I Traded My Work Trips for This

We had pushed the coffee table out of the way and thrown every pillow and blanket in the house onto the floor, and we were lying there in the kind of dark you only get when nobody’s bothered to turn a lamp back on, and frankly, anything artificial didn’t belong in that space.

There we were, four grown women in sweatpants who hadn’t left the house in two days and had absolutely no intention of leaving it.

As we lay in our human puddle, we started dreaming up what our ideal lives could look like. It felt outlandish at first, like asking for world peace in a world that’s already on fire. But then one of us said the words out loud, I honestly don’t even remember who, and the second we said them, the idea went from half-formed to something we could all see so clearly. We all kept adding on to the thought until it became all of ours.

What if we did this every month. Not someday, not six months from now when everything finally settled down, not two years from now when we blinked and time had passed, every month.

We let ourselves imagine what it would be like for our daughters to grow up watching their mothers choose each other on purpose.

What it would feel like to make this part of the rhythm of our lives, a few days we always knew were coming, where we handed the whole circus at home to our partners and got to stop being anyone’s mother or boss or wife, and simply be ourselves, no role to play, just us in a room together.

What it would mean if this weren’t the rare exception we apologized for but the ordinary shape of a life, if our children simply assumed this was what women did, gathered, dreamed, cried a little, and drove home softer and more rested than when they left. It was a beautiful, bucketless dream, the kind that usually burns off by morning when reality sinks in and suitcases start getting packed.

Except if you know absolutely anything about me, once I get an idea I’m excited about, I refuse to let it die. I mean, I am who I am, for better or for worse, so before we scattered back toward our own lives and drove in opposite directions, I sat down, booked the same little house, halfway between us, for exactly a month later and told them, mark your calendars now, this is when we’re coming back.

That was six months ago, and we haven’t missed a single month since. I still can’t quite believe we pulled it off, this far-fetched idea we cooked up on the floor, in a world that feels like it’s coming apart most days.

So when a friend said something to me about it a few weeks ago, it landed a bit harder than she probably meant for it to, but I haven’t been able to stop running what she said over and over in my head.

Let me back up, really quick though, because it won’t reach you the way it reached me until you know what we’ve walked through since.

These have been, and I’m not at all being dramatic when I say this, the richest months I’ve lived.

There’s a particular kind of full that comes from being in a room with women who knew me long before any of this, before the businesses and the platforms and the version of my life that has my name on it.

Between us we’ve walked through just about everything, the corporate jobs we quit and the businesses we built from nothing, the weddings and the divorces, the babies and the losses that came before the babies, the moves that put whole states between us.

They’ve watched me build and lose and begin again more times than I can count and stayed for every single version of me, and I’ve done the same for them. It’s put a floor under my life I didn’t know was missing. And trust me, I know how that sounds.

I know that saying all of this out loud lands right up against the truth that not every woman has a partner who’ll cover bedtime, or the money for a plane ticket or the ability to meet at a little house in the middle, or three whole days each month that she can hand herself without the entire scaffolding of her life coming down. I sat in that discomfort for a long time, and I almost didn’t write this because of it.

I’ve written and sat on this post for a while, maybe to see if we’d keep to our promise, but also as a way to protect myself, because the position we’re in isn’t the norm, and it hasn’t come without a lot of work and planning. When I really get down to it, though, it’s not just about the money. Somewhere buried in my travel schedule, dictated by work, was this belief that those trips were the “necessary” ones and anything extra would fit somewhere between them. Somewhere in deciding what earned the word necessary, I’d lost the plot, and I’d been making a choice for years that I never once realized was a choice.

The travel was never really the point, though. I’d just never stopped to notice that all those hours I was handing over, to the work and the strangers and everyone who ever needed a piece of me, were hours I was always allowed to spend differently. It doesn’t take a plane ticket. It takes deciding this one isn’t up for moving.

And Drew doesn’t raise an eyebrow at these trips, he guards them, because he’s seen what I bring back through the door. I come home to him and my girls with more of myself than I left with.

