The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (5 page)

I had truly thought of myself as an independent woman. Certainly I was not outwardly submissive. I had my career, my own
life, ideas, and plans. I behaved in seemingly independent ways, but inside I was still caught in daughterhood. I was deferring to the father at the center. I operated out of a lot of assumptions and ideas, but I had no idea the extent to which my ideas were really the internalized notions of a culture that put men at the center. My independent forays and outspokenness came at emotional cost and required excessive expenditures of energy. They engendered uneasy feelings, after-the-fact worry, second-guessing, and the habit of looking over my shoulder.

Living without real inner authority, without access to my deep feminine strength, I carried around a fear of dissension, confrontation, backlash, a fear of not pleasing, not living up to sanctioned models of femininity.

Such ideas may have been barely forming in me, but they still packed a lot of feeling. A lot of confused feeling. One evening in early November while the family was eating dinner, I reminded Sandy I was going away soon to the monastery for a retreat. With me gone, he had it all—work, kids, meals, house, laundry, the whole thing.

He grimaced. He said, “I wish you weren't going.” That's what he said. Here's what I heard: Stay home. Stay put. Put me at the center of the universe and allow to happen only what honors my prime position.

“You know what?” I shouted. “I am fed up. I am just plain fed up!” Then I left the table, with Sandy, Ann, and Bob all staring at me, their forks poised in the air.

Sandy followed me into the bedroom, full of concern. “What is it? What's wrong?”

I wish I could have explained it to him then in a neat, coherent fashion, but it was so new and such a jumble inside. “I don't know,” I said. “I don't know.”

When a woman wakes up, it's not experienced in isolation. Her family, the people she's closest to, will be thrust into the experience as well, because it's not just the woman who's expecting a new life. In a way, the whole family is pregnant.

Broken Connection to the Feminine Soul

I had always prayed, though much of my prayer in the last few years had been silent meditation. One morning, though, I tried to get talkative with God, to talk to “him” about the things in my journal, the fed-up feeling, the realization that a new way of being a woman wanted to be born in me. I got nowhere. I kept wondering how “he” was going to understand this distinctly feminine experience.

I tried briefly to imagine a God like me. God as female. But it was such a foreign notion.

Now with the wisdom of hindsight, I can look back and understand what I could not really see then—that as a woman I was severed from something deep inside myself, something purely and powerfully feminine. Steeped in a faith tradition that men had named, shaped, and directed, I had no alliance with what might be called the Sacred Feminine. I had lost my connection to feminine soul.

When I use the term
feminine soul,
I'm referring to a woman's inner repository of the Divine Feminine, her deep source, her natural instinct, guiding wisdom, and power. It is everything that keeps a woman powerful and grounded in herself, complete in herself, belonging to herself, and yet connected to all that is. Connection with this inner reality is a woman's most priceless experience.

I wish someone had told me this that autumn, and I suppose that's why I'm saying it at the outset. We need to know the root problem when the awakening begins, when all is fuzzy and the feelings are confused and we find ourselves suddenly yelling across the dinner table that we are fed up. We need to know what has happened to women and to ourselves so we can find our way back to our feminine souls with as much purpose and clarity as possible.

With the connection to my feminine soul broken, I had no idea how to unfold my spiritual life in a way that was natural and genuine for women. I didn't even know there was a feminine way of being spiritual. If I had, I probably couldn't have given myself permission to embrace it. Not then.

Disconnected from my feminine soul, I had also unknowingly forfeited my power to name sacred reality. I had simply accepted what men had named. Neither had I noticed that when women give this power away, it is rarely used to liberate and restore value to women. More often it is used to shore up and enhance the privileged position of men.

In the beginnings of Christianity, church fathers debated whether women had souls at all. Later the issue became whether or not a woman's soul could be saved. Today the issue is one of women reconnecting with their souls.

