The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd

following the script, we forfeit the power to shape our own lives and identities.
    I studied Magritte’s painting. It all went back, of course, to Adam and Eve, to the idea of woman being fashioned out of man or out of the male rib. If woman was formed from man, in his image, to be his helper, then her life and roles emerged from him and revolved around him—or so said this mindset.
    Sandy moved on to the next painting, but I remained. After a while he came back. “What’s so fascinating about this one?” he asked.
    â€œI was just wondering, when it comes to my life, who holds the brush?”
    He looked at the picture, then back at me.
    I hadn’t said much to him about my awakening; I knew how uncomfortable, how resistant he might be. But standing in the middle of the museum, I told him a little of what was happening to me. That I was experiencing an awakening, that this awakening was spiritual, and that it was feminist.
    There was a long pause. That may have been the first time I used the word feminist out loud in relation to myself. Along the way, I’d decided that I cared passionately about the essence behind the word, that being a feminist was nothing more than aligning myself with the cause of equality and justice and fullness of personhood for women.
    â€œFeminist?” he asked.
    I nodded.
    â€œWell, I guess that will be okay,” he said, sounding a little like he was talking to a teenager who’d just asked to take the car out for the first time. Sounding, too, like he was trying to convince himself. Then he asked me where I wanted to go for dinner.
    I felt like I’d been given some kind of permission I hadn’t asked for and then been dismissed. Right then I finally found the words to tell him why I was fed up.
    The more I talked, the angrier I got. People were starting tostare, so we left and I got angry in the taxi. I railed about what had been done to women. He got defensive. He railed back. At some point I realized he’d become a target for my anger, an anger I had kept tightly bottled. It wasn’t fair to him, and yet I needed him to hear me. I wanted so badly for him to understand, and I couldn’t make it happen.
    During awakening, volatility often lies just beneath the surface of a woman’s relationship with her partner. In our case it was created by hurt and blaming on my part, fear and resistance on his. Men’s resistance often grows out of their fear—fear that everything is going to change, that women’s gain is their loss, that women will “turn the tables on them.” Men need to become aware, but blaming them doesn’t help. It only polarizes. Eventually I came to see that what’s needed is to invite men into our struggle, to make them part of our quest.
    If Sandy and I had been more sensitive to what lay behind the other’s reaction, if we’d picked our time wisely and listened, really listened to the other, we may have avoided such scenes. But frankly, it may not be possible to completely avoid the clash of feelings that accompanies powerful transitions. Sometimes the exchange may be calm and fruitful, but often it’s a wild taxi ride.
    Sandy and I made our peace, but it would be a while before I mentioned my journey again.
    Flying home from New York, I thought about the painting. I thought about it over and over. In that curious and exotic way that an “unteacher” appears only when the student is ready, the Magritte painting appeared and opened several revelations to me. First, our lives as women are not always as self-created as we might assume. And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father—the man holding the brush—and live up to his images of what a woman should be and do. We’re rewarded when we do; life gets