Sticking Together
My Stick Together Girls
We’ve all had those days. You notice a ding in your car door, your phone falls to the pavement shattering the screen, you arrive home to find a huge tree down in your yard, your garage door won’t open, and after holding for twenty-five minutes with an airline, the call gets disconnected. I can feel the burn of frustration even as I write this. Often we share these stories to vent and commiserate about these anger inducing situations, but every so often we find a silver lining in a day full of frustration.
On my morning walk with a friend, she relayed a day full of pitfalls. She was having issues with her bank account and had been back and forth with her bank throughout the day trying to rectify an issue with payments to her landscaper. Later that morning, her car was damaged in the supermarket parking lot. When she returned inside the supermarket to ask the manager if she could check the security cameras regarding her damaged car, the woman apologized. The boy who collects the carts had hit her car and the manager assured my friend the supermarket would pay for the necessary repairs. My friend was thankful for the ease in which the situation was handled.
When she arrived home, next on her to-do list was to contact her landscaper regarding the bank payment issues. As she spoke with the woman at the landscaping company, there was a knock at her door. The company that services her pool had discovered a dead deer which had accidentally fallen into a troth on her property. The woman on the other end of the phone overheard the conversation as my friend stressed about how to handle such a situation. My friend was understandably shaken by the thought of the deer. How big was the deer? Could animal control pull it out or would they need a lift to remove the carcass? My friend began to panic. “I can come by and take a look for you.” She heard from the other end of the phone. My friend was surprised, yet overwhelmed with gratitude. Within an hour the woman fulfilled her promise to come help assess the situation.
At the end of the day, reflecting on the series of mishaps, there was a moment that replayed in her mind. As my friend emphatically thanked the woman from the landscapers office for volunteering to come to her home and assess the deer situation, the woman turned to her and said, “We have to stick together.”
One woman uttered five words and made a huge impact. As my friend retold the tales of her day, a day that was already frustrating and upsetting, five simple words reminded her that we need to stick together as women. Throughout time women have been known to hold each other back, cut one another down to get ahead, but those days seem to be in our past. Times have changed and we now know that lending a hand is not at the expense of our own success. We know that standing together is more powerful and effective in growth and change. While my friend's day was not one of the best days, it was overshadowed by the spirit of human goodness, specifically women. The importance of sticking together was never more obvious to her.