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mean to be unambiguously a woman?” writes Heilbrun. “It means to put a man at the center of one’s life and to allow to occur only what honors his prime position. One’s own desires and quests are always secondary.” 5
    For me the “man” was sometimes my husband, at other times my father, male colleagues, clergy, or God. But at its most basic, this “man” was symbolic of male authority itself, the cultural father or the collective rule of men in general.
    I didn’t consciously recognize when I was being unambiguously woman; I’d been blind to it. Before October, I would have denied it vehemently, as we are apt to do when something true is unconscious to us.
    I had truly thought of myself as an independent woman. Certainly I was not outwardly submissive. I had my career, my ownlife, ideas, and plans. I behaved in seemingly independent ways, but inside I was still caught in daughterhood. I was deferring to the father at the center. I operated out of a lot of assumptions and ideas, but I had no idea the extent to which my ideas were really the internalized notions of a culture that put men at the center. My independent forays and outspokenness came at emotional cost and required excessive expenditures of energy. They engendered uneasy feelings, after-the-fact worry, second-guessing, and the habit of looking over my shoulder.
    Living without real inner authority, without access to my deep feminine strength, I carried around a fear of dissension, confrontation, backlash, a fear of not pleasing, not living up to sanctioned models of femininity.
    Such ideas may have been barely forming in me, but they still packed a lot of feeling. A lot of confused feeling. One evening in early November while the family was eating dinner, I reminded Sandy I was going away soon to the monastery for a retreat. With me gone, he had it all—work, kids, meals, house, laundry, the whole thing.
    He grimaced. He said, “I wish you weren’t going.” That’s what he said. Here’s what I heard: Stay home. Stay put. Put me at the center of the universe and allow to happen only what honors my prime position.
    â€œYou know what?” I shouted. “I am fed up. I am just plain fed up!” Then I left the table, with Sandy, Ann, and Bob all staring at me, their forks poised in the air.
    Sandy followed me into the bedroom, full of concern. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
    I wish I could have explained it to him then in a neat, coherent fashion, but it was so new and such a jumble inside. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
    When a woman wakes up, it’s not experienced in isolation. Her family, the people she’s closest to, will be thrust into the experience as well, because it’s not just the woman who’s expecting a new life. In a way, the whole family is pregnant.
    Broken Connection to the Feminine Soul
    I had always prayed, though much of my prayer in the last few years had been silent meditation. One morning, though, I tried to get talkative with God, to talk to “him” about the things in my journal, the fed-up feeling, the realization that a new way of being a woman wanted to be born in me. I got nowhere. I kept wondering how “he” was going to understand this distinctly feminine experience.
    I tried briefly to imagine a God like me. God as female. But it was such a foreign notion.
    Now with the wisdom of hindsight, I can look back and understand what I could not really see then—that as a woman I was severed from something deep inside myself, something purely and powerfully feminine. Steeped in a faith tradition that men had named, shaped, and directed, I had no alliance with what might be called the Sacred Feminine. I had lost my connection to feminine soul.
    When I use the term feminine soul, I’m referring to a woman’s inner repository of the Divine Feminine, her deep source, her natural