SPARKY AND HIS SOUP LADIES

Gradually, over the past many years, through a mysterious process of aggregation, I have gathered to my side a company of stalwart women who have earned the epigraph of “Sparky's Soup Ladies.”

These are women whom I could call up at two in the morning and say,"Rachel, I am bummed out, can you please come over and bring me some hot vegetable soup?” These women would say, “I'll be there within an hour.” They know, to a certainty, that if the positions were reversed I would be equally responding with alacrity to their request.

The reaction of these women to being in my cohort is as different as the women themselves. Many of them network with each other to provide support for me, sometimes even without my knowledge. Other women want to be exclusive and do not bother to hide their feelings.

It is straightforward, from a psychological point of view, to hypothesize the mutual attraction among these women and myself. Of course a strong component of the dynamic is the search for maternal nurturance. I maintain that maternal feelings toward a woman are healthy part of any male-female relationship and there is absolutely no guilt attached to this. Nor do I feel that I will be infantilized or controlled in any manner whatsoever. In addition to this maternal component, these women are precious sisters to me. My brother and I grew up together and I was always envious of friends of mine who had sisters. It seems to me that they were given special insight and experience that was denied to me.

There is also a strong erotic component between myself and these women which serves to provide a delightful form of energy exchange between us. The boundaries, although not spoken, are precisely clear and a violation of the boundaries would cost me my sense of honor and would constitute a betrayal of the relationship.

Another aspect of this dynamic is the fact that the women and I can talk about absolutely anything to one another. This reciprocity is truly liberating. As my dear friend Alan was fond of saying, “We can dance naked on the table in front of each other.” Guilt and shame are simply not a part of the equation.

Some women say to me that I have a lot of women fawning over me, and they follow with the question, how bad can that be?

For the first time I'm aware of the possibility that I can have the same supportive relationship with guys. This is a new thought and I am proceeding very carefully down the road. I am not sure where it will end up but I'm willing to consider the possibility.

Those of you who know me will not be surprised at the next step. I asked four of my soup ladies to join me, with their partners, to a performance of Handel's Messiah, last Christmas. The four ladies each wore, on their wrists, as a gift from me, a Superwoman Bracelet designed to ward off bullets and the picture enclosed shows them proudly displaying their powerful talismans.

Are there any similarities among the women? The answer is yes: they are all comfortable with the masculine part of their personality and this allows me to be up front with the feminine part of my personality, so Yin and Yang are very much in the equation.

This post is a public acknowledgment of the gifts that these women have brought into my life and I am proud to share that knowledge with all my readers.