Imbalanced relationships would be equalized.
Children would be fed.
Corrupt governments would topple.
Wars would end.
Civilizations would be transformed.
If women trusted and claimed their desires, the world as we know it would crumble. Perhaps that is precisely what needs to happen so we can rebuild truer, more beautiful lives, relationships, families, and nations in their place.
Maybe Eve was never meant to be our warning. Maybe she was meant to be our model.
Own your wanting.
Eat the apple.
Let it burn.
One morning, I called my friend Martha and began telling her all the reasons I could not leave my marriage. Then I began sharing all the reasons I could not stay in my