The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (30 page)

Healing came for me as I integrated images of a strong, powerful, compassionate Feminine Being, one who was creating the universe, creating Herself, birthing new life, and holding everything in being. For me this was the most significant factor in creating a restoration of feminine value, dignity, and power inside—seeing female as
imago dei,
the image of the Divine, revealed now through women just as it had been revealed all these centuries through men. It was the return of my feminine birthright.

Over the altar in my study I hung a lovely mirror sculpted in the shape of a crescent moon. It reminded me to honor the Divine Feminine presence in myself, the wisdom in my own soul. Sometimes when I peer in it I can see myself just as I looked in the mirror in my dream.

The Matryoshka doll found a place on my altar. Eventually, though, she came to represent not only the Divine Feminine at the core of a woman but also the line of mothers I came from. Poet Adrienne Rich has pointed out how little the mother-daughter connection has been emphasized in patriarchy. And as Carol P. Christ said, Christianity has celebrated the father's relationship to the son, even the mother's relationship to the son, but the story of the mother and daughter is missing.

The Matryoshka doll made me want to discover and celebrate my mother-daughter story. In my family it had always seemed to me that the line of father and son was paramount—the passing down of the male name, the male line. As the first child and only daughter with three brothers the importance of being a male was rarely lost on me.

My parents welcomed me as a girl and loved me, resoundingly so. Yet, strangely, I'd had vague feelings that on some unspoken level I'd been a disappointment by showing up as a girl, especially
since I was the first child. So many times I'd heard people speak of the perfect family as having a boy first, then a girl. As a child in Sunday school, I'd soaked up Old Testament stories about the firstborn male receiving the birthright. That, along with the cultural negation of females in general and the historical imprint of preference for sons, formed an idea in me that while girls may be “sugar and spice and everything nice,” boys were the most desired, especially as the first child.

The story I am about to tell relates a small thing, and yet it captures the subtle distinctions I felt growing up female. In my paternal grandmother's house were many treasures: several marble tables, an antique hat rack, bookshelves with glass panes, a marvelous old Victrola, and, treasure of treasures, a massive roll-top desk of oak that smelled like lemon seed oil. It was a desk with secret nooks and crannies that I loved to explore. I would find silver dollars and caramels and cans of Prince Albert pipe tobacco that smelled like my grandfather. For a girl who loved books and writing and secret places to put my words, the desk was an icon of the creative life, and I wanted it for myself.

One day I heard my grandmother talking about who would receive various things after she and my grandfather were gone. She named a couple of things designated for “the first male child,” one who carried on the Monk name.

My heart sank a little, but then I thought, Aren't I the first female child? So I got up my courage. I crossed my fingers behind my back. “What about the desk?” I asked. “Who will get it?”

“That will go to the first male child,” she said and seeing my disappointment added, “But don't worry, you'll get something special, too.” She took me by the hand into the dining room and presented me with her antique hutch full of plates and platters.

That's when I knew for sure there was no such thing as the first female child.

That memory had always been strong in me, and it came back at times when I gazed at the Matryoshka doll on my altar. Here, I would think, looking at her, is an image that honors the motherline.

As Christmas came around, I went back to the shop and bought two more Matryoshka dolls—one for my mother and one for her mother, my ninety-five-year-old grandmother whose name, like mine, is Sue. I wrote each of them a letter to accompany the dolls. “Long ago you used to give me dolls for Christmas. Now I would like to give you one.”

I wrote to them about our unfolding line of mothers and daughters. How we'd nested in one another and birthed one another. I told them we were connected not only through blood, tissue, and female likeness, but through feminine heart, memory, and soul. I spoke of the mystery of being inseparable but separate. I was thinking of the dolls but also of Jung's words: “Every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.”
⁵⁸

I also wrote about the endless renewal symbolized in the dolls, the ongoing transformation contained in us. I told them this doll even suggested the image of a Divine Feminine Source birthing and containing us all.

