Sweet Sisterhood Grows Even Sweeter on Wednesdays
(Today’s post is dedicated with graditude and admiration to my dear gal pals — Joanne, Lisa, and Elizabeth.)
If only we owned enough couture to be part of the “Lipstick Jungle.” And sorry, we’re far too prudish to boast the boudoir high jinks of “Sex and the City.”
What we are is the “Woo Hoo Wednesday Club.”
We are four women of color _ two of us married, and two of us single. Two of us are in our 40s, one is in her 30s, and one is in her 50s. Once merely friendly acquaintances, we are now true bosom buddies, drawn tighter into sisterhood by circumstances beyond our control. Each of us was laid off from our jobs. From the same newspaper. On the same day.
Layoffs are nothing new in Silicon Valley, where life changes in a nanosecond. One year a company is soaring stratospherically; the next it’s plummeting in freefall off the NASDAQ.
Yet for three of us, this was a brand new experience. All of a sudden a pink slip was not a girly, silk undergarment we donned to feel pretty, but something ugly and demeaning thrust upon us that we were forced to wear.
Joanne is a photographer. Elizabeth is a features designer. Lisa and I are writers. For years at our former company, that is what we were. Now, together, we hope to find what we can be next.
For anyone who has been summarily dismissed from a job they not only loved but were damn good at, there is shock, there is anger, there is sorrow, and there is more than plenty of fear.
We lugged all that to the table for the first time on a Wednesday afternoon, as we sat together at a cushy, red banquette over morsels of dim sum and icy glasses of Thai basil lemonade.
It wasn’t long before something surprising happened: As we began devouring dumplings, we also began filling up on collective strength. It was lunch — girl power-style.
Lisa dubbed it “Woo Hoo Wednesday” for how cathartic and empowering it proved to be. After all, nobody really knows what you’re going through except someone else going through it, too.