So if this is work, and I’ve decided it is, it may be the most honest work I do. Not an escape from my life. It’s what lets me carry it.

The funny part is, I think we blame the calendar? It’s an easy culprit that can’t argue its point back. But if we really look at why we don’t invest in time with other women, it’s not just the calendar, it’s far deeper than that, it’s the wounds we wear from other women.

So many of us are carrying a wound with another woman’s name on it. The friend who turned on you, the group chat that turned into a second group chat without you, the text about you that was never supposed to reach you, the party you found out about from someone else’s story, the girl at the lunch table and the coworker who smiled and then didn’t and the one who knew your softest place and used it against you.

We were handed this story far too early, before we even had the words for it, that other girls were the competition, the threat, the ones to keep at arm’s length. We learned it young, measured against each other as if there were only ever room for one of us to shine, and by the time we were grown we’d stopped questioning it entirely, carrying it like gospel, like it had always simply been true. We call it being careful, we call it being busy, we call it whatever the heck we need to in order to just keep ourselves safe. But if we got quiet and honest enough, the truth is we’re just a little (or a lot) afraid.

I’ve got my own history with all of this, I’ve walked through the fire of a public life, I’ve watched my biggest fans become my hardest haters.

We all have wounds, but if we choose to focus on the open ones we never learn how to appreciate the scars, and the ways they make us commit to never doing that to another woman again.

The sisterhood we find ourselves in? It’s far deeper than a quick call to “catch up” while we cook noodles for our kids or fold a load of laundry. It’s not meeting up for a quick dinner every few months, the kind where you leave with parking lot hugs and a promise to do it again soon when in your heart you know months will pass before a moment like that comes around again. It goes way deeper than the surface questions (How are you? Oh, good, busy!) and beyond the versions of ourselves that leave us feeling like little performers reciting the same rehearsed lines, and it goes into the places we try to hide or deal with in private. It’s the difference between snorkeling and scuba diving, and me and my friends? We choose to go into the darker, murky waters in search of what we can find together.

So let me tell you the strangest and perhaps the best part of this circle of women. We talk about each other behind each other’s backs. We do. But we do it upside down from the way we were taught, we do it to work out how to help each other, how to hold the one who’s struggling, how to tell her the hard truth to her face next time in a way she can actually receive.

It’s not all love and light. It’s a reckoning some nights, it’s saying the quiet thing out loud, it’s skipping the small talk and going straight for what’s true, and it’s also the safest I’ve ever felt in sisterhood.

All along, we thought the love was in the agreeing. It’s in the calling-in.

What I grapple with almost daily is that the women who know me best live hours away. They aren’t just a drive away, I can’t pull up and plop myself on their couches (though I so wish I could). I’ve realized proximity only has so much to do with it, that living close to someone doesn’t always mean you’re close in spirit. When you live twenty minutes from someone, you kind of just assume there’ll always be time to get together, but oftentimes “always” has this way of turning into weeks, months, even years that pass while life stays busy.

The wild part is, they all live five minutes apart, I’m over here the outlier, the one who left town years ago, but instead of making me carry the whole distance every time, they get in their cars and drive toward me while I drive toward them, and we meet somewhere in the middle, which is its own kind of love. Nobody sitting there making the far one do all the reaching.

Distance turned out to have almost nothing to do with it. What I put first did.

Because the way most of us do friendship is we wait. We wait for life to slow down, we wait until the kids are older, we wait for some different season we presume will arrive with a side of sitcom-style friendships built right in.

And if you’re anything like me, you’re in a bit of denial about the fact that the slow-down isn’t coming, that there’s no time left over and there never has been, that the calendar fills from the top with the kids and the work and the dentist and the thing at the school, and whatever sits at the bottom is what falls off the edge.

So we stopped leaving it for the bottom. We set it in first, the way you drop the biggest stones into the jar before the sand, because you already know the sand will find its way around anything. We play calendar Jenga every month to find the window, and somebody’s kid almost always gets sick the week before, and nobody backs out anyway. The time is planted, and we tend it like it’s the root keeping the rest of the garden alive, because it is.