Several months after Christmas, I went to Georgia to visit my maternal grandmother Sue on her ninety-sixth birthday. She had broken her hip a couple of years earlier and didn't get around very well, but her mind and spirit were sharp. She took my hand and pointed to the Matryoshka doll I'd given her.

It had been opened so that each doll stood in a tilting line across the top of a table. “The first doll is Roxie,” she said, naming her mother. “And the next doll is her daughter, which is me. And then my daughter, Leah, then her daughter, which is you, and then your daughter, Ann.” One tiny doll remained. She picked it up and held it in her palm. “And this is the daughter who isn't yet born.”

She was looking at me while she spoke, and it seemed to me she knew everything I'd ever felt about growing up female. She said, “When you were born, I looked through the nursery glass and I said, ‘Oh good, it's a girl—a little girl!'”

I smiled, and she opened her arms to me.

I think when I'm very old, if someone asks me which moment of my life stands out as the most loving, I will tell about this one.

“It's a Girl!”

When I was in Crete I found myself in the Skoteino Cave, having an experience similar to the one with my grandmother.

As I wrote earlier, going into the dark of that cave, named for Skoteini, Goddess of the Dark, had been a parable of what it's like to grope our way into the unexplored gorge. But I learned other lessons as well after we blew out our candles and sat on the cave floor.

I was leaning against a huge stalagmite, seeing nothing, but I could smell the wetness in the air. The rocks beneath me were slick with calcareous water. The only sound was dripping, rhythmic as a heartbeat.

I was thinking how in ancient times caves were known as wombs of the earth, and I began to feel that not just I but all of us were gathered there inside Herself, waiting to be born in some new way.

Finally we lit our candles and moved back single file along the narrow passage of rock, climbing up and out. Because the rocks were slippery and the passage steep, the way was treacherous. In some places, for instance, we had to hug the wall and maneuver along skinny ledges, and in one downright awesome place we had to slide slowly on our bottoms along a chute of rock with a precipice on each side.

After a while I noticed the air grew lighter. Looking up, I saw a circle of light above, streaming in milky rays into the tunnel. Something about seeing the opening of that cave excited a burst of energy in me, and I hurried toward it.

A couple of others who'd already emerged stood at the entrance, and as I came out, they began to clap and exclaim, “Oh look, wonderful! It's a girl! It's a girl!” It became every woman's greeting as she emerged.

I stood there feeling infinitely welcome in the world. I was remembering, too, my grandmother who'd opened her arms to me and said nearly these same words. Only now it seemed the valuing of my feminine life was coming from the Great Mother Herself.

Two days later we visited two other caves. The first was known as the birthplace of Zeus. After winding through it, we found a private grotto nearby and made a small altar on one of the stones. According to the Greek custom, we poured water, wine, and milk on the altar. The milk, however, poured out in soured clots. Along the way it had spoiled. It prompted us to talk about the ways that “mother's milk” had gone sour in our own lives. We spoke about the difficulties, betrayals, and pain we'd experienced with our mothers.

Some of the women's experiences with their mothers were so decimating that these women had had terrible difficulty embracing the notion of a Divine Mother. As they told their stories, it became clear that when the idea of the feminine is mediated to daughters through mothers who uphold patriarchal values, who are severed from their own feminine ground, and who are driven by their own inner bishops, the daughters will have to redefine the feminine.

A mother may unconsciously inflict her inner bishop on her daughter, communicating the message that she's not good enough, capable enough, or pretty enough, driving her daughter toward perfection. At the same time the mother may be cautioning her daughter not to overstep conventional bounds, not to rock boats but to be a good patriarchal daughter. The mother is reflecting not a conscious feminine but a negative feminine that is reflected in passivity, inertia, inferiority, and dependency.

Others of us had not experienced such devastating relationships with our mothers while growing up, but instead, seeing the autonomy that was the prerogative of males, we had identified with our fathers and disidentified with our mothers.

