The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read online

  It was true: There had been other awakenings in my life, but no waking experience had been as passionate and life altering as this one, nor had there been another where I felt more was at stake. The female soul is no small thing. Neither is a woman’s right to define the sacred from a woman’s perspective.

  Still, the initial idea of telling my story in this book gave me pause. The hardest thing about writing is telling the truth. Maybe it’s the hardest thing about being a woman, too. I think of Nisa, an old African woman who was telling her story for the tape recorder of a writer. She said, “Fix my voice on the machine so that my words come out clear. I am an old person who has experienced many things and I have much to talk about. I will‘ tell my talk . . . but don’t let the people I live with hear what I have to say.”1 I love Nisa for that. I know that feeling. But in the end, Nisa and I told our truth anyway.

  The reason I went ahead and wrote this book is difficult to express, so I will try to explain it this way. While I was writing it, a nature show came on television, a special about whales. I watched them on the screen as they flung themselves out of the sea, arced into the air, then fell back into the water. The behavior, the narrator said, is called breaching. He also said it may be the whales’ way of communicating when the seas get high and wild. He speculated it was a tracking system for rough weather, some kind of urgent and powerful ballet that allowed the whales to follow one another’s vibrations and not get lost. With each lunge, the whales marked their course, letting the others know where they were.

  I thought to myself that women must have the whale’s instinct. When we set out on a woman’s journey, we are often swimming a high and unruly sea, and we seem to know that the important thing is to swim together—to send out our vibrations, our stories, so that no one get lost. I realized that writing my book was an act of breaching. I hoped my story might help you find or keep your bearings or encourage you to send out your own vibrations.

  In Etty Hillesum’s journal, which chronicles her life before and during her imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, I came upon a few sentences that touched me very much. Hillesum wrote,

  There is nothing else for it, I shall have to solve my own problems. I always get the feeling that when I solve them for myself I shall have solved them for a thousand other women. For that very reason I must come to grips with myself.2

  We tell our stories for ourselves, of course. But there are also those thousand other women. And yet I’m aware that no two women’s journeys into the Sacred Feminine are the same. Nor is this book, by any means, a complete picture of that journey. It is one woman sending out her own unique vibration.

  Still it’s true, I think, that when a woman offers the truth about her struggle to wake up, to grow beyond old models of womanhood and old spiritualities that no longer sustain, when she expresses what it was really like to discover and relate to the Feminine Divine, to heal feminine wounds, to unearth courage, and to reclaim her power, then women’s differences tend to give way to something more universal. Often in such stories we find a deep sameness beneath our dissimilarities. We find we are all women, and down deep we ache for what has been lost to us. We want to tell the truth about our lives, to see the truth through other women’s lives. We want to trust a Feminine Source of wisdom. We long for the whole, empowered woman who wants to be born in us.

  When we start on this journey, we discover a couple of things right away. First, the way is largely uncharted, and second, we are all we’ve got. If women don’t tell our stories and utter our truths in order to chart ways into sacred feminine experience, who will? It is stories women need. Stories give us hope, a little guidance, and a lot of bravery. That’s why I “tell my talk,” as Nisa says.

  Such journeys may be new for you; you may want to launch out into women’s spirituality, but at the same time you may feel terribly hesitant. I can only tell you, I understand this. When I began, such journeys were painfully new to me, too. You could hardly have found a more hesitant beginner or, paradoxically, a more eager one. This book will walk you through the journey. It will illumine the passages. It may even hold your hand a little. My hope is that the book will be an opening for you, that it will reassure and challenge you at the same time. I even dare to hope that something in these pages will make a tiny explosion in your heart and that you will see the thing you’ve hungered for all along as a woman. Above all, take what seems yours to take, and leave the rest.

