Overcoming Our Feline Instincts

I used to be quite the cat woman. You know the type—always ready with a backhanded compliment or a nasty comment for a fellow female. I’d join my girlfriends and roommates in trashing games, talking about so-and-so’s current hairstyle or such-and-such’s need for a wardrobe in a larger size. In fact, during my college days, it was rare to come across a woman who wouldn’t participate in a little female bashing, so I counted myself among the majority at that point in my life. The truth is, I still have moments (and days and weeks) where I find myself susceptible to those tendencies, but in making an effort to change, I’ve learned the beauty and power of celebrating our spiritual sisterhood.

As women, we are bound by so many common experiences that it would seem logical to draw support and encouragement from each other. Unfortunately, we live in a society that fosters divisiveness and contention among gender equals. (The recent media attack over Britney Spear’s body after her VMA performance almost makes it too easy to illustrate how critical we are of one another.) Our self-esteem is constantly under attack by a media that pumps us full of images of airbrushed, perfectly coifed, rail-thin women and then tells us that we are less than good if our bodies don’t equal theirs. And while it’s natural to feel the need to defend oneself against expectations of living up to the impossible, attempts to build one’s own self-esteem at the expense of others’ aren’t only in vain, they’re mean.

Celebrating our spiritual sisterhood means looking beyond the messages we are force-fed to the ties that bond us.

Have you ever been in a roomful of mothers who don’t know one another? My experience has been that if someone musters up the courage to break the ice, soon the entire room is chatting about birth stories, breastfeeding, stretch marks, and potty woes. The trouble is, too often I’ve been in that situation, and never had the ice broken at all. The reason for this might be shyness or the desire to “mind your own business”, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that it has more to do with that little devil that sits on our shoulders saying either, “She wouldn’t want to talk to me anyway,” or worse, “Why would I want to talk to her?”