Thank You Thursdays: All-Women Family Reunions

I had a really incredible experience a few weeks back and I wanted to write something about it for the feministing community because I hope it inspires others to do the same.
For many years my extended family on my mom’s side, which is mostly located in Colorado—with some outliers on the east and west coasts—has had a hard time getting everyone together. When I was growing up our Thanksgiving celebrations were legendary—kids everywhere playing board games and falling in the snow during touch football, parents laughing and reminiscing about old times, my grandmother pulling out her amazing pumpkin pie and drinking scotch on the rocks. But since we’ve all become adults, it’s gotten harder and harder to make this happen.
And let’s be honest, it’s not just a logistical difficulty. My family is really diverse, not in the ethnic sense, but in the political, cultural sense. We’ve got cousins who still think George Bush has been a great president, that abortion should be illegal, that homosexuality is an abomination. And then we’ve got my mom, for example, who uses words like “goddess” and “patriarchy” with ease, drives a Prius, and talks to animals in the backyard like they are her little friends. When the two meet—especially in these contentious political times—things can get ugly.
The women in my family—however—have a way of working with these differences that has always been more compassionate, more resilient, less fraught with black and white thinking. So, in the spirit of the amazing women who have come before, we decided to try an all lady reunion at my mom’s house in New Mexico.
It was amazing. It was actually more than amazing. I would sit around a table in the backyard and feel stunned by how unalike we all were, yet how wildly similar. It turns out that though we have traveled very different paths, so many of us have been traveling them in the same way.
We are a family of women with indistinguishable empathy and tireless work ethics, what my Christian cousins would call “servant’s hearts.” Among the “momma generation” we’ve got a psychiatric social worker, an emergency room nurse, a missionary nurse, a teacher in a poor, urban school, a business owner with a collaborative, cutting-edge ethic, and a bartender (aka another therapist). I’d never really seen all these women (at least with an adult consciousness) as a quilt of where I come from. I’d never felt my roots so deeply and profoundly as I did over this weekend.
It wasn’t easy to get everyone together. A lot of us, in truth, barely knew one another before showing up for this familial leap of faith. But I cannot tell you how grateful I am that we did it. I encourage you—especially if you come from a family like ours, where political tensions run high—to try to cut out the guys for a weekend (not forever, just for a weekend) and see what transpires. I have a feeling you’ll be as moved as I was…
(And if it’s something you’ve been thinking about doing, but just having gotten around to it, do it. Today. Email everyone or call and say, “Okay, let’s get a date on the books.” That’s what we had to eventually do to make it happen.)