The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd

come home.
    My favorite scene is when her husband arrives in Greece in order to try to reconcile their lives. She waits for him at a table by the sea, watching him trudge up the hill. He passes her, then turns back. “I didn’t recognize you,” he said.
    â€œI know,” she tells him. “I used to be the mother. I used to be the wife. But now I’m Shirley Valentine.”
    That morning as I lay in bed watching my husband sleep, I yearned to transform the model of our marriage, to find my unused life, which is the work a Secondary Partner will need to do. I needed to find the woman I’d left behind and to challenge the conventional orbits of my relationship. But if I did all that, what would happen to my marriage? Could it sustain that sort of transformation? I had my qualms about it.
    The Many-Breasted Mother
    Another blueprint given to women, the Many-Breasted Mother, is one of the more revered. The image came to me as I watched a peculiar sight on the television news, an overwhelmed mother dog nursing a small litter of newborn kittens along with her own brood of pups. The kittens had been brought to her when their mother died. The mother dog lay sprawled on her side overrun with mouths, some that naturally belonged to her and some that didn’t. “Poor thing, all she seems to do all day long is nurse something,” said the owner.
    Women have been encouraged to embrace the all-nurturing (many-breasted) role of womanhood as the jewel in the female crown. And while mothering can be a deeply beautiful role, it can also become distorted by self-negation. The Many-Breasted Mother ends up caring for an array of children, including projects, needs, groups, and persons, that may not even belong at her breast.
    I remembered a verse I’d scrawled once when my children were small and I was feeling engulfed by the role of mother:
    Priestess of dutiful sacrament.
    You knead your soul into bread.
    You serve it on a silver tray,
    Bright morsels for your family to eat.
    Aren’t you hungry too?
    Even as my children grew and became teens, many times my role as nurturer allowed the very essence of my life to be overrun and eaten away. Sadly, I know women who keep doing this even after their children have grown and left home.
    When my Many-Breasted Mother really kicked in, I even found myself taking care of my husband. I would be sure he ate well, encourage him to exercise, make sure he had a shirt ironed for his meeting, table my issues to soothe his bad mood.
    Women have been trained to be deeply relational creatures with “permeable boundaries,” which make us vulnerable to the needs of others. 36 This permeability, this compelling need to connect, is one of our greatest gifts, but without balance it can mean living out the role of the servant who nurtures at the cost of herself.
    Referring to this feminine script in her essay “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf describes the syndrome and offers a drastic remedy:
    She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. . . . I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her, she would have killed me. 37
    At the very least we need to disempower this part of ourselves, to relieve ourselves of the internal drive to forfeit our souls as food for others.
    The Favored Daughter
    One of the more uncomfortable discoveries I made about myself during this time was a need to prove myself to the father-world—my own father, the cultural father, the church father. The powerful male presence. I began to recognize