Traveling with Pomegranates - Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

Thoughts of Mother and Daughter was my 16th of 2021.

Kefi: Joyous Abandonment

Am reminded of May Sarton's 'When a Woman Feels Alone', from this book:

Old woman I meet you deep inside myself.

There is the rootbed of fertility,

World without end, as the legend tells it.

Under the words you are my silence. 

Heuresis! (Greek name for mother daughter reunion) Demeter and Persephone. The intersection of mothers and daughters. Persephone the daughter is the 'green fuse' in the soul, the regenerative energy. She's the bright, invisible sap within that must rise after fifty. 

How the reunion of Demeter and Persephone conveys : the essence of Young and Old coming together in a woman to create new life. A new self. 

Theologian, Richard Niebuhr said: “Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.” A new poetry: the spiritual composition of the Old Woman, not through words, but through the wisdom of a journey.

For Sue Mon Kidd, the older woman the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling “betrayals” of  body. The stalled, eerie stillness in  writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. The raw, unsettled feelings, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning. And about  own mortality?  Finally, she wrote a series of questions: Is there an odyssey the female soul longs to make at the approach of fifty– one that has been blurred and lost within a culture awesomely alienated from soul? If so, what sort of journey would that be? Where would it take me? The impulse to go to Greece emerged out of those questions. To make a pilgrimage in search of an initiation.

The trip is a pilgrimage for Ann, too. She was officially exiting the precincts of girlhood and stepping into young womanhood– another threshold that wasn’t all that defined and acknowledged– and she did seem daunted lately. She had her moment at the Acropolis writing about Athena; when she had been there for earn college credit but turned into a kind of unravelling of herself, with a vision for life, destiny in hand, a big jubilant fire warming inside determined not to loose herself again; but then all of it was fallen apart. 

There are struggles, when the mother, try to let her daughter go, while unconsciously seeing her as an appendage of herself. And the daughter, enmeshed in her mother's power, compelled to please her and pattern herself in her mother's image, but straining at the same time to craft an identity separate from her. For some after a point there is a distance. Some find flashlight like Demeter lighting her torch. 

Grandmother, Mother, Self, Daughter  - so many daughters and patriarchal underpinnings from society. Powerful demands of motherhood, need for a separate life; not knowing how to balance them - with a need for solitude and creative expression. When Sue asked her mother, what she wanted to be when she was young, she told her 'mother'. Sue too wanted to be a mother, but differently.  Her book prior to this was 'The Dance of the Dissident Daughter'. 

Leonardo da Vinci's The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne; Christ is shown grappling with a sacrificial lamb symbolizing his Passion as the Virgin tries to restrain him. Saint Anne, Mary's mother has all eyes for her daughter.

The book has mother daughter relationship where both look for love and freedom  in their relationship. It also has changing times along with a chance for virtual travel to Greece and Turkey and France and South Carolina. In South Carolina there is a garden called 'The Secret Garden' build based on that book, I read all about it again and  again. Which garden am I invited to? What are the connections?

Her relationship with both her daughter and mother had no fireworks, only the necessary loss and then the loving congeniality. Wishing for a deeper connection. 

All through her life Ann was the quiet, happy girl; but now she was pretending to be happy. An act. Kefi: Joyous Abandonment. For Ann who had initiated the novel, it was here she first met Demetri for few hours, he had introduced her to herself, had caused her to fall in love with herself.

For Sue it was the search for meaning,  need to connect  with her daughter, get into her passion  of writing...

Girl Before A Mirror by Pablo Picasso

As is said child is the father of Man'.

From Becoming to Belonging.

In parts, the first part of the book is  Loss and covers Greece/Turkey/South Carolina during 1998-1999, the second part is Search in France/South Carolina in 1999-2000 and the third is Return to Greece in 2000.

There is often the mention of the Trinity: Athena, Joan and Mary.  Mary is often called Madonna as well, from Italian ma donna 'my lady'. These are the places mother and daughter visit, as they grow and their life change with it. Sue in the end mention that they write to taste life twice. Living the experience and writing about it, mother and daughter together.