Being Woman

As I was writing my "spiritual memoir" for class, I came—belatedly—to the realization that so much of my spirituality was tied up in frustrations with my own femaleness. We are “made in the image of god”, but god was “god the father”. My young brain couldn’t wrap around that any easier than my more "mature" brain can. I don’t accept it. What I do accept is that I am part of the collective that makes the world full of meaning and sacredness. That sounds mad and more than a bit fluffy, but it doesn’t have the affect of divorcing me--in my body--as something that is the image of a god.

When I’m having a good dance night, I have no doubt that I am made in the image of god[dess]. It is easy to think “What if the world was danced into being, rolling off the undulating spine of the Creator?” In the power of a really talented belly dancer’s muscles, I see the flex and flow of all the possibility that women have.

If I may digress for a moment: I think that is why belly dance is unlike any other dance, and it drives me absolutely bats when people reduce it to “ohmigodsexy”. It is that. I’m certainly not going to deny it. I, and zillions of other people worldwide I’m sure, want to lick Sharon Kihara’s abdominals, but it is more than that. It is challenging. It is the body glorying in itself, expressing the potential of creation as it accents the most biological bits of a woman all the while melding them into the whole. It is the mind working with the body; it is very controlled. Belly dance is not reductively sexy. It is empowering—more about the dancer than the audience. And in spite of this, I have met so few conceited belly dancers. That, I think, is testimony to the power of dancing for oneself. No justifications, no false pride, as woman tries to reconcile herself with an activity that is not for herself.

Reaching this place with myself has been hard-fought. It is obvious, when I think of my younger self, that I have always wanted to get here. She was an angry girl. She wanted to be a warrior for women everywhere. She would, like Erik Draven in The Crow, find every perpetrator of violence (physical or otherwise) against women and beat that person to a bloody pulp, take away their power and their agency. (You dare make me uncomfortable in my body! I’ll show you uncomfortable!) It is amazing, just writing those words, how easy it is to still feel the rage of that young woman. I spent a lot of time cultivating that anger.

It was a false sense of strength, but I used it. I lashed out in words, thinly veiled diatribes in fictional form, but my words gave pause to other young women in my class who were feeling similar things. I shared this writing with girls in my high school, and for a time, I was a mini-celebrity among the other frustrated young women (and a few young men) of my class. The anger was not useful, but the outrage may have been.

For a long time, I forgot this part of me. In the arms of a good relationship, I grew a bit complacent, I think. I had a hard time connecting with the righteous anger that I needed to rewrite young Armina. When I was once again introduced to anger at a man who was directly in my life, and also a young woman who seems to desperately want to be a young man, I remembered myself as a young woman...so desperate herself to just be comfortable in her body. I, too, wished to be a boy when I was little. I would tuck my hair up under a baseball hat, trying to imagine my feminine roundness away. (And I was a round 7 year old.) I thought, perhaps not consciously, that the answer to being comfortable in my skin was to be a boy. That faded, of course, but my discomfort in my femininity did not.

I’ve only just now started referring to my peers and myself as women. This is not so much an age thing (though we are nearing our venerable third decade), as it is a desire to leave behind a diminutive. Woman, with all its baggage of disenfranchisement and inequality, is also the strongest thing to be, and I’m embracing that anew…or perhaps for the first time. It blows me away that humanity is still alive and kicking sometimes, and that is women. My ancestresses have pushed through feelings of unimaginable frustration, feeling love for their families, but perhaps equally boxed in, without other options.

I always (somewhat) laughingly think of myself in the 50s, drinking martinis until I float as soon as I’m alone in the house, or 1890s me with a glass of sherry, struggling to find meaning in being a mother, valiantly staying away from the opiates that I kept on hand for dosing sick children. And that’s just the recent memory stuff. The women on my walls have possibly had those feelings, though my IL grandma was employed all through raising a family. She had to deal with my grandfather telling her that she thought more of the job than she did the family. “It must have seemed that way to him, but I didn’t,” she told me. It was for the family that she worked so hard.
It is these women I join. My grandmothers are living evidence of sacred femininity. They have lived, loved and worked through times that could have diminished them even more than this one has tried to diminish me. We have struggled with similar things, and I hope to finally banish shame, discomfort and guilt from the blood of the women in my family.

The following poem was written not quite two years ago when my therapist was trying to drag me out of another period of being uncomfortable in my skin. I turned to Tori Amos' writings about archetypes and the divine feminine and decided to play with them a bit myself. I offer it up again in thanks and because I need to keep reminding myself...

“Archetypal”
They say that Cleopatra wasn’t Liz Taylor gorgeous.
It was her boldness and wit that drove Caesar mad.
In the stacks of the library at Alexandria,
they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

A continent away, Caesar’s men chased down Iceni daughters.
Their milk-pale, freckled bodies broke under the onslaught of centurion spears.
Their Mother-queen rode into battle,
bringing the night-dark wings of the Morrigan down on her enemies.

Rumor has it, both Cleo and Boadicea died of poison.
They might have talked strategy together,
red head, bent to dark one.
“Horses, my dear?”
“Oh no, elephants, like Alexander.”

And I really think that Jesus’ mother would have wept
to see her power consigned to her virginity.
“Why, Miss Magdalene can you go about with your hair unbound,
and I must smile benignly from beneath my halo?”

Hildegaard understood this.
Her Virgins went with their hair loose, under the sheerest of veils.
The bishops tut and tsk, and still the ladies of Bingen sang:
“How very hard it is to hold out against whatever tastes of the Apple.”

I would bring the apple to Hildegaard’s cell
and tell her of maidens whose bows shot snakes
that turned into herons.
“What crawls on its belly can also learn to fly,” she would say
and draw a mandala that would make it all very clear.