The arms of a woman

This is an ode to the intimacy of friendship that holds your hand in the dark. To the arms that have carried me—my sister, my mother, my friends—and a quiet nudge to remember and reach for the women who’ve carried you too.

It was just after 3am, that strange hour where the world is still and sleep gets restless. The phone rang beside my bed and I picked it up in a sleepy haze, tinged with dread. My sister's voice was on the other end, familiar but unsteady, she was struggling to make the words real, "Melissa, Michael died".

Our older brother had been sick with pneumonia. He’d gone to the ER a couple days earlier, they admitted him but said it was manageable. A few days, they told us...it was a bump in the road, not the end of it. But his lungs and immune system couldn't handle the fight, and sometime late that Saturday night, he slipped quietly out of this world.

My best friend in New York had stayed over. She was lying beside me when the phone rang. She woke, heard the disbelief in my voice, and waited for me to hang up. “I’m so sorry,” as she scooted toward me, her arms wrapping around mine in the dark. We were barely into our twenties—still more questions in life than answers—but I learned something holy in her embrace that night:

you don’t have to know the pain to be a witness to the grief. The presence of her arms in a darkness I had never known were enough.

There are so many pivotal moments in my life where a girlfriend has been there, solid and steady, bearing witness to my joys and my sorrows, the milestones and the mundane. They've been there for the big, loud chapters and the quiet, forgettable pages too. We've stumbled and danced and cursed and laughed our way through first loves and last straws, new careers and old wounds and everything in between. We were, and still are, figuring out life together with blistered feet and borrowed faith, letting grace lead the way when we lose our compass.

I can't imagine a world where I don't have sisterhood surrounding me.

Looking back, it all started with my sister. We didn't have a close relationship growing up, she's three years older and at 13 and 16, that felt like an eternity. But adulthood has a way of rewiring tolerances into lifelines. She got married and moved away and then I moved to New York and the distance between us softened things. We started checking in, not just out of obligation, but because we actually wanted to know how the other was doing. When the planes hit the Twin Towers on 9/11 and my office building near the United Nations building started to evacuate I called her right after my mom to let her know I was ok and was moving further uptown with colleagues and would check in later. I was scared and needed to hear her voice. She's become the first person I call when I need to vent or spiral or just share nonsense from the day. Our friendship today is one of safety and steadfastness. She picks up the phone no matter what and shows up no matter where or when. She's carried my babies and my burdens and is forever the one that I can laugh till I cry with. She is the anchor of sisterhood in my life.

A local baker came into my life nine years ago through her bread and pastries at the farmer's market. She makes sourdough that feels like communion and croissants worth setting a 5am alarm for so you could be at the front of the line when she opened at 8. And over time, I realized it wasn't just the bread I kept coming back for--it was her. She extended her hands towards every person in that line and had a way (still does!) of making the person among hundreds feel like they are the reason she'd been up baking all night. A lot of life has happened since we started romancing a friendship in those early days and she's now woven into my life in a way that 'best friend' could never encapsulate. Her arms are my safety net, my parachute, and everything else that saves a life.

A month before I turned 19 my mom and I packed whatever would fit in my little Ford Escort and drove north to New York, leaving state lines and comfort zones behind. She was moving me into my new life, giving me the freedom to spread my wings beyond the security of her nest. She had raised me to believe I was capable of anything. She gifted me the audacity to believe. It was during those three years in New York that I started traveling and exploring, loving the experiences of new foods, new cultures, new fashion, new friends. I was intoxicated by the world outside my own. And yet no matter how far I traveled, my mother is the one that made me feel like the big, scary parts of life were manageable, simply because she was there, in just a phone call, a plane ride, a road trip back home. Her embrace has been the most enduring definition of safety in my life.

Through every uncertain beginning, every hard goodbye, every beautiful risk, the strength of her arms have carried me forward.

The arms of sisterhood find us in unexpected ways. One of my closest friends is in my life because our daughters were in Girl Scouts at the same school. We decided to join our troops together and, while our Girl Scouts days are behind us, her friendship is the greatest thing to come out of unwittingly raising my hand at a Girl Scout info session and becoming the unintended troop leader. There's no one else I would have wanted to fight for my life through cookie season with. She's a matching-pajamas, slumber-parties-into-adulthood, I'm-coming-over, always-ready with a warm embrace and a cold prosecco, kind of friend.

Some friendships grow from the shared rhythms of life—same running group, same school, same workplace. Others feel like they were written into the stars--two souls meant to meet right when they needed each other most.

No matter how they find you, sisterhood leaves its mark. It heals you. Changes you. Saves you.

This writing is a reflection of the way sisterhood has woven itself into the fabric of my being, but it's also an invitation for you to think about the women that have carried YOU—those that stayed when it was messy, who made you laugh when your world went dark, who've answered your texts and returned your calls and showed up when you didn't know how to ask. Those that knew your younger self and those that stand with you today. It's an invitation to tell them what their arms have meant to you. To share the love back that they've poured into you.

Because in the end, when the ground shakes and the lights go out, or a new door opens and the breeze of possibility blows through, it's the arms of a woman that remind us we're not alone. We never were.

If this post stirred something in you, share it with the women who’ve held you up. Or leave a comment with a story of your own—I’d love to hear it.