The Sisterhood of W.I.N.E. - Women in need of excitement.

"Maybe our girlfriends are our soul mates, and guys are just people to have fun with. " Sex and the city.

Remember back in high school. You had so many girls who were friends. The friends I walked to school with, friends I had lunch with, friends I met after school, friends I went out with on the weekends. I always had lots of girlfriends. After high school, we stayed friends. Many a Friday and Saturday night we closed down a night club. Then walked up Long's Hill in three-inch stilettos, in the wintertime, went to a restaurant for a late night food and staggered home at 4 AM. Next weekend we did it all over again. We laughed. We shared secrets. We had great times ... and then we grew up.

Today I could not walk up Long's Hill in sneakers or eat foot at 3 in the morning without ending up at the Emergency Department in a hospital. Times have changed.

I met a new best friend. My husband. Over 20 years later, we are still best friends. We raised three kids together. We built our careers together. We built our home together. We travel together. We shop together. We eat together. We sleep together. We do everything together. We're BFF's till the end. And that's the way it should be.

But between raising kids, keeping the marriage strong and focusing on my career, I lost track of my girlfriends. Not to say I still don't have them. I do, but not like it used to be. I've met some great women over the years. Most of my friends are mothers of my children's friends. I don't see a lot of people that I went to high school with anymore and I don't have that same high school relationship with women I meet now.

Now that the kids are older, one is moved out, one is going to finish high school next year and one is going to junior high, I find myself with lots of free time, especially on the weekends. We no longer need babysitters and our kids have their own plans for Friday and Saturday nights. We usually find ourselves looking at each other saying "What do you want to do?" "I don't know." "What do you want to do?"

My husband has no interest in going to Pier 1 to see what's new or rummaging through Winners for the latest sales. Those are the times I really miss having a female BFF like I used to. I think a lot of women go through this. We devote ourselves to our children, our careers, our marriages. Everything but ourselves. Then the children grow up, our careers are getting close to retirement and our husbands are more interested in golf than shopping. We find ourselves going through our Facebook friend list thinking "I wish I had stayed in contact with her."

I love watching "Sex and the City." It's my favorite show. I think the reason so many women love this show besides the great writing and the funny repertoire between the characters is the relationship between the women. We would all like to have a relationship like these four women. These women never judge each other. They never backstab. They are there for each other during every crisis. Even though the characters represent four very different women, they never sacrifice who they really are because someone else has a problem with it.

My sister gave me a sign for my kitchen as a gift. It's a provocatively dressed lady sitting in a bar holding a glass of wine and the writing above her head says "The sisterhood of W.I.N.E. - women in need of excitement" below that it says "Welcoming new members since the beginning of wine." It got me to thinking.

I think a lot of women are looking for the sisterhood of W.I.N.E, women in need of excitement. Women who want to get back to having girlfriends that they can talk to and laugh with. We just need to learn to do for ourselves what we have been doing for others. When my daughter went to kindergarten. She was very shy and found it hard to make friends. Every day I would tell her "To get a friend. You have to be a friend." Now I find I'm saying it to myself.

I am setting up my own sisterhood of W.I.N.E., women who get together to celebrate their accomplishments and talk about their lives at a table where they won't be judged, where they won't be talked about, where they feel welcome. Everyone is welcome. If you're interested in being in the sisterhood, let me know and I'll tell you when the next meeting is.

“They say nothing lasts forever; dreams change, trends come and go, but friendships never go out of style.” Sex and the city.