Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd Read Free Book Online

accompanied by anger at the turn my life had taken. It was odd how abandoned I felt by the future, by my own self, by the promise of the life I’d discovered in Greece. I was not proud of any of this, how things had imploded, the way depression had taken over, how I’d retreated. My world became an unforgiving place. It scared the daylights out of me.
    I feel like a failure, I wrote in my journal. I was twenty-two.
    Luckily, I got a job as a part-time assistant to the editor of Skirt!, a local women’s magazine, which I gathered would mostly involve answering the phone and being the all-round gofer girl, a position I would begin when I returned from Greece. When I left the interview, I stopped in the salon next door and made an appointment for a haircut. A week later, in what may have been a small act of grief or a reach for newness, or maybe both, I had my long hair cut off. When Mom and I left for Greece, I looked like Tinkerbell.
    Now, here in Neverland, sitting beside the Parthenon on the same slab of marble as before, I spot my mom in the distance. She stands by the Erechtheion, taking pictures of the sculpted columns of women on the Porch of the Caryatids. She wrote about the Caryatids in her book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter . She described them as an embodiment of “strong women bearing up.” Women who bear the weight of opposition, she wrote, create a shelter for the rest of us.
    The Dance of the Dissident Daughter was published during my sophomore year in college. When I opened it and saw it was dedicated to me, I read it like a mother’s letter to her daughter, sometimes forgetting her story was being read by thousands of other people. At times it seemed beyond weird that we’d lived in the same house during those years—I’d known so little about what she’d struggled with inside. There had been hints—bits of conversation, the piles of feminist theology books that were suddenly in the house, moments when it was apparent some kind of awakening or ripening was going on in her. Mostly, though, I knew her as my mother—the one who stayed up half the night decorating my Raggedy Ann birthday cake, who indulged me by creating the Coke/ Pepsi Challenge in the kitchen for Bob and me, who helped me pick out my black cotillion dress, who taught me how to parallel park at the DMV—but when I finished Dissident Daughter , I glimpsed her, for the first time, as a woman, like one of those beautiful Caryatids she’s standing with now.
    Catching my eye, she waves and begins to wind her way toward me through the other tourists. I wonder why I can’t tell her what I’m going through. When it came to the letter back home, still in the drawer with my gym socks (why did I keep it, this evidence against myself?), certainly I didn’t think she’d reject me. Perhaps the shame of failing is not my only reason for not talking to her about it. We’ve been close since childhood, but I feel a kind of partition between us now, not anger or aloofness, but a room divider that properly marks the space: this is your territory, this is mine. I did not confide intensely personal matters to her. Are the particulars of your own darkness something you describe to your mother or your best friend?
    But it wasn’t just the darkness I secreted, was it? Why did I give her only the postcard version of my first trip to Greece? Ran a race in Olympia, visited Athena’s Tholos, saw the Charioteer, sat beside Parthenon, danced in a restaurant with some locals, bought a pretty ring . . . having a great time—wish you were here. Obviously she knew I’d been affected enough to want to spend my life teaching ancient Greek history, but I’d left her to sense for herself the deeper imprint those experiences had made on me. Maybe it was the particulars of my soul—the experiences, feelings, and inner thoughts I held close—that I kept from her.
    As I sit here, I feel the depression closing in.
    “Help me,” I pray, barely moving my