Many a marriage is fraught with the tension of displaced ambition brewing in a woman who has yet to claim the passion wanting to drive her. Heterosexual couples come to me for help and ninety-nine percent of the time the work is located in her, not him.
Sister to three siblings, I have two brothers and one sister. Being the eldest, I’ve always felt a duty of care toward them as children and as adults. But the girl in me often felt selfish in her desire to have a room of her own, some time to herself, and space all alone. I still feel badly for insisting my brother ride the bus one morning when I was allowed to drive our family car to school — I didn’t want him in the car with me! I don’t think I will ever truly forgive the girl in me for that decision. But I can also understand now that to have the car and the license to drive on a road all alone in newly discovered autonomy was a sublime moment in that girl’s life. It just came at a cost. I often wonder if my brother remembers this the way I do, especially in light of the fact that when he got his pilot’s license he was happy to fly me to the sky for the first time! Why wasn’t I so generous with him?
Generally and simply stated psychologically, in the female sex the goal of woman is to find what she wants and the focus to achieve it. In the male sex, the goal of man is to find his function of relationship and the relatedness to live it. She is looking for her masculine spirit. He is looking for his feminine soul. Based on this knowledge, I am clear about the different ways my brother and I functioned. He needed to share his accomplishment while I needed to accomplish authority.
In learning to be the authority of my own life, I had to discriminate between marriage to man and marriage to the writer within me. The call to write superseded the marriage to man. For me, the marriage to other led me to the inner marriage to self through purpose. It was the desire to write that drove the whole process. I simply could not not write. Mothering was conducive to writing. Marriage to man was not. And I must admit that to this day, the question remains if it is possible for the two to co-exist. That is, does coupling with a man cost a woman her vocation?
Perhaps love cannot live in the construct of marriage as we have known it. For love knows no limits and patriarchal marriage constrains the human spirit through needs and expectations when God has left the marriage. What do I mean by this?
God is not just an idea. It is the self-knowingness of unity with the wholeness of life. It is perceptual and actual as God is the source and the substance of all life regardless what name we give it. Whatever word we give to God is a God created by the human mind when one realizes the actual Word is God. For it is the spirit of a woman’s life that declares itself into form through speaking the Word from within whatever story she is living. So if she marries with her focus on God — that is, the power within her to make life through choices — then she is well equipped to grow through her marriage. And grow she must as her story is in perpetual motion forward. But if she unconsciously projects God onto the man she has married — we all do, such is the world we have been born into — then she is in big trouble that can become big opportunity IF she calls in the support required to midwife the inevitable transformation. This is generally the state of marriage in modern woman’s life today.
As I discovered the deeper priority within me by hearing and heeding the call of my spirit to build a life of writing and mothering, the men I loved could not hold my attention or my aspirations. I started to grow outside the marriage. My passion was no longer at the centre of the wedded couple and leaving wasn’t just an option, it was a necessity. Staying would have required loss of feminine soul via disconnection from the masculine spirit of my creativity. The Word was calling me to build my own soul’s house. My children were always to be held in the heart of the house of my making but the men I married seemed not destined to live within her walls. I wonder why was this so?
I believe the idea of patriarchal marriage in heterosexual relationship exacts a price from womanhood that a woman questing to know her true self will no longer be willing to pay.
Marriage between two men or two women may still work fine, if ever it did or does. This I cannot speak to. But marriage between man and woman has reached its zenith unless human beings grasp the fact that the numinous ground of creation is feminine for both men and women. Until women hear the song of our own soul and allow it to find expression in life for All That Is, we are using marriage to man to deny the Divine within. And marriage itself as a cultural construct will need to be re-ordered. Perhaps this process is already underway. This I cannot say ... yet.
What I can say from where I am now is that every decision I made to marry stemmed from the emotional and economic need to be safe and make home in the world, albeit unconsciously. I was borrowing the masculine power I had yet to claim from within. This unconscious need is woman’s shadow and it is rooted in the disempowered self constructed by and through centuries of patriarchy. Until women get a grip on this we are re-enacting past pain and taking it into our marriages with men. Therefore the best of intentions are doomed.
I needed to drive my own car, beat my own drum, and birth my own life. The desire to have a room of my own, some time to myself, and space all alone was never a selfish impulse. It was the instinct to build what is mine to make from my own energy. And I was born into a world where woman creates while carrying the weights of other. She is rarely acknowledged for her contribution because feminine values are not subject to support. Therefore she resorts to harnessing her power as a dark force of negative emotion. She demands. She nags. She harbours disappointment. She is jealous and competitive. She resents her own offspring. And loathes her husband for a laundry list of reasons. Welcome to the wife I usually meet in the conversations couples bring to me. It ain’t pretty!
To be held by a master outside oneself is to not hold self-mastery.
Self-mastery in a woman is lit by the torch of her own inner masculine. Until she learns to claim this for herself, she projects it upon her male lover, which keeps her in expectation that he will deliver to her the life she senses must be, has to be, is certainly going to be hers because she deserves it!
All those years ago, the girl in me was invited by her father to share with her brother a ride to school and she was having none of it because her need to be her own authority was greater than her shameful behaviour. I am not judging her. I am seeing her clearly. The young woman she would become harboured that same desire as manifested in the life I have since lived.
In the first three years after my first husband’s death, I gave birth to my first son, moved from the farm into town and then from town into the city, enrolled in college, completed my first year of study, and then married a college instructor, sold my entire household to leave nothing behind, and embarked on an adventure overseas to live in a place nobody I knew had ever heard anything about.
Was I crazy with grief? Was I ready for adventure? Or was there something else driving me?
I now sit in the life those decisions brought to me. And I can say with authority that the entire journey was about coming to terms with the woman in me who demanded I be.
She was seeded as potential in the girl who refused to drive her brother to school.
Overruling that girl’s desire would’ve proved futile. So thank you Dad for giving me the keys to your car and the permission to drive it on my own, in my time, to my destination. It was a first step toward me finding home.
Question for Reflection:
What is in me to give to life? Am I developing it, nurturing it, paying attention to it and allowing it to grow me into the woman I long to be?
Magdalen Bowyer
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