How Do You Fancy To Take Flight?

This month’s neighborhood book club chose Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings, a fine narrative set in the early 1800s Charleston and Philadelphia. The two Southern plantation daughters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, become abolitionists and women’s rights leaders--who were actual pioneers in our American history. I deeply sympathized with the rebellious slaves, mom Charlotte and daughter Hetty, and how they plot to gain their independence. Kidd weaves their challenging, moving stories, illustrating how these women create paths to freedom, inventing their own wings so they could soar and be at peace.

It may sound melodramatic to identify with lack of choices and feeling trapped…especially being educated, white, and it being 2015. But I do.

Over coffee this week friends and I discussed staying home to raise our children. I connected with comments about feeling restricted and not financially free. How we support our spouses to flourish in their careers while managing the home and kid responsibilities, the whole “default parent” bit. We know how much we contribute, yet still feel guilt about spending money. That we miss utilizing our degrees. That it can be lonely. But we honestly don’t seek full-time jobs, knowing the stress potentially added to home life. We admitted to not being able to have it all—which is fine, but sometimes uncertain feelings still sap our energy. By all means, we know how good we have it, but that doesn’t dismiss that veil of female longing, questioning, and wondering…themes whirling in Kidd’s novel, 200 years later.

Do you ever feel trapped? That you have lost your independence? Your will to follow your path?

 A few months ago one of my girlfriends scoffed at me, saying I was clipping my 10 year-old daughter’s ambitions for having career conversations. I had told her about my forthright mom-daughter chats describing the many hats a woman wears—and if she chooses to get married and have a family, that there are some professions with more flexibility than others. My friend wondered why I’d limit my daughter, why I would curtail her dreams. Being an impassioned dreamer I heartily asserted that was not my plan. Instead, I intend to help my daughter see the realities of being a grown-up, professional, working woman with a family. Isn’t that what being a feminist is? To help advance women to make their own choices? In my heart I want to give my daughter wings by showing possibilities, not by limiting them.

In the movie Maleficent Angelina Jolie-Pitt’s titled character becomes bitter and resigned after the king brutally removes her wings.  None of us should be in that dark place. For any person—man or woman—it takes individual drive to follow their own flight to figure out their future path. For some, it may take more energy and ingenuity than others…but I do believe that we all have the power to fly. We may just have to invent those wings ourselves.

“One can never consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar.”
- Helen Keller

 

For The New York Times review of The Invention of Wings: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/books/review/the-invention-of-wings-by-sue-monk-kidd.html?_r=0

The “default parent” piece:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/m-blazoned/the-default-parent_b_6031128.html