There really are few secrets left amongst us. Men are much more careful about thinking out loud.

My most cherished witch’s coven (as the man of the house lovingly refers to us) likes to get together every so often, the three of us, for what we call ‘committee meetings.’ At these, we discuss  the order of the day, usually a crisis for one of us needing three heads, wine and speaking in tongues. By hour’s end, and divination, we have usually solved most of the world’s curses (like teenagers, and g-strings) and why husband A prefers not to have deep-and-meaningfuls about his marriage at three am in the morning? Why not, we argue? It’s quiet, the kids are asleep. And what does he mean: ‘She’s a succubus’? (I had to look it up, too.)

Those girls, and the lovely others I have collected over the years, have been my saviours so many times over, they are the sisters I never had. I don’t know if life would be as rich and varied without them. Certainly I have laughed with them so hard and so often that they are like endorphins. I crave their company.

A true female friendship can withstand as many ongoing conversations as there are participants. You can be in earnest discussion with one, whilst keeping an ear on another and be able to make insightful interjections into a third. We are talented in so many ways. A man has a conversation in as few words as possible. And you’re a best mate if you can keep quiet and nod in sympathetic silence.

Women need their friends because men don’t appreciate the sheer effort required to keep a conversation going at warp speed. Brain and mouth at full pelt, no filter required. I have left girls’ lunches satiated but exhausted from the mental gymnastics of trying to get through everyone’s news in under a lunch hour. I hope that men appreciate the sisterhood for taking the pressure off  their ears.

My mother has a precious collection of her own, a circle of girl(ish) seventy somethings, who  through thick and thin have stuck by each other for near on six decades, and are as close as ever. Rarely grumpy, always empathetic, generous of spirit, they have looked after each other in sickness and in health, and the vows of friendship have stuck fast through the terrible times and more often than not, the joys of a well lived life. My mum has reminded me more than once that my girlfriends will be there for me even when the men in my life aren’t. And so right she has been.

The sisterhood inspires because it is as varied as its members are clever, and funny, and breathtakingly gorgeous, inside, where it counts. And I feel about them the way I feel when separated from my children. Like I’m missing a body part. Legless. They’re good for that too.