success

So I'm reading Carolyn G. Heilbrun's Reinventing Womanhood, and she's explaining it all to me. "Women," she writes,

"have avoided adventure, risk, and opportunity because they have been taught that suffering, the shaking loose of the comfortable foundations of one's life, must be avoided at all costs." (p. 68)

Except I'm a risk-taker. And a poor planner. I am the epitome of not looking before leaping, ok? And yet. Something in this quote tickles at the edges of my pre-conscious mind. A page later, Heilbrun says,

"They feared above all the loss of dependence and the discovery of a realm of choice where suffering is possible, even likely." (p. 69)

Wham! Right between the eyes. Not so much choice, but responsibility, and certainly, the loss of dependence.

In the meantime, I'm loving my job. But I spent some social time with some of my peers today, and got a glimpse into their successful lifestyles. About which, I remain ambivalent. One has a house worth twice as much as mine, and it's expensively furnished and landscaped to boot. And while it is beautiful and I liked it, I did not think I would feel comfortable living there. Why? Don't know yet. But for whatever reason, I'm more the kind of woman who would go on living in a shack and stuff the money in the mattress.

Simply,

Naming

Carolyn G. Heilbrun, in Writing a Woman's Life, talked about the power of naming. Men, she said, have always done all the naming, and left women without the power to name and define ourselves and our lives. This is true in very concrete ways, for example, as we obtain our surnames from our fathers first, and then our husbands. If we marry more than once we may have three or more names in the course of a lifetime, names that have nothing to do with who we are in the way that, say, a Native American's sequence of names over her lifetime describes her character or deeds she has performed.

Even the names in our society have names. There's your maiden name, if you are a woman, and your married name. Both describe us not in our own terms, but in relationship to men. But then what do we want to be called? It's a similar problem to the one Malcolm X faced in ditching his "slave name." After a few hundred years it is impossible to know what your name would have been, should have been, had slavery never happened. So he just went with the X. Women would have to go back about 2,000 years to find our "real" names, because even your mother's name was a man's surname before her, and her mother's, too. For that reason, settling for keeping your maiden name despite marriage(s) just isn't going to cut it.

Having one name gets us out of that box. And since a woman with a made-up name like, say, Wind Horse, seems kind of silly in mainstream America, I picked a good old English place name befitting my genealogy. Better yet, it sounds like a name either a girl or a boy could have been given, so it doesn't have the gendered expectations attached to it that a "Sally" or a "Joseph" would. That fits me, as I'm a little androgynous.

It will have to do until some mentor, some spiritual adviser, gives me my Indian name.

Simply,