Auckland Writers Festival: Megan Nicol Reed on the pleasure and pain of female friendship

Writer Megan Nicol Reed. Photo / Jason Oxenham

OPINION:

Much of my debut novel, One of those Mothers, was written in a heightened state of peri-menopausal anxiety. Reading back over it now, I am painfully aware of the tension that lingers in the margins, the panic that erodes the white space between paragraphs and woke me in the night with its pounding heart and drenched sheets.

Thanks to the sage counsel of a dear friend, who forced me to seek medical assistance, I am in a much better place. For this, and a small mountain of other reasons, she has my undying love and gratitude. While my book is about a great many things - middle-class hypocrisy, modern parenting, sexual mores – at its core it is about a friendship between three women, Bridget, Roz and Lucy. There for births, deaths and marriages, they are each other’s confidante and conscience. They’ve travelled and worked together, partied together. Forever friends. Or so they thought. In the book I describe them as being like a plait: “… entwining the strands of their lives in and out, around and around; lovingly strangling each other”. As wonderful as it can be terrible, their friendship brings out the best in them … until it doesn’t.

Without a doubt my own friendships with women have been some of the most profound relationships of my life. Cheering me on, propping me up, taking me by the hand, girlfriends have been there for the pivotal moments: the prize announcement, the attempted sexual assault, the humiliating drunken act. And yet, in ways I have never experienced in a romantic relationship with a man, at times my female friendships have been coloured by a gut-wrenching kind of intensity. I once had a friend who inflamed such a jealousy and possessiveness in me, I almost went up in smoke. Then there was the friend whose need to compete with me was so extreme, she almost destroyed everything in our path.

Watching my 14-year-old daughter with her friends, I see how they are everything to her. How they move together in a kind of organised chaos, from house to house, sharing “going-out” tops and lash growth serum, “sleeping-over” in puppy-like heaps. And I both mourn that time and am thankful it has passed. At 48 my friendships are still deep, but not as all-consuming. Hopefully because I am wiser now, but probably, also, because I don’t have the energy I did then. I wince now when I recall the zeal with which I applied myself to my friendships when I was younger. My protagonist, Bridget, claims she is not “one of those women who’d held on to that teenage girl trait of thinking everyone had to do everything together”. I fear, in fact I know, there have been situations in which I’ve been that woman, relieved to have left behind all the suffocating inseparability of adolescent girls, and yet doomed to recreate it. “These crushing triangles. Endless little cycles of exclusion,” Bridget describes it as on witnessing it already playing out amongst her nine-year-old daughter, Abigail’s, social circle.

"Watching my 14-year-old daughter with her friends, I see how they are everything to her." Photo / Melissa Askew, Unsplash

Bridget, Roz and Lucy’s friendship pre-dates motherhood, but many of the book’s minor characters are fellow school mums. I’ve always hated that term, there’s something so dismissive about it, maybe because unlike say “colleague” or “business associate”, it implies “women’s work” and the lowly position that has traditionally occupied. Many of my bestest, dearest friendships have been formed through my children. We’ve met at ante-natal classes, gotten to know each other on school trips, sought each other out on netball side-lines. In fellow mothers I was surprised to discover a structure of care and a sense of camaraderie I had neither known I was missing nor would require. Without them I’m not sure I would have survived my children’s childhoods. But, along with the succour, there were other things, too. Uglier things: scrutiny and rivalry, condemnation and social stratification.

Perhaps these are behaviours you would encounter in any group, but it seems to me that somehow being thrown together because you have your children in common - those beautiful extensions of our best selves and, sometimes, most monstrous of vanity projects - amplifies these inclinations. The mother who only asks how Timothy is faring at school so she can skite about Dylan’s invitation to join the gifted programme. The mother whose sense of self-worth is entirely constructed around Matilda’s continued inclusion in the popular group.

I have sometimes envied my husband the apparent straightforwardness of his friendships. Sure, he and his mates might have their ups and downs, but for the most part they seem more able to find the joy in one another, readier to overlook anything less lovable. They never waste time apologising for not having kept in better touch, they just get on with it. But then again, perhaps this ease is down to the slight distance, both emotional and physical, at which men tend to hold each other. For all that I know my husband adores his friends I suspect the intimacy between them does not run as deep as with my female friends and me. That they do not enjoy the same familiarity with each other’s bodies or desires as we do. And I pity them. While my girlfriends and I might sometimes cause each other pain, I am, and always will be, a woman’s woman, through and through.

• One of Those Mothers, by Megan Nicol Reed, Allen & Unwin, $36.99.
• Megan Nicol Reed will be on a panel with Caroline Barron and Josie Shapiro, On Female Friendship, at Auckland Writers Festival, Friday May 19, at 1pm.