Either way, it was only now as we made our journeys back to authentic feminine ground that we could appreciate and forgive
their wounds and deficits, their aches and struggles to be themselves in a culture that was arranged against them.

Later that same day we entered the second cave, known as Trapeza. Here we sat in a small room and honored our motherlines. We called the names of our mothers, going back as far as we were able. The cave filled and echoed with dozens of female names. “I am Sue, daughter of Leah, who is daughter of Sue, who is daughter of Roxie, . . .” I said when my turn came, and I felt the connection to my mothers quicken inside.

The feeling was still with me a couple of days later as we hiked through the gorge at Zakros. It was steep, rocky terrain, and we went singing verses of a song called “Mountain Mother.” Deep in the gorge we came upon a large stone that bore an uncanny resemblance to a great armchair with large, rolling arms and a wide, hollowed-out seat. Stopping beside it, I recalled the picture of the
Cartoon of St. Anne,
the dream of the
Pietá,
the image of the Great Lap. I felt I'd come upon the lap again, this time in Crete. The lap of the Mountain Mother.

One by one we sat in it. When it was my turn, I could think of nothing but the names of our mothers that we had recited in the Trapeza cave: Leah, Sue, Roxie, and all the others. There are moments when love moves out of the abstract and becomes a real thing, sudden in your chest, and I felt it there, sitting in the lap of the Mother and all my mothers. I felt healed.

Someone took my picture, which sits today on my desk. A dark-haired woman wearing a red baseball-style cap is beaming all over.

My mother knew I'd gone on a Goddess tour to Crete. Also, some time before departing, I'd given her a copy of an essay I'd written entitled “Going Back for Mary.” The premise of it was that when the Goddess disappeared, Mary had in some ways carried on the Feminine Divine for us. The first time I saw my mother after arriving back home was Christmas. She handed me a small box wrapped in silver paper, then stood nearby watching as I opened it. Inside was a small pewter statue of Mary.

When I looked up, Mother was smiling. I carry that picture of her in my mind; it is the one I will always keep and cherish, because for the first time, I knew—I really knew—that she understood. It was as if she had given me her blessing. She was my mother, but she was also a woman like myself. I smiled back at her, and my eyes filled with tears.

TRANSFIGURING ANGER

Back during my awakening I'd learned to recognize my anger and allow it to have its place. I had stopped treating injustice against half the human population as a misdemeanor. Inside of me there had been a firestorm, and it had needed to be there for a while. It had opened my eyes, seared my heart, ignited my passion, and steepened my fierceness. But later, as I moved into other passages of the journey, especially the healing, I knew the anger would have to be healed along with other parts of me. It would have to be transfigured.

By transfiguring anger, I don't mean that we wave a placating wand and poof! anger disappears. Nor do I mean that anger is turned into sweet resignation. By healing or transfiguring it, I mean to imply, in Clarissa Pinkola Estés's words, that anger becomes “a fire that cooks things rather than a fire of conflagration.”
⁵⁹
A conflagration may embolden and impassion you for a while, but if you get stuck in it, it can burn you up. A fire that cooks things, however, can feed you and a whole lot of other people.

During my awakening, for a period of time the church had become a flash point for my anger. At the core of the feminine wound is betrayal, and the more we've trusted and invested in a relationship, the deeper the feeling of betrayal will be. When it came to the church, I'd trusted much and invested much. But gradually as episodes of healing took place, I began to move beyond reacting and blaming. Instead of simmering over patriarchal structures and wounds and acts of injustice, I started to respond
creatively. I began to redirect the energy toward writing, imagining, speaking out, and empowering other women.

The transfiguration of anger is a movement
from rage to outrage.
Rage implies an internalized emotion, a tempest within. Rage, or what might be called untransfigured anger, can become a calcified bitterness. What rage wants and needs is to move outward toward positive social purpose, to become a creative force or energy that changes the conditions that created it. It needs to become out-rage.