The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (21 page)

“You're outgrowing the old way,” she said. “You're being asked to create from your feminine soul.”

What flickered unbidden through my mind was a desire I'd harbored from the inception of my writing life, the desire to write fiction, something that had always seemed a remote and implausible prospect.

I would have to start over. I would lose so much—speaking engagements, money, safety, security. I felt like Jo in
Little Women
when she realizes that what she is writing is no longer from the purity of her soul and she mutters, “I almost wish I hadn't any conscience, it's so inconvenient!”
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Besides, there were no guarantees that if I gave all that up, I could succeed with fiction or any other sort of writing. I was starting to realize that in some ways my career as it was had become my
identity, and as such it seemed impossible to shed. “I don't know if I can do it,” I told her.

Then, for the first time, I heard a sharp edge enter her voice. She looked at me solemnly, sternly and asked, “Do you have anything to say to your generation of women or not?”

Inside me something gave way and let go. Her words became tiny keys unlocking the place inside where I'd been trapped. It still amazes me how this process works—the key words from the enabling person, coming at the height of our readiness, after we've tried so long to pick the lock ourselves, enter the lock with a resounding click!

Late that same afternoon I took my journal to the patio and wrote:

Why didn't I see this before? That my creative life is my deepest prayer. That I must pray it from my heart, from my soul. Not from my head or my need for security or approval or to gain some sort of repute.

What did she say to me? I must write from the Self. The deep and true place. Not from the ego.

And now, oddly, there is something inside me, something thick, full, and chaotic like water just before it boils. Write your personal story, it tells me. Write your female experience, but go deeper, further. Write unbarred, untethered. Say what you want and need to say. Forget selling the words or pleasing.
Just do it.

Just do it. The words sound so wise, so simple, even if they are from a Nike ad. But I remember that long before Nike was a shoe company, there was Nike, Goddess of Victory.

There is this other clamoring in me, too. The desire I've carried around but never dared. The thing I thought I could never do. Now here it is. The urge to create characters and stories. The ones that are mine to tell. Fiction, the passion tells me. Fiction.

So my thread is spinning new courses. And my thread, like my dreams, never lies, never leads me astray. Still I cannot stop thinking how brave I will have to be to follow it.

Rebirth was happening slowly in other ways, too.

The Many-Breasted Mother was starting to decay in earnest. I remember an utterly simple moment when I felt her going and something new rising to fill her place.

I was standing in my son's room, putting a stack of clean clothes on top of his dresser. I looked at his high school picture wedged between the old soccer trophies, and I thought—no, I didn't think, I knew:
Their lives are theirs to live. My life is mine to live.

That's all, just this thought that swept through me and changed my mental landscape. I felt as if I'd been released. I sat on my son's bed just taking it in.

When I stood up, I no longer had that bittersweet need inside that mothers know so well, the one driven by love and nurture gone overboard, that need to bend, spindle, and spread ourselves over the lives of our children as if we are the St. Louis Gateway Arch. I felt it go—the need to oversee and manage all the aspects of their lives. The need to work constantly, relentlessly to make them into happy people and their world into a perfect place. As if they had little steering wheels protruding from their backs and it was my job to drive their lives around, never taking my hands off the wheel for fear they would bump into something, get lost, rear-end things, run a caution light, show up late, miss the destination.

Ultimately I was not responsible for the living of their lives. They were at the helm of their own lives, and I was suddenly willing to let that be—to let them pilot their courses, make their mistakes, learn their lessons, choose their roads, and take on for themselves the job of being human.

Somehow I think this deep release needs to take place before a Many-Breasted Mother can take up her own life fully. Released of the need to oversee, overnurture, and overmanage, a woman's life becomes newly her own.

The demise of my Secondary Partner had been going on for some time now as Sandy and I renovated our marriage. There were many renewals, but I particularly remember one small event that took place that same spring. Betty and I decided to travel to Santa Fe for a week. Just two female friends leaving husbands at home and taking off on vacation. “Spontaneous adventure,” we called it.

At an earlier time in our marriage such a trip would not have been considered. Today it seems like such a small thing, but at the
time making that choice and carrying it out was an initiation in itself. In a symbolic way it marked the end of an old way of being married and signaled the beginning of a new autonomy. In New Mexico Betty and I hiked mountains, explored gorges, and tramped around in the desert. Left to ourselves, we became downright plucky. In town we bought audacious straw hats, stuck big feathers in them, and wore them everywhere, laughing at our reflections in store windows. I noticed we walked differently in those hats; we went just where we wanted to go, and we went with our chins flung back. We had caught the spirit of belonging to ourselves. And when we got off the plane back home, still wearing those hats, our husbands, who'd come to meet us, looked at us then at each other. “I see you had fun,” Sandy said, smiling.

Rather than dilute our relationship, the freedom I was claiming helped solidify it. For in the long run, when a woman breaks out of boxes that have limited her, when she sets her plucky self free and begins to nourish and enrich herself, her relationships are nourished and enriched as well. In fact, Sandy seemed to
like
the woman who climbed mountains and wore the audacious hat.

With that experience more than any other, I felt the crumbling of the old patriarchal foundation our marriage had rested upon in such hidden and subtle ways. Though both of us would always need to compromise, there was no more sacrificing myself, no more revolving around him, no more looking to him for validation, trying to be what I thought he needed me to be. My life, my time, my decisions became newly my own.

The Silent Woman inside began to slowly unmuzzle herself. I first recognized her rebirth when I spoke at a conference for church women. I planned to give a speech I'd delivered several times before, and the evening before, hunched over a little desk in my guest room, I pulled out my notes and read over them.

This isn't my real voice
, I thought. This voice belongs to a woman speaking the father tongue, a woman stifling her deeper truths, a woman interested in being safe and approved of. The real stuff was silenced.

