What happens when women gather?

 I went to a film viewing event last week to watch “Milisuthando -The Film” a second time. It was a small affair hosted in a boutique record store with a focus on African music and there were no more than forty of us in the room, with women making up the majority of the audience. All kinds of women were there, obviously looking beautiful, talking and laughing out loud and smiling kindly at the other strangers in the room. I was there alone and so I had the pleasure of being a quiet observer for some of the evening. The filmmakers themselves are a group of women and so in that special way that only women can for each other, we showed up.

I arrived quite early for the show and sat alone with my thoughts for a short while before I was joined by two other women who sat next to me. They told me that they met when they were eleven years old in boarding school and were now thirty-five and still inseparable. One had gone on to build a business, get married and have children. The other had done none of that and was thriving in her career and chosen way of life. She was the artsy one of the two and the reason they were there that evening. She said her friend had been working hard and taking care of her family and that she wanted her to let her hair down for the evening. With over twenty years of friendship, they had seen each other through some seasons and clearly knew each other well. Well enough to even anticipate the needs of her friend before she knew she had them. It was delightful to watch them talk about each other so lovingly to a complete stranger.

When I was a pre-teen my aunt started selling crockery as a means to make a regular income. She carried a catalogue full of dinner and tea sets, glassware and cookware and walked door to door to sell these to neighbours near and far, mostly women. I would sometimes tag along on these missions as an assistant and scribe. I would watch her sell to her customers and negotiate payment terms and freebies. I would also watch the relief on her face when they budged and brought her closer to her monthly targets. Every quarter, she and the other women who sold the same products would have gatherings to celebrate their performance and again she would bring me along. Most of them were single parents and breadwinners and they often shared what the work had enabled them to do for and in their families. I think she unknowingly did something special for me with this. It was important that as a young girl child that I see women I loved be industrious and build the kind of communities that supported that industry and provided emotional support.

When I was much younger, my mother belonged to something called a ladies club. She had met these women through their husbands, who were colleagues/friends of my father. The ladies club hosted the most fun family days, braais and charity fundraisers and so we grew up with an army of mothers and plenty of friends. It was that same army of women who when my mother found herself as a widowed mother of three at the age of thirty-two, stood right beside her. Outside of family members and friends, they were the ones baking scones and bread, chopping onions, peeling potatoes and holding her together when grief enveloped her and us. Even years after that, those same women showed up at every celebration and at every wake and she did the same for them.

At the end of the viewing and discussion that evening, I drove home with my heart at ease and encouraged by the experience shared with all those women I will likely never see again. I was also flooded by the memories of everything I have shared and euphoric with gratitude for them. If there is something we must glean from our mothers and how they lived with each other, it is to continue to gather and share with one another. To nurture this peculiar and precious thing that happens when we are together.