When I heard that one of my favorite Twitter “girlfriends,” Cindy Morrison, had written a book called “Girlfriends 2.0,” I knew it was a subject I wanted to highlight, harkening back to one of our very first Executive Moms events which centered on the theme that spending time with our own friends is the thing women like us tend to sacrifice most often. In my own life, much as I preach with conviction about banishing the cliche of working mom’s guilt, I have had a hard time allocating a real slice of time to just being with my friends, when it feels like there is never enough of the pie to sate just my family, and my career. (In fairness, my family is far less begrudging of my taking time for friends than I worry they will be).

Cindy’s own story, as I note in this week’s Executive Momorandum, reads like overwrought fiction: fired from her job as a respected TV anchor with 20 years experience, she was shortly thereafter diagnosed with a grapefruit size tumor. Then her house was struck by lightning. (One of THOSE years). Importantly, she looked back later to realize that it was her network of Girlfriends that got her through – to higher ground in every sense. In the process she honed an understanding of what constitutes a strong Girlfriend (with a capital G), and the counterpart we like to consider less- the girlfriend that isn’t.

I reflect with a measure of embarrassment on my over-eagerness across the years to elevate a girlfriend
to “Girlfriend,” and the staggering disappointment that came upon realizing they weren’t what I wanted and trusted them to be (the wisdom of experience providing little emotional armor). If there is a shame to our gender, it is how very insidious our cruelty to each other can be, death by a thousand little deceptive cuts born primarily out of our own insecurities, starting back in the schoolyard.

Yet having started a women’s organization, I have been able to witness firsthand in a bigger context the awe-inspiring power of women when we are at our best — acting as real Girlfriends to each other in the most positive sense. In considering my own definition of “Girlfriends,” I realize they are the women I know who inspire me, care about me and what’s happening in my life, have smart, honest, interesting things to say and observe, and bring a sense of humor to my world and the world at large. These Girlfriends are the eclectic, close friends I have cultivated, with whom I have a genuine closeness and for whom I have such tremendous gratitude. But they are also, in many respects, some of the best women I have met through Executive Moms, through work, even (superficial as it might sound) on Twitter. Cindy suggests, perhaps quite rightly so, that Girlfriend with a “G” is something that a friend earns in time like a badge of honor, a title therefore reserved for our closest sanctum of friends, the ones you would actually pick up the phone and call in an emergency. However, wouldn’t our (women’s) world be a better place if we all managed to check those insecurities at the door and reveled in our shared sense of experience and sense of humor that forges the most exilhirating of bonds, makes even the most difficult seem bearable, and the improbable seem that much more possible. In other words, wouldn’t our (women’s) world be a better place if we all we all treated each other like true Girlfriends?