‘‘They say she looked back and was turned to a pillar of salt. But maybe she couldn’t help it. Maybe she wasn’t defying God. Maybe she just couldn’t bear not to look one last time at everything she had known. Maybe grief turned her into salt.”—Marilyn French, The Bleeding Heart
She was tiny, wide-eyed, all questions, giggles, and I adored every bit of her. We had our secret rituals of love—like the way she’d run into my arms or the secret handshake she made me learn. But as she grew, something shifted. She grew quieter, and harder to reach. She would call, and there would be long breaks of silence after the hello and the pleasantries. With time, she stopped calling all together. I gathered she had nothing more to say. Or maybe she had too much to say, and no idea how to say it.
I had lost her, and that realization cracked my heart.
It happens that women often lose each other. Not all at once, but in slow, and subtle silences. We learn, somehow, to pull away from the women who raised, held, and shaped us. We decenter them. We grow into our own pain, and we start believing that to survive it, we must do it alone. We don’t trust that they could hold our pain, because they hadn’t trusted us to see theirs.
I had done the same to my mother. Isolated from her, pregnant and alone, I was carrying my own heartbreak in silence. I couldn’t tell my mother what I was feeling—too much shame, too much fear of her judgment, or maybe just not knowing how to start. She would look at me in my silence, and I know it broke her heart too.
Another time, my brother, his friend, and I were sitting together when a woman walked in. She was confident, lively…until she saw me. The shift was immediate. Her energy folded into itself. Her shoulders pulled in. She stopped laughing the way she had been with the guys.
That too broke my heart.
She didn’t have to say anything: I was the other woman. The rival. What a tragedy, isn’t it? The generational mistrust in-built in women. That sometimes we feel safer with strange men than we do with each other. Not because they understand us better, but because we don’t always give each other permission to just be. We’ve been taught to compete. To compare. To withhold warmth until it’s “earned.” We walk into rooms and feel the presence of other women as a threat: We are ever competing for the male gaze.
I once thought that being a woman is all about being seen. When you’re old enough, you start praying someone will see you and validate your existence. The greatest achievement for a woman was to be chosen by a man.To be validated through marriage. To be known for birthing sons. Anything else was noise.
But I am unlearning and unknowing. I don’t have all the answers. I still ache for the little girl who once ran into my arms. I still carry the silence between my mother and me like a stone in my pocket. And I still flinch when I feel another woman pull away, unsure if it’s me or the world we’ve inherited.