  Or, such journeys may not be new to you. You may be in the midst of your own transformation. You may already be exploring a Sacred Feminine dimension. You may be fully engaged in a struggle to exit patriarchy and come into your own as a woman, grappling with how your life is changed. In that case, this book is meant to offer you clarity and nurture. It is meant to be a companion to you. It should provide new markers, passages, insights, questions, motivations, inspiration, boldness, and meaning.

  And there may be some of you who have already made your great transition. Maybe you have journeyed deep and long to the Sacred Feminine. I’m hoping that this book will open up some new avenues of experience and empowerment, just as I’m sure—if I were able to hear your story—that your journey would give me brand-new ways of expanding and understanding my own. I hope, too, that the book will encourage you to find new ways to offer your experience to other women.

  In the end, no matter where you are in the spectrum of women’s spirituality, I invite you to weave new connections to your female soul. For always, always, we are waking up and then waking up some more.

  SUE MONK KIDD

  1996

  PART ONE

  Awakening

  I was trying . . . to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep the nightmare out.

  Anne Sexton

  If we do not want to change and develop, then we might as well remain in a deathlike sleep.

  Bruno Bettelheim

  Woman is as common as a loaf of bread, and like a loaf of bread will rise.

  From a wall poster

  “THAT’S HOW I LIKE TO SEE A WOMAN”

  It was autumn, and everything was turning loose. I was running errands that afternoon. Rain had fallen earlier, but now the sun was out, shining on the tiny beads of water that clung to trees and sidewalks. The whole world seemed red and yellow and rinsed with light. I parked in front of the drugstore where my daughter, Ann, fourteen, had an after-school job. Leaping a puddle, I went inside.

  I spotted her right away kneeling on the floor in the toothpaste section, stocking a bottom shelf. I was about to walk over and say hello when I noticed two middle-aged men walking along the aisle toward her. They looked like everybody’s father. They had moussed hair, and they wore knit sportshirts the color of Easter eggs, the kind of shirts with tiny alligators sewn at the chest. It was a detail I would remember later as having ironic symbolism.

  My daughter did not see them coming. Kneeling on the floor, she was intent on getting the boxes of Crest lined up evenly. The men stopped, peering down at her. One man nudged the other. He said, “Now that’s how I like to see a woman—on her knees.”

  The other man laughed.

  Standing in the next aisle, I froze. I watched the expression that crept into my daughter’s eyes as she looked up. I watched her chin drop and her hair fall across her face.

  Seeing her kneel at these men’s feet while they laughed at her subordinate posture pierced me through.

  For the previous couple of years I had been in the midst of a tumultuous awakening. I had been struggling to come to terms with my life as a woman—in my culture, my marriage, my faith, my church, and deep inside myself. It was a process not unlike the experience of conception and labor. There had been a moment, many moments really, when truth seized me and I “conceived” myself as woman. Or maybe I reconceived myself. At any rate, it had been extraordinary and surprising to find myself—a conventionally religiou
s woman in my late thirties—suddenly struck pregnant with a new consciousness, with an unfolding new awareness of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be spiritual as a woman.

  Hard labor had followed. For months I’d inched along, but lately I’d been stuck. I’d awakened enough to know that I couldn’t go back to my old way of being a woman, but the fear of going forward was paralyzing. So I’d plodded along, trying to make room for the new consciousness that was unfolding in my life but without really risking change.

  I have a friend, a nurse on the obstetrical floor at a hospital, who says that sometimes a woman’s labor simply stalls. The contractions grow weak, and the new life, now quite distressed, hangs precariously. The day I walked into the drugstore, I was experiencing something like that. A stalled awakening.

  Who knows, I may have stalled interminably if I had not seen my daughter on her knees before those laughing men. I cannot to this day explain why the sight of it hit me so forcibly. But to borrow Kafka’s image, it came like an ice ax upon a frozen sea, and suddenly all my hesitancy was shattered. Just like that.

