What It Feels Like For A Girl

The older I get, or perhaps the more experience I get, or maybe it's the more jaded I get, the more I realize just how different women's lives are from those of men. Not always in bad ways and not generally to their detriment but completely different nonetheless. Even with education, caring equitable partners, choices, good work, and other bastions of a more equal Western world, it is still different, as Madonna says, what it feels like for a girl. There are pressures, expectations, paradigms we operate within, dreams and hopes that while they may differ for the individual woman, are still present in her universe. That's kind of what I'm interested in--her universe.

So I have these women I know, and we are all different. And yet, we have found things in common. We all have gravitated to this kind of shared inner dialogue experience, this strangely connected, loose, sometimes transient, sometimes solid thing that is blogging. I have witnessed moments of honesty, clarity, anger, depression, elation, silliness, bravado, hopefulness. I like the way they write and I get something different out of reading each of them. They are young and single, married with children and without, divorced and getting there, moms who stay home, moms who work, moms who take medication. They are all someone's daughter, some of them are sisters, aunts, wives, girlfriends, daughters-in-law and the like. They are all so different and if I think about them each as their own complete character, there is no story I could weave to bring us all together and yet, somehow here we are.