I’m not here to pretend I invented sisterhood. The women before us knew something our culture has made us forget. It’s not like we lay on that floor and dreamed up some revolutionary idea that women need each other, no, I don’t think we dreamt it at all, I think it was us returning to a remembering so deep in our souls we had to get quiet to hear it.

They knew this in their bodies. They ground the corn together and caught each other’s babies and washed the bodies of their dead together, they sat in circle not as a retreat they had to schedule but as the water they lived in.

And the research we’re so proud of now is only catching up to what they never forgot, that women who gather live longer and heal faster and seem to carry a good deal less of what would otherwise break them. We were never built to do this alone, we were built to do it in a room full of each other. So I don’t think it’s an accident that we’ve been scattered.

There’s something incredible that happens when women gather. When they’re given the time to drop the roles, get past the pleasantries, and just be. When women come together and are truly present? It can change the world, and women changing the world has always made men nervous. The system built on keeping all of us tired and separate is the same one that can’t survive if we start to remember how powerful we can be together.

Which brings me back to that sentence my friend said to me, the one that made me laugh. (I told you I’d come back to it!) She’d been there for the very start of all of this, the reunion of sorts that got us remembering we needed each other, that we needed to be together more than once in a blue moon. Then life pulled her one way and the rest of us another, and we didn’t really see her again until now.

When we finally all landed in the same room, she looked around at all of us and said, whew, you all have really been through it these last six months, haven’t you? And I laughed, because she wasn’t wrong, we absolutely had, there’d been so much life that had happened between then and now, and I heard myself say back, yeah, and it’s also been the best six months of my life.

Both true in the same breath, and the only reason both can be true, that they were the hardest and the best, is that not one of us walked through any of it alone. The work we planted on that living room floor in the dark is the same work that’s been holding us ever since.

And the part I didn’t see coming is that the circle doesn’t stay a circle. In six months it’s spilled out in every direction. We’ve road tripped together, folded our whole families in, let our kids run loose in the same backyard, and gotten on planes to make a fuss over a single birthday.

The closer we get to each other, the wider it gets, because a woman who feels held comes home and holds everyone else, her partner, her kids, the friend who needed her most that week. This was never an exclusive little club. It was only ever meant to overflow.

So no, you don’t need what I have. You don’t need the little house or the three days or the six hours or the partner who covers the nights. That’s my version, and it’s a lucky one, but it’s not the price of admission.

You need one woman and a date on the calendar that you refuse to move.

It can be a porch, or a phone propped against the sink while the two of you fold the same load of laundry hours apart, or a standing walk you never cancel rain or shine, or a table you keep coming back to.

The shape it takes barely matters. What matters is that you keep coming back to her, and that the dates you make are the ones you protect.

Nobody’s going to clear your calendar for you. Nobody’s going to hand you the circle. The world we’re aching for, the one where our daughters grow up assuming this is simply what women do, we don’t get to sit and wait for it. We build it ourselves, and we do it where they can see.

So text her, or call her, and I don’t mean sometime soon, I mean right now. Set a date, write it down in pen, and give it the first spot on the calendar instead of the last. I’ll be doing the same, somewhere in the middle of the distance between us, on the floor in a pile of pillows in a room we all drove a long way to meet in and would drive twice as far to keep.

About the Author:

Jenna Kutcher is a New York Times bestselling author who writes where the wild things grow from a stretch of land in northern Minnesota, usually somewhere between the garden and the beehive with dirt under her nails.

After years of building a business and hosting a podcast about ambition, she’s spending this season writing about the things that don’t fit on a launch calendar: rest, sisterhood, motherhood, and what it looks like for a woman to return to herself.

She’s raising two daughters with her husband Drew and slowly turning the whole place into her own version of Eden: an orchard planted, dahlias everywhere, a jungle of a garden that’s a little out of hand in the best possible way.

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