The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd Read Free Book Online Page B

considered to be the truest book of all. A feeling of pressure built in my chest, almost the same feeling I got at the city pool when I stayed underwater too long. I looked down the pew at my mother to get her reaction. Her eyes had glazed over; she looked like she’d heard it at least five hundred times before. I looked at the other women. Same there. I wanted them to stand up and say indignantly that this wasn’t so, but none of them looked the least bit perturbed.
    My heart sank. If I could have put the feeling into words, I would have said, “God, how could you?”
    The so-called God-ordained image of female as under male, incapable, disobedient, unworthy—all of which added up to inferior—was a devastating notion to me as a girl. It snuffed out something vital, some hope for my female life.
    When I left church that day, real doubt had set in about the value of being a girl.
    Years later when I came upon some words by theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson, I felt the deep click of truth inside. She said that experiences like the one I had “give girl children from the beginning the experience of a world where the male is the norm from which her own self deviates.” 12 Over the years the idea of being “other,” of being the lesser sex, had continued to seep into me. I saw now it had penetrated the marrow of my tiniest bones. That day in the nest of leaves outside the monastery I came to know this for the first time. It was a moment of awakening. I had touched the wound of my feminine life.
    THE FEMININE WOUND
    When I returned home from the monastery, I wasn’t quite the same. Oh, I tried to be. The holiday season was coming, and I thought if I dived into it full force the pain would be forgotten. I shelved my journal. The children and I went shopping. We dragged out decorations, drove to the country, and cut greenery. We put so much evergreen in the house Sandy said it looked like we were celebrating Arbor Day. I went crazy baking things, and I don’t even like to bake. I also created new writing projects for myself. I did what I could to blot out the recognition that there was a feminine journey to be made and it was probably going to be the most arduous, most revolutionary experience of my life.
    Feminist the a logian Carol P. Christ states that a woman’s awakening begins with an “experience of nothingness.” 13 It comes as she experiences emptiness, self-negation, disillusionment, a deep-felt recognition of the limitation placed on women’s lives, especially her own.
    An experience of nothingness was what I encountered at the monastery. In tasting what it meant to be female in my culture and faith, I felt, for the first time, a hidden despair lodged inside.
    At the time I had delusions that I was probably the only woman in the world with a wound like that. Later I would be surprised to discover that most women carry this wound, though it is usually buried and unnamed. Psychotherapist Anne Wilson Schaef’s name for this wound is “the original sin of being born female.” She writes,
    To be born female in this culture means that you are born “tainted,” that there is something intrinsically wrong with you that you can never change, that your birthright is one of innate inferiority. I am not implying that this must remain so. I do believe that we must know this and understand it as a given before it can be worked through. 14
    Of course, being female is not inferior at all, but that doesn’t change the fact that women have often experienced it that way. Messages of inferiority and self-denial are passed to us all our lives,messages that we should deny our own experiences, feelings, and needs. We absorb them in an ongoing process of osmosis that creates and enlarges the wound’s core.
    Early on a girl starts to soak up the idea that she is less than boys. Not long ago my friend Betty told me about the day she and her husband walked