The Dance of the Dissident Daughter Read Online Free Page B

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.
    This female-child is the new potential we all have to become women grounded in our own souls, women who discover the Sacred Feminine way, women who let loose their strength. In the end we will reinvent not only ourselves, but also religion and spirituality as they have been handed down to us.
    Nobel Prize–winning novelist Toni Morrison wrote of her character Pilate that “when she realized what her situation in the world was . . . she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero.” 2 With her new awareness, Pilate conceived herself and birthed a new way of being woman.
    When my dream came, the potential to do the same rose up. Only it would take a long time to shed my old assumptions and begin at zero.
    THE DEEP SLEEP
    The dream left me with a vague kind of anticipation, a sense of restlessness. Two things happened as a result. First, I made plans to go away two months later for a solitary retreat at a Benedictine monastery, which I typically did when something was stirring inside. The second thing involved a journal.
    Writing is not only my career, it’s my compulsion. I keep voluminous journals, normally beginning a new one each January, so it was revealing that soon after the dream, even though it was September, even though I already had a nice journal with months of pages left, I went out and bought a new one. I bought a pink one.
    Many mornings throughout October, I sat by the windows in the den before the children awoke, before my husband, Sandy, came in and started the coffee ritual. I sat there thinking about my life as a woman.
    So much of it had been spent trying to live up to the stereotypical formula of what a woman should be—the Good Christian Woman, the Good Wife, the Good Mother, the Good Daughter—pursuing those things that have always been held out to women as ideals of femininity.
    One morning I wrote about something that had happened several months earlier. I’d been inducted into a group of women known as the Gracious Ladies. I’m not exactly sure what the criteria was, except one needed to portray certain ideals of womanhood, which included being gracious and giving of oneself unselfishly. During a high-lace ceremony, standing backstage waiting to be inducted, I felt a stab of discomfort. I thought about the meticulous way we were coiffed and dressed, the continuous smiling, the charm that fairly dripped off us, the sweet, demure way we behaved, like we were all there to audition for the Emily Post-er Child. We looked like the world’s most proper women.
    What am I doing here? I thought. Lines from the poem “Warning,” by Jenny Joseph, popped into my head and began to recite themselves.
    When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / with a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me, . . . / I shall go out in my slippers in the rain / And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens / And learn to spit. 3
    I turned to a woman beside me and said, “After we’re Gracious Ladies, does that mean we can’t wear purple with a red hat or spit?” She smiled but appeared vaguely dismayed that someone who’d managed to get into the group had just said the word spit.
    â€œIt’s from a poem,” I explained.
    â€œI see,” she said. Still smiling.
    It occurred to me on that October morning that living the female life under the archetype of Gracious Lady narrowed down the scope of it considerably. It scoured away a woman’s natural self, all the untamed juices of the female life. It would