sisters - for your health

sunrise:  4:49

Here are my three lovely daughters on T's graduation day, my favorite photograph from the weekend.

There is a repeated phenomenon of sister triumvirates in my life.  I am one of three sisters.  My mother is one of three sisters.  My grandmother was one of three sisters.  I have very close first cousins in a three sister group, and my mother-in-law is in another.

We are all so lucky.

Please don't imagine that I lack appreciation for brothers.  I adore my brothers and my son, and I love to witness close brother relationships.  But I am not a brother myself.  I am writing from a more personal standpoint about being and having a sister.

I was enormously grateful to my two older daughters for the love and support they gave their youngest sister last weekend.  It meant more to T than even she knows herself.  It fills me with hope and encouragement to see them devoted to each other as they grow through life.  What a boon that will be to them as life stumbles on.

Even when I go for long periods of time without being in touch with my own two sisters, there is something that buoys me up, knowing that they are out there in the world.  They are a connection to my past, but also to my heart and soul, my feminine core, my motherly wellspring.  I will always be at the ready to leap to their aid, and I trust they feel the same way towards me and each other.

Sisters do not have to be blood relatives either.  I've talked about this before ("hot women" post).  The company of women with whom we share a deep friendship creates a lifeline for us, or a security blanket, or a bowl of chicken soup.

(good shot of our bobolink)

A high school friend just sent the following blurb in an email.  It was pretty nice to learn that all those hours spent hanging out with sisters and girlfriends is good for our health.  Don't feel guilty about it any more!

A thought to share…

I just finished taking an evening class at Stanford. The last lecture was on the mind-body connection--the relationship between stress and disease.  The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends.  At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.  

Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality  "girlfriend time" helps us to create more seratonin--a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being.  Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going.  Jobs? Yes.   Sports? Yes.  Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf?  Yes.  But their feelings?--rarely.  Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters, and evidently that is very good for our health.  He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.  

There's a tendency to think that when we are "exercising" we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged--not true.  In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking!  So every time you hang out to shmooze with a gal pal, just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing something good for your health!  We are indeed very very lucky.