To reconnect with our souls we need to claim the freedom and power to shed our conditioning, to tear out the stitches from the old fabric, and to define for ourselves who we are as women, what is sacred, and how we relate to sacred experience. When we finally do that, we will weave new lives and a new era. We will take back our souls once and for all.

This shedding and defining, this tearing out stitches and reweaving new ones became the essential work of my journey. But as author Madonna Kolbenschlag wrote, “Much testing, much reflecting, much living must intervene before we can say, ‘My soul is my own.'”
⁶

Sleep Dust

Like the Sandman from the nursery tale, who stole into children's rooms and put them to sleep by sprinkling sleep dust over them, our culture, even the culture of our faith, has helped anesthetize the feminine spirit.

I like the way Clarissa Pinkola Estés says it:

When a woman is exhorted to be compliant, cooperative, and quiet, to not make upset or go against the old guard, she is pressed into living a most unnatural life—a life that is self-blinding . . . without innovation. The world-wide issue for women is that under such conditions they are not only silenced, they are put to sleep. Their concerns, their viewpoints, their own truths are vaporized.
⁷

The sleep seems to descend on females early in life. Studies conducted by Harvard professor Carol Gilligan and Colby College
professor Lyn Mikel Brown from 1986 to 1990 have revealed that something truly phenomenal happens to girls around adolescence.
⁸
They undergo a gradual change in which they lose their feisty spirit, courage, and willingness to speak out—qualities they had known in girlhood. Around this time their truth becomes silenced, held back. They become afraid of conflict with males, because they know on some level that males hold the power. They become—perhaps forever—good little girls, settling into the clichés and limits imposed on their gender.

So sleep begins. For some it can extend throughout life as unconsciousness deepens and numbness sets in. These women lose all memory of the problem they once saw. For other women the sleep is more fitful; they sometimes glimpse the truth, but it never seems to rouse them fully. These women tend to fall back asleep when the waking state becomes threatening.

But whether our sleep is sound or partial, when we are cut off from our feminine source, from the Feminine Divine, symptoms inevitably break through.

Although outwardly appearing stable and satisfied, inwardly we may feel silenced, afraid, stuck, self-doubtful, unable to carry through with things, angry but unable to express it directly. We may grow perfectionistic and driven, but strangely at the same time we may feel powerless, without boundaries, overwhelmed with the roles we are expected to carry out. Moreover, we may harbor fears of being left alone, of risking ourselves, of conflict.

In my mid- to late thirties, before my awakening began, I was experiencing many of these symptoms. Yet I was unable to see that they were trying to tell me something, that they were voices urging me to drop deep into my own feminine nature.

Wake-Up Calls

Even on the literal level, waking was always hard for me. I have had only one nickname in my life, given to me by my brother, eleven years younger than I. He called me Sue-up, a name he made
up for me when he was a toddler and I a young adolescent. At that time I'd sleep so soundly that alarm clocks could not get through to me, and I would wake only after being shaken a half-dozen times. Each morning people in my family would go around asking, “Is Sue up?” My little brother, who was learning to speak, thought this was my name.

Now beginning to wake up at thirty-eight, I realized that once again I'd been living up to my old nickname. As a woman I'd slept so soundly that wake-up calls had not really gotten through to me. Not the feminist movement, not the marginalization of women in the church, not exclusive male language in scripture and liturgy. I had been upset and alarmed by the staggering assault on women through rape, spousal abuse, sexual abuse, harassment, and genital mutilation, but somehow this didn't initiate a full-blown awakening.

I'd been disturbed by a stream of statistics, such as four times as many girls die worldwide of malnutrition as boys because boys are preferred and given more food. Or the fact that women do two-thirds of the work in the world and receive one-tenth of the world's wages.
⁹
Or that American women earn 75 percent of what similarly employed men do and comprise only 2 percent of top management. But neither did this rouse my feminine heart in the sort of way that propels one into a life-changing journey.

