Today’s post is written by my wonderful friend and former seminary classmate, Lauren Januzik. Lauren is an incredible writer, preacher, and pastor. She currently works at Tyndale House Publishing where she works closely with the Nueva Traducción Viviente, the sister translation to the NLT. I’m delighted to share this piece of hers on female friendship for Women’s History Month.
It’s not blood that makes you my kin. It’s bone. No other component counts.
– The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood
“Do I love being a woman?”
What a question. It’s one that recent cultural celebrations of “girlhood”—catapulted to the fore by the likes of Taylor Swift and The Barbie Movie—have answered with a resounding “YES!”
But, if you’ve walked this earth embodied as female as I have, and you peel back the layers of these cultural movements, you know why this question is still very much a hard one to answer. This world, with its beauty and redemption and goodness, is also hard. And it is uniquely hard for women.
You don’t need me to convince you of this, of course.
Women learn a poignant brand of self-hatred and loneliness from an early age. We learn to navigate careers, social circles, and relationships in bodies that despite our best (and if we’re honest, sometimes unequivocally unhealthy) efforts, will simply never be deemed “good enough.” From early childhood, we bear the crushing responsibility of making sure we are neither “too much,” or “too little.” Many of us become caretakers before we ever get the chance to experience firsthand what it means to be cared for. We exhaust ourselves fighting to be heard in spaces where it seems others simply do not want to hear us.
I could go on.
Of course, these are only broadly contemporary, and frankly, immensely privileged issues—you know as I do that they only barely scratch the surface. Women across cultures, countries, and skin tones have suffered far worse.
A Friendship Stronger than Family
“Do I love being a woman?”
I recently attended a performance of The Penelopiad, a play based on the novella written by Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) from the perspective of the women in The Odyssey. I loved the play, not only because I love a good retelling of a classic, but also because those who are all but forgotten in the original Odyssey—that is, unless you already identify with them—get to tell the story.
As the tale goes, Odysseus’ wife Penelope is left behind on her island home of Ithaca as her husband travels to Troy to fight in the war (for those who don’t know the story of The Odyssey, yes, it’s that war). She is left with both her son and young handmaidens to cultivate, oversee, and defend her vulnerable island homestead that, by Greco-Roman standards, is a hot commodity for stealing, plundering, and overtaking.
In Penelope’s world, much like many worlds that exist today, powerful men are immense threats to her well-being and the well-being of the women around her. These men are portrayed as brute, conquering, and unfeeling. To be a woman in their eyes meant both objectification and possession of the lowest, most grotesque form. Threat after threat invades her beautiful, sheep-filled island sanctuary
—and she finds herself powerless, voiceless, and terrified.
Even so, she is not alone.
As the decades roll by, Penelope’s longing for her absent husband slowly transforms into trust and love for those who are with her. Merely “servants” at first, the unnamed handmaidens in the story become her confidants, and eventually, the very partners with whom she runs her household. They give her joy, strength, and an unexpected “out” from her desperate loneliness. Though intimacy is scarce, Penelope allows herself to form an unbreakable, unconditional bond with them. Friendship that rivals familial ties rises to the fore of the story:
“It’s not blood that makes you my kin. It’s bone. No other component counts...”
Though a tale of fiction, The Penelopiad profoundly articulates something that is both hard to acknowledge in real life and even harder to implement: Women are stronger together than we are apart.
The Joy of Female Friendship
Throughout my own life, like Penelope I’ve had the immense privilege of experiencing friendship that is not merely life-giving, but life-sustaining. Because I have traversed continents, jobs, and educational settings without flesh-and-blood family by my side, the friends who have come and gone during life’s many seasons have made all the difference in otherwise challenging times. They have cared for me when I’ve been sick, they have spent holidays with me, they have helped me move, they have celebrated my wins, and they have lovingly supported me amidst my many failures.
I know true intimacy because I have been blessed by friendship with other women that looks like family. I am who I am because I’ve had the privilege to know and be known by them. And, by God’s abundant grace, I have learned to love being a woman because of the relationships I’ve been able to form with them.
Despite this, I know this is not everyone’s experience—certainly friendship looks different from woman to woman, depending on life’s circumstances (even my own experience of friendship has changed as circumstances have changed). Adult friendships can be challenging, with ever-changing schedules, priorities, and life-stages. And, in our contemporary context where romantic love is deemed most important and most transcendent, friendship is often automatically lost in the shuffle of cultural and structural priorities.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us finding what margins we have in our own lives—no matter how big or how small—to know one another as deeply as we can. It leaves us calling one another or texting one another when we know it would be meaningful for the other person. It means knowing that in our loneliest days, even when we find ourselves surrounded by people, we are not alone—for there will always be the opportunity to ask for someone else to be in our corner, there will always be others looking for friendship just like we are, and there will always be somewhere we belong.
We Are Stronger Together
It’s true—this world can be hard for women. We tirelessly navigate the complexities of work, marriage, household duties, motherhood, singlehood, and other responsibilities. We daily face oppression, anxiety, glass ceilings, exclusion, and the immense pressure to get everything (and I mean everything) just right. Life can seem impossible for us, and yet, when we do these things alongside others, they don’t seem as impossible—we are stronger together than we are apart.
“Do I love being a woman?”
I mean, sometimes. But of this truth I am certain: I love being women.
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