I went to the window and gazed at the grounds of the conference center sloping down to the banks of a river. I was groping around for courage.

I went back to the desk, took a red pen in my hand, and struck out sentences. I wrote furiously between the lines, up the margins, on the back of the paper, writing things that came from my soul, truths I'd never dared, words about women in search of their souls, about the Feminine Divine.

To show you what a grand humor the dream-voice can have, that night I dreamed I was staring at a picture of Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen who was known for her unusually long and beautiful neck. The picture accentuated the elongation of her neck, and I was struck by how unique and magnificent it was. I stretched out my own neck and was startled as it, too, lengthened.

I woke laughing at the image, thinking, Yeah, I'm about to stick my neck out, all right. But it's okay, even beautiful. I broke my silence before five hundred women. Not all of them were happy about that. In fact, a few were so distressed they organized a letter-writing campaign to me and to one of the magazines I wrote for, expressing their anger. Dozens of letters poured in. One suggested that I was a “dangerous woman.”
A dangerous woman.
I smile every time I think of it. The writer did not mean it as a compliment, but I took it that way. I remembered the old woman who told me that one day we may all owe our survival to subversive women. Dangerous ones, too, I thought.

I fell into a soup of controversy. I had to swim my way out or sink. At first I felt overwhelmed, lamenting the loss of support and approval. But as the blow wore off, I experienced the freedom and enlargement that comes from unsilencing the feminine soul, from being true to myself.

But perhaps the most vibrant rebirth going on inside me was the transformation of the Church Handmaid. My thread had already lead me away from the religious collective, away from its projections about what a Favored Daughter of the Church ought to do and be. And I was fretting less over what friends and family would think.

I was also beginning to name my own spiritual meaning. Already I had named a myth that could hold a feminine spiritual process, claiming the thing most denied to Church Handmaids—the creation of spiritual myth, symbol, and meaning. But mostly I sensed rebirth as my heart opened wider toward the Divine Feminine presence.

Landing on Naxos

In June Sandy and I flew to London to spend a week. As we were wandering through the National Gallery, we came unexpectedly upon Titian's gargantuan painting of Ariadne on the island of Naxos. The painting portrays the final part of Ariadne's myth, and I played it back in my mind as I gazed at the picture.

Before Theseus had entered the labyrinth, he had promised to take Ariadne with him when he escaped, a promise she'd extracted in exchange for the ball of thread. When the Minotaur has been slain, they flee the realm of King Minos together. Ariadne, defying her father, leaves her old life forever.

They sail to the island of Naxos, where they stop for the night. The next morning, however, when Ariadne wakes she discovers that Theseus has sailed on without her. She is alone in a strange place.

But something dramatic is about to happen, and the painting captures it perfectly. It shows Ariadne standing desolate on the shore, watching Theseus's ship disappear on the horizon. Her hand is reaching out toward the ship, but her head is turned back toward the island as she is startled in midgesture by the sudden arrival of the Greek god Dionysus.

He is leaping from his chariot to console and love her. Ariadne's face registers surprise, her lips parted as if saying, “Oh my! What's this?” It's obvious that the ship receding into the distance is her past and that in turning to meet the gaze of Dionysus, she is meeting her future.

The myth tells us that the two marry and create a deep and lasting love, that Dionysus gives her a crown as a sign of his devo
tion. She goes on to become leader of the annual sacred dance performed by the maenads, the dancing women who honor Dionysus. Along with him, she becomes enshrined in the Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii as the overseer of women's mysteries, to be known as the wise mentor who initiates women into the feminine journey.

But what did all of this signify in the life and journey of a woman like me? I'd focused mainly on the stages of the myth that lead a woman out of the father-world and through the labyrinth, meditating little on Ariadne's arrival in Naxos. But now, confronted unexpectedly with that part of the story, I went and sat on a nearby bench and tried to sort out the meaning.

I recalled that one of the dangers in leaving the realm of the old king is that in our desperation and pain we will create a savior “out there” because we cannot recognize our own strength, daring, creativity, and power. So if, like Ariadne, we find some external Theseus on whom to project the savior role, we will eventually face a moment of truth.

Theseus's leaving suggested to me that the last of a woman's dependence on male deliverers must be stripped away. She needs to see that the external Theseus is really an extension of the patriarchal father—another male figure upon whom she's dependent.

Theseus's departure forces a woman back completely upon herself. She learns that to become fully reconnected with her feminine soul, the projection must be withdrawn. Now she must set about the business of discovering
within herself
the daring, hero strength she saw in Theseus. In doing this, she renders herself independent of patriarchal values and judgments.

So here is Ariadne on Naxos—abandoned to herself, abandoned to new possibility.

But whatever could the arrival of Dionysus imply for a woman? I got up from the bench and wandered back to the book shop in the National Gallery, where I picked up a book on mythology. I leafed through the index for Dionysus. I was not surprised to find that he was the god of women, a god close to and inclusive of the
feminine. One of the animals he was associated with was the snake—often a symbol of the Divine Feminine. Jean Shinoda Bolen indicates that as Dionysus traveled through Greece in his mythological travels, he called women away from their household hearths and looms, liberating them from conventional, narrow roles.
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He was also the god of dance, joy, creativity, spirit, and wine, the god of ecstasy.

I walked back to the painting. As I looked at the figure of Dionysus, it hit me that, unlike Theseus, who was a mortal man in the myth, Dionysus was an immortal god. In other words, he symbolized an inner figure. He represented something Ariadne must find
within.
As Jungian analyst Nancy Qualls-Corbett points out, at this point in a woman's life, she can begin to appreciate the strength of the god within, who emerges at this crucial point without threatening her budding connection to her feminine nature.
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