The first fictional story I ever wrote was about a woman who walked in her sleep nearly every night.
¹⁰
“People deposit their misery somewhere in their body,” the character Hallie says. “Mine apparently is the sleep center of my brain.” But despite her awareness that her sleepwalking signals something wrong in her life, she refuses to face her life or her problems.

Then one night she sleepwalks outside and climbs a ladder that has been left leaning against the house. She wakes three rungs from the top, everything around her darkness and air. Frightened, she backs down and returns to her room, where she ties her arm to the bedpost, afraid she'll sleep again and wake on the roof, this time stepping off into thin air.

But even then she doesn't confront the changes she needs to make. So she walks in her sleep again, this time backing the car down the driveway and crashing into a Japanese elm. It takes the crash to wake her. She sits at the wheel, stunned, a trickle of blood on her forehead, knowing finally that she must alter the direction of her life.

Here is one of the principles of women waking: If you don't respond to the first gentle nudges, they will increase in intensity. Next you will wake up on the roof. And if you do not respond to that, there will likely be a crash. There are women who sleep through the crashes, too. I imagine by then the impulse to wake gives up and they drift into permanent hibernation.

Why in the world do women sleep through all manner of wake-up calls? I think part of it is because we use psychological sleep as a way of avoiding pain. Our choice, as Florence Nightingale put it, is between pain and paralysis. A hard one. But it's only when we are willing to see the truth about our lives as women, however painful that truth might be, that we enter the portal of the journey.

That November, two months after the dream of giving birth to myself, I had a real collision with the truth. It would be my “driveway crash.”

THE NEST OF YELLOW LEAVES

The monastery visit I'd planned was supposed to be just another routine retreat.

When I arrived dusk was falling. I strolled to the church along a sidewalk covered with so many fallen leaves that it was like walking on one long yellow carpet. I sat through vespers, listening to the monks chant the office, hopelessly trying to follow them in the prayer book but nevertheless swept into the strange beauty of the chant.

Afterward I waited outside the church for a monk named Father Paschal, who was to be my spiritual director during the re
treat. Standing ankle-deep in leaves, I watched the monks file out in their black, hooded robes, and I wondered which one Father Paschal might be. He would have no problem spotting me; I was the only female in the whole place.

Suddenly I heard a little cough behind me and, turning, saw a smiling man with shaven dark hair and round glasses. “I'm Father Paschal,” he said.

At that moment I opened my mouth and uttered what is undoubtedly the most embarrassing Freudian slip of my life. I said, “Hello, I'm Father Sue.”

He got a funny look on his face. Heat flared in my cheeks.

“Are you feeling nervous about being here?” he asked, attributing my word slip to anxiousness.

I hated to tell him that no, actually I was an old hand at monasteries. “I must be,” I said.

We chatted a while longer, though I don't recall a thing we said after that. My face stayed warm a good half hour.

Back in my room, I thought about my strange slip of the tongue. It hadn't come from nervousness like Father Paschal suggested, so why did I say that? Maybe it was an indication of just how at home I felt in monastic places, that I had become “one of them.” Sure, that's got to be it, I thought.

But some other part of me suspected the real truth, one too bitter to let in. That part in my unconscious, knowing and wise, was telling me exactly who I was identified with. It was telling me that my values, my spirituality, my way of being a woman in the world were masculine through and through. I was immersed in the world of the father.

Father Sue. I wanted to cry.

The next morning I rose and went for a walk, taking pen and journal. I walked toward a small stand of trees at the edge of the monastery, where I picked my way through young pines, half-bare maples, and bramble until I came to a small, hidden clearing.

It was wall-to-wall yellow leaves and dappled light. Impulsively I took armfuls of leaves and plumped them into a big pile
to sit on. When I finished, the mound resembled the kind of nest Big Bird of Sesame Street would require. Almost laughing, I wrote in my journal, “I'm here in the woods sitting on a big nest of leaves.”