I had an amazing (2-part) experience last week. I met up with three women I'd gone through grades 5 to 13 with, after not seeing one of them for 40 years, and the other two for 42 years!
My best friend in high school (hereafter known as BF) visited my parents, still in the same home, a couple of months ago and called and we had a brief chat. After exchanging phone numbers, emails, and a phone conversation we met halfway between our homes at a restaurant. We immediately recognized each other, and talked with the same ease as in high school. It was fascinating to hear about a couple of painful points we each had back then that the other hadn't known about. It was even more fascinating hearing the paths our lives had taken: husbands, children, professions. When BF mentioned a Sunday get-together with some other high school classmates, I decided to go to.
I have a couple of male classmates that I've connected with a few times. One lives in my town and the other has a holiday party every year that I've gone to a couple of times. But, and here my feminist self shakes her head at me, it's not the same. Being with the girls/women I went to school with is qualitatively different. We talk about different things. We have noticed and so can comment on different aspects of live. It is a gender difference I can't deny. (So I must cede the same recognition to men!)
The Sunday of the get-together, I had already committed to volunteering, with my husband who is a Rotary member, for Dragon Boat Races, a Rotary fund raiser. So i got to the park at about 7:30 and explained (no problem) and left at 12:30. I drove to the closer of the two other classmates, who doesn't like her name on the Web and so will be known as Closer Classmate, or CC. One minute into talking to her and I knew how to weave into conversation with her and watched how our mannerisms meshed. You don't spend 7 or 8 years of your growing up time in the same room for most of the day without creating powerful patterns.
CC guided me to the home of the daughter of Another Classmate - AC - where she was visiting with her husband while her daughter and her spouse traveled. AC was immediately recognizable too and it was a pleasure seeing her again. Three other women arrived whom I met for the first time. They were all about my age and very interesting conversation ensued.
Although I have women friends my age, when we meet, we usually talk business, with a little family stuff thrown in. With my closest friend, and now with these women, the conversation just flows, moving from family to health to mates to retirement dreams with only little time for business-talk. I felt like I was in one of those groups you see in movies like Steel Magnolias, where women who have known each other forever, and don't expect each other to be anyone but who they authentically are, meet, eat and drink, and give each other hearing, ease, and support. It was a lovely afternoon and evening.
As I listened and began to grasp the shape of their life paths, my own began to take clearer form in my mind and heart. Knowing what had happened and been done by women I grew up with was/is a mirror that allows me to understand my own life more in two ways. One, some information I hadn't known about when it was happening back then was filled in now, because it no longer needed to be heart-secrets, now that we were old enough to look at it. And two, the threads of their lives provided contrast to my thread, as we all came from the same cloth.
I admire all of them. They have built themselves lives, lived them, and are building and living as we begin to move towards this new portion of our lives, retirement and beyond.
An amazing experience! If you have the chance of going to a school reunion, go! There are rich insights to be had.
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