  The men’s laughter seemed to go on and on. I felt like a small animal in the road, blinded by the light of a truck, knowing some terrible collision is coming but unable to move. I stared at my daughter on her knees before these men and could not look away. Somehow she seemed more than my daughter; she was my mother, my grandmother, and myself. She was every woman ever born, bent and contained in a small, ageless cameo that bore the truth about “a woman’s place.”

  In the profile of my daughter I saw the suffering of women, the confining of the feminine to places of inferiority, and I experienced a collision of love and pain so great I had to reach for the counter to brace myself.

  This posture will not perpetuate itself in her life, I thought.

  Still I didn’t know what to do. When I was growing up, if my mother had told me once, she’d told me a thousand times, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” I’d heard this from nearly everybody. It was the kind of thing that got cross-stitched and hung in kitchens all over my native South.

  I’d grown up to be a soft-voiced, sweet-mouthed woman who, no matter how assailing the behavior before me or how much I disagreed with it, responded nicely or else zip-locked my mouth shut. I had swallowed enough defiant, disputatious words in my life to fill a shelf of books.

  But it occurred to me that if I abandoned my daughter at that moment, if I simply walked away and was silent, the feminine spirit unfolding inside her might also become crouched and silent. Perhaps she would learn the internal posture of being on her knees.

  The men with their blithe joke had no idea they had tapped a reservoir of pain and defiance in me. It was rising now, unstoppable by any earthly force.

  I walked toward them. “I have something to say to you, and I want you to hear it,” I said.

  They stopped laughing. Ann looked up.

  “This is my daughter,” I said, pointing to her, my finger shaking with anger. “You may like to see her and other women on their knees, but we don’t belong there. We don’t belong there!”

  Ann rose to her feet. She glanced sideways at me, sheer amazement spread over her face, then turned and faced the men. I could hear her breath rise and fall with her chest as we stood there shoulder to shoulder, staring at their faces.

  “Women,” one of them said. They walked away, leaving Ann and me staring at each other among the toothpaste and dental floss.

  I smiled at her. She smiled back. And though we didn’t say a word, more was spoken between us in that moment than perhaps in our whole lives.

  I left the drugstore that day so internally jolted by the experience that everything in me began to shift. I sat in the car feeling like a newborn, dangled upside down and slapped.

  Throughout my awakening, I’d grown increasingly aware of certain attitudes that existed in our culture, a culture long dominated by men. The men in the drugstore had mirrored one attitude in particular, that of seeking power over another, of staying up by keeping others down.

  Sitting in my car replaying my statement back to those men—that women did not belong on their knees—I knew I had uttered my declaration of intent.

  That night Ann came to my room. I was sitting in bed reading. She climbed up beside me and said, “Mama, about this afternoon in the drugstore . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “I just wanted to say, thanks.”

  CONCEIVING THE FEMININE SELF

  Poet Maxine Kumin wrote, “When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, she is almost fifty years old.”1 I wasn’t fifty when my awakening began, but I was nearing forty. I’d lived just long enough for the bottom to start falling out of my notions of womanhood.

  It all started when I was thirty-eight, two years before I walked into the drugstore. I was a full-time writer, spending many hours immersed in books. I lived in a nice house with a man I’d been married to for eighteen years, and we had two children, Bob and Ann, both in early adolescence. I went to church regularly and was involved in the social life of the small, Southern town where we lived. The last thing I expected was an encounter with feminist spirituality.

  Feminist. What a word to deal with. I felt a secret sympathy for the underlying cause of feminism—what it might do for women—but I was uncomfortable with the word, uncomfortable with the images it carried. Overall, I’d kept a discreet distance from it. In fact, if there had been a contest for Least Likely to Become a Feminist, I probably could have made the finals on image alone.

