The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read Online Free

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.
    â€œThis 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.
    â€œWomen,” 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 . . .”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œI 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