Girl on Girl (Week One): On Seeing Each Other

Rebecca,

I keep thinking about the delicate gold necklace you gave me all those years ago, the one that says I see you. At the time, I thought it meant being known, validated, maybe even chosen. But lately I’ve been wondering if it was less about being seen and more about learning how to see. 

Maybe that’s what we’ve been doing every time we text each other another gray hair, another line, another inch of ourselves we were taught to fix. Aging is failure. Correction is empowerment. That’s the story we’re still being sold. To see our bodies as projects instead of homes.

So when you send me the silver coming in through your bangs and I send back the evidence of time gathering on my face, it feels less like checking than finding. Whatever this thing is between us—love and friendship and motherhood and sisterhood and that strange place where desire and recognition become impossible to separate—it has become a flare gun, a way of recovering reality from a culture that profits from our distortion. Who gets to author what a woman’s body means? We do.

***

Monica,

I don’t think I would be letting my hair go gray if it wasn’t for you. Throughout our twenty-year conversation—first across the internet as strangers, peering into each other’s lives through our blogs, and then as friends, lovers, sisters—our connection has been singular and seemingly ancient and modern all at once. 

I often think about what relationships between women were in a pre-patriarchal world and imagine the blurred lines between friendship and love, or rather, the flexibility to inhabit various versions of the same love story. We talk about this all the time, but for the last handful of years—since we reconnected (and connected for the first time in person) during COVID—our work has been in conversation, our essays and diatribes and manifestos.

Our hours-long talks in the car inspire three thousand-word essays, often sharing them with each other before they go live. There have been so many parallels in our lives even though our lenses are wildly different but for me, the muse has always been you, and reconnecting in our forties cracked me open in a way no other relationship has. We set each other on fire from the top and in the embers came a sort of rebirth as we entered middle age. You held up so many mirrors to parts of me I never knew, as a lover, as a woman, and as a former wife. And now, our changing bodies have become our own version of those BabyCenter newsletters from when our paths first crossed in the ’00s. “Your baby is now the size of a chickpea.” “Your grays are now taking over the front of your scalp.” “You’ve never been more beautiful and alive and in your power than you are now.”

And girl, it’s fucking true. Just look at you.

***

Rebecca, 

Meeting you wasn’t just the beginning of one of the defining relationships of my life. Almost immediately, I began to perceive myself differently. I felt like you recognized the woman I was trying to become and spoke to her as if she already existed.

You’ve spent years revealing me to myself. All these years later, you’ve become one of the people through whom I can most accurately perceive myself. Not by telling me who I am, but by seeing me clearly enough that I eventually could see myself that way too. When I can’t trust my own eyes, I borrow yours for a while. Not because I need your approval, but because your way of seeing me has never been organized around making me more desirable, more agreeable, more marketable, or more acceptable. It’s organized around helping me become more myself—my mind, my body, my desire, my voice, the whole exhilarating, complicated project of being a middle-aged woman.

I trust the way you see me more than a culture that has spent my entire life trying to convince me my body is a problem to solve, my mind is too much, and my worth depends on how convincingly I can perform youth.

God. BabyCenter. I haven’t thought about it in years. Remember the weekly fruit comparisons, the message boards, women typing from couches and beds and kitchen tables, saying the private thing out loud, because somewhere, some other woman was probably awake and scared and searching the same question. The relief was always the same: I’m not the only one.

Maybe that’s what we’ve been doing all these years. Revealing each other back to ourselves. And maybe that’s what women have always been trying to build for one another. Women don’t need more advice; they need more witnesses. A place where women can keep discovering themselves in the company of other women.

***

Monica, 

“Women don’t need more advice; they need more witnesses” might be the most important observation of our time. It separates patriarchal conditioning from matriarchal care. Advice suggests that one’s autonomy is not enough. But observation? Bearing witness? Holding up the mirror so we can see ourselves in each other instead of being told how to be? 

That’s love. That’s equity. That’s true friendship. And good parenting. There’s no hierarchy, no dogma, no “I’m the authority on your life.” 

And to your point, this was why the internet was such a sacred space in those early years. It was never about influencing others, but about validating our own experiences through our willingness to write about them. It was about advocating for community, dispelling myths about marriage and motherhood, and paving paths for other women, not to follow, but to acknowledge in their periphery as they were paving their own. It was about saying, “THANK YOU! SAME! Keep writing! I see you, I love you, and I have your back.”

I see you. 

I love you. 

I have your back. 

And I can’t wait to continue this conversation as a bi-weekly column for The Rumpus. This is all I’ve wanted to do for like two decades. Cue the theme music… and by theme music I mean “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell… obviously.