I always scoffed at these proclamations with a sigh and a roll of the eyes. It was already difficult to find enough hours in the day to do everything I needed and/or wanted to do. And now some cheesy women’s magazine was telling me I needed to spend time building a larger network of friends. Just what I needed – one more task to add to my to-do list.
So I shunned this thinking. Maintaining friendships was more likely to cause me stress than increase my life expectancy. I had my husband; I liked hanging out with him. Most of my friends from high school and college lived out of town or were busy with their own families and jobs.
After my mother died and before my father remarried, my immediate family consisted of my dad, my brother, my husband, and me. Consequently, for a few years of my adult life, I didn’t even have women in my own family with whom I could interact.
However, I changed my tune a little (or at least modulated it into a neighboring key) after taking part in the Women’s Fitness Celebration a couple of weeks ago. It had been a few years since I had been free to participate in this, and I had forgotten how rewarding it was to socialize with other females and to be a part of a "Women Only" event.
This year, my father’s wife, her two daughters, her daughter-in-law, and her daughter-in-law’s friend joined in the festivities. (My father’s wife, didn’t end up walking with us. She fell ill the morning of the 5K, but we had all gone out to dinner the night before.) I also met up with one of my best friends and her family at the finish line. I had such a pleasant time during this girls’ weekend that I started to think there might be something to this “Girlfriends Are a Necessity” theme that the magazines had been touting.
I met my girl group at a downtown coffee shop for breakfast. We watched as female walkers and runners, clad in multicolor leggings, fluorescent wigs, and crazy, oversized sunglasses, lined the streets. Then, two of the women in my group pulled their arms through a set of orange and yellow, translucent wings.
We gathered at the starting line, red and purple balloons floating intermittently through the air. Of course, as someone who occasionally embraces the title of "Tree-Hugger," I couldn't get past the environmental impact of all that plastic eventually littering the earth.
We weaved in and out of the hoard of women, attempting to find enough room to move freely for the 3.1 miles. We critiqued the various sets of butterfly and fairy wings (which were surprisingly prevalent) throughout the crowd. We compared Zumba classes. We admired the older homes and the newly-built condominiums as we walked through a Boise Bench neighborhood. We related in ways that, though I tell my husband everything, only girls could truly understand.
At one point on the course, we passed a group of cheerleaders, chanting and hooting at us from the sidelines.
“That’s just what we need, a bunch of Barbie dolls rooting us on,” I said, a little louder than I had intended.
A woman walking beside me started laughing.
"Did I say that out loud?" I said, feigning embarrassment.
"My thought was, 'Why aren’t they out here with us?'” the woman said.
At the finish line, we were greeted by a group of men in tuxedo jackets and shorts, a longstanding tradition of this event. One man in particular was wearing bright yellow gym shorts with his coattails. This 5K was less about being in premium physical shape than it was about uniting and lifting up a community of women.
Even as I walked to Julia Davis Park where my husband, Dan, was picking me up, several people asked me about the race, gave me the thumbs up sign, and congratulated me - all that encouragement for an simple 5K. Sometimes (men, are you listening?), a little encouragement and female bonding is just what we women need.
Check out my writing in An Eclectic Collage Volume 2: Relationships of Life, now available at www.freundshippress.com. For more information, visit the book's Facebook page.
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