  But then one September night, I fell asleep and dreamed a momentous dream:

  While sitting on the sand at the edge of the ocean, I am amazed to see that I am nine months pregnant and starting labor. I look around for help, but I am on an island by myself. Well, I think, I’ll just have to deliver the baby myself. As the labor begins, I rub my abdomen and breathe deeply. I scoop up water as the waves flow ashore and bathe my abdomen and face. The pain comes and goes. Sometimes I cry and feel I might faint, but then the pain subsides. Finally I start to push. I give birth to a healthy baby girl. I hold her up, laughing with joy. I bring her close and look into her eyes. I am shocked to see I have given birth to myself, that I am the baby and the mother both.

  I woke abruptly. You know how some dreams are so vivid you have to spend a few moments after you wake assuring yourself it didn’t really happen? That’s how I felt, like I needed to look around in the sheets for a newborn. I felt awed, like something of import and worthy of great reverence had taken place.

  For years I’d written down my dreams, believing, as I still do, that one of the purest sources of knowledge about our lives comes from the symbols and images deep within. So, being careful not to wake my husband, I slipped out of bed, crept through the darkness into my study, and wrote down the dream.

  At breakfast I took my tea to the patio and stared at the morning, wondering about this baby girl who was myself. What new potential did she represent? Who would she grow up to be? The dream was a mystery in many ways, but somehow I knew clearly that it was about my life as a woman.

  Despite that realization, it didn’t quite sink in that this dream was signaling the beginning of a profound new journey. I didn’t know then that the child in the dream would turn my world upside down. That she would eventually change every fundamental relationship in my life: my way of being religious and spiritual, my way of being a woman in the world, my marriage, my career, and my way of relating to other women, to the earth, and even to myself.

  At forty (or sometimes thirty or sixty), women grow ripe for feminist spiritual conception. By then we’ve been around long enough to grow disenchanted with traditional female existence, with the religious experience women have been given to live out.

  Nearing forty, I needed to rethink my life as a “man-made woman.” To take back my soul. Gradually I began to see what I hadn’t seen before, to feel things that until then had never dared to enter my heart. I became aware that as a w
oman I’d been on my knees my whole life and not really known it. Most of all, I ached for the woman in me who had not yet been born, though I couldn’t have told you then the reason for the ache.

  When this disenchantment, this ripeness, begins, a woman’s task is to conceive herself. If she does, the spark of her awakening is struck. And if she can give that awakening a tiny space in her life, it will develop into a full-blown experience that one day she will want to mark and celebrate.

  Conception, labor, and birthing—metaphors thick with the image and experiences of women—offer a body parable of the process of awakening. The parable tells us things we need to know about the way awakening works—the slow, unfolding, sometimes hidden, always expanding nature of it, the inevitable queasiness, the need to nurture and attend to what inhabits us, the uncertainty about the outcome, the fearful knowing that once we bring the new consciousness forth, our lives will never be the same. It tells us that and more.

  I’ve given birth to two children, but bringing them into the world was a breeze compared to birthing myself as woman. Bringing forth a true, instinctual, powerful woman who is rooted in her own feminine center, who honors the sacredness of the feminine, and who speaks the feminine language of her own soul is never easy. Neither is it always welcomed. I discovered that few people will rush over to tie a big pink bow on your mailbox.

  Yet there is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming. But more than that, birthing the kind of woman who can authentically say, “My soul is my own,” and then embody it in her life, her spirituality, and her community is worth the risk and hardship.

  Today, eight years after my waking began, I realize that the women who are bringing about this kind of new female life are brand new beings among us. I keep meeting them; I keep hearing their stories. They confirm my own experience, that somewhere along the course of a woman’s life, usually when she has lived just long enough to see through some of the cherished notions of femininity that culture holds out to her, when she finally lets herself feel the limits and injustices of the female life and admits how her own faith tradition has contributed to that, when she at last stumbles in the dark hole made by the absence of a Divine Feminine presence, then the extraordinary thing I’ve been telling you about will happen. This woman will become pregnant with herself, with the symbolic female-child who will, if given the chance, grow up to reinvent the woman’s life.