Free The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd Page A

the closest thing Christianity had to an archetype of the Feminine Divine. For many she filled the vacuum in the divine image and came to represent the feminine “side.” She was referred to as Queen of Heaven, Lady All Holy, Sovereign Mistress of the World. 26
    Yet at the same time Mary was portrayed as a humble, submissive, untainted virgin, the lowliest of handmaids whose compliant response was, “Let it be done to me according to your word,” a response women have mirrored in virtually every relationship in their lives.
    In the Baptist tradition we’d prefaced most conversations about Mary by saying, “She was just a woman, ” emphasizing her lesser place. In fact, if the Christmas story hadn’t been read once a year in the Baptist churches I’d attended, it would have been easy to forget Jesus had a mother at all.
    In the shop that day, I remembered the one and only experience with Mary I’d had as a child. I was spending the night at the home of a Catholic family, and on the mantle in the guest bedroom was a porcelain statue of Mary. Standing upon a sliver of crescent moon, she was a mystery that called up an inexplicable rush of feeling. I experienced what I suppose could be called the magnetic pull to the Feminine Divine. With a gesture of spontaneous adoration, I reached out and touched her, whispering the only words for her I knew: “Hail, Mary.”
    Later I questioned my veneration of the feminine figure. I felt as though I’d eaten a forbidden fruit. 27
    As the memory faded, I stared at the handless Mary in the picture. The omission of her hands made me wonder: Was the handless Sue I’d been drawing connected to the handless Mary? Did awounded and diminished feminine life emerge in part from a wounded and diminished Feminine Divine? Did reclaiming my feminine hands have something to do with reclaiming a feminine divinity? It was a thought wildly new to me. I could do nothing at the time but tuck it quietly away.
    I simply went on doing the only things I knew to do at this point in my waking—acknowledge and express my feminine experience as best as I could, mostly through art and journaling. And I went on saying it out loud to Betty, who received it with the tender words, “I know, Sue. All of us down deep know.”
    FACES OF DAUGHTERHOOD
    One morning when summer had nearly burned itself out, I woke to the sound of rain. I went to my study and sat before my sketches and paintings of the wounded female life—the handless, footless, mouthless women. For months I’d been acknowledging my feminine wound, but now I felt a need to let it go or at least symbolize its going in a ritual of foretelling.
    When the rain stopped, I burned the drawings one by one on the patio then stared at the heap of cinder left behind. It was this sight—the small lump of cinder and aftermath—that filled me suddenly with a need to understand how the feminine wound had affected my life. What sort of ash and fallout had it deposited? What patterns had it instilled?
    I bent down and touched the cooled cinders, letting them move through the sieve of my fingers, aware that the next part of my awakening lay in probing those questions, going even deeper into the act of naming myself. Or was it an unnaming I was about to take up? Sometimes you have to unname something before you can define it for yourself.
    The morning after I burned my pictures marked a pivotal moment in my unnaming. As I stood in the garden picking what was left of the tomatoes, an awareness splintered into my thoughts: I am grown, with children of my own. But inside I am still a daughter. A daughter is a woman who remains internally dependent, who does not shape her identity and direction as a woman, but tends to accept the identity and direction projected onto her. She tends to become the image of woman that the cultural father idealizes.
    My simple self-confession was a deceptively powerful one, for