Women and words

Sometimes life gets in the way of writing and as much as I love to write, or believe that it is a discipline that needs to be practiced every day, I also believe there must be something to write about.

In search of that I joined several groups of women this year. One group is my age or older. Another is closer to the age of my children and the last is a motley crew. My experiences with each of them are very distinct and very different from the other two.

But the one thing they all have in common is their fluidity. They do not meet at a certain time for a certain reason. Instead each one has different things that pop up here or there and I can choose to participate, or not, as the spirit moves me and no one will be offended, or upset either way.

I don't think these sorts of things existed in the past, at least not for women, who had to plan everything in advance so they could get babysitters, appropriate clothing, and sometimes even permission from their spouses. I like the freedom of today's women and we are women, not girls.

We do not need people to drive us places. We do not have to go everywhere in pairs. We can go out to dinner, or coffee, or drinks, or wherever we want simply because we enjoy it. We don't have to know who else will be there because we are capable of enjoying each other's company in the moment. And we are diverse groups, whose only prerequisite in these cases is that we are women.

They give me outlets I would have loved when I was a young woman and still find rich and wonderful now, but they do take up time that I might have spent writing in the past.