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Earlier this week, I read (well, devoured actually) The Mermaid Chair, by Sue Monk Kidd.

I’ll try not to give any spoilers to the story.
So, from the back cover the reader knows going into it that this is a story about a woman and a monk and a woman and her husband and her journey with herself. She’s at that stage…kids grown, identity shaken, feeling lost and like she hasn’t really lived. She’s been down for a long time and is struggling to ariticulate just what it is exactly that she wants, when catastrophe strikes and she has to back to a place that she’s spent years trying to escape.

I was somewhat bummed to have figured out the major plot twists before the first three chapterw were over. But Sue Monk Kidd is a very good writer; she compells the reader to keep going, and even though I knew what the character was going to do, I still hoped things for her and had to keep reading to find out if my hope was going to be rewarded or not.

I was angry as I read though. I don’t get this justification that seems to go on where women hit a rough spot, even a *really* rough spot, and convince themselves that they NEED to go on this journey that treats all of their lives like they don’t matter. No expense is too high if it gets her “to know herself” better. Think: stories that involved women leaving husbands or children to find out “who I really am”.

So I was aware of a big contrast between the lovers. I felt no hostiltiy against Whit…he hadn’t taken his vows yet. His exploration really had no context that he was violating. I find this to be a bothersome attitude of mine; he knew she was married, which makes him a very guilty party. Whereas Jessie on the other hand, was already vowed to one man. She was a mother. Two things, that if she need to do some soul searching, ultimately HAVE to include.

She’s done nothing but continue the cycle: she starts out trying to run from her past. Hepizibah reminds her, “You can’t leave home. You can go other places alright, you can live on the other side of the world, but you can’t ever leave home.” She confronts this, the island past, all the while trying to run from her *other* past, her life as a man’s wife.

It could be argued I supose that in the end, she makes peace with them both. But I don’t buy it. In the end, she’s looking back at her affair as something sacred, something necessary. She might be thankful her good husband took her back but she isn’t sorry she screwed around. And irony of ironies, when she “finds herself”, she has a friggin’ marriage ceremony in the ocean with herself! I couldn’t help but scoff at the hilarity of that…someone who already treated one vow sooo lightly is making another one?! And we’re suposed to buy into the beauty of that?!

Not leaving home…not ever leaving home. There are things that *indelibly* make us who we are. They are an undeniable context. All the exploration and growth we go through HAS to keep this context in mind in order to stay true.

Applied to myself: I AM someone’s mother. 5 Someones. If I get weary with identifying myself as “mother” or “stay at home mom” or “homeschooler” I might want to branch out and try other things. But I can’t forget that it isn’t skin I can just shed. Those people ARE. Or a wife…so he’s gotten comfy in 20 years. So he wasn’t the first one to realize women need to stretch themselves, shed their wings. Growth can happen and still be that man’s wife. Infidelity isn’t necessary in order to truly find oneself. Then again, loosing one’s self in order to commit adultry may be.

I hear a a line in my head: “you may have to lose yourself in order to find yourself.” Maybe that’s the message of this book. Maybe that’s why it’s making me angry. People get hurt with this kind of message. And “loosing one’s self” isn’t really possible in the long run. You can only do it for a short, unsustainable time. There’s a day of reckoning eventually.

And I never thought I’d say this, back when I liked the Ya Ya movie, and loved Traving Pants, and The Secret Life of Bees came out…but if I read ONE MORE woman-power ceremony involving mysticism and chants and weird dances and rituals I’m gonna roll. As in roll my eyes right up to the back of my brain. Yawn. I’m so impatient with it!

After thinking more about it and talkling to some friends about the story, I’ve calmed down a little. A little ;-). I see this story, this character, as a kind of cautionary tale. Don’t lose yourself. Don’t be dishonest and untrue to who you are so that you find yourself, to quote a friend, “backing into” questions and paths that are much more than you bargained for in a search for answers. I still think the book condones the crossing of boundaries I find unacceptable (and inauthentic) in a search for a deeper knowing of thyself. I still find it rather maddening, unable as I am to just separate it out as a “summer read”.

I think that opening quote (that I posted a few days ago) might have set me up to go into the story thinking SMK was holding up the monk as her soul-lover. But today I changed my mind. Her true love, the one who’d been a part of her as much as she’d been a part of him, was with her on both end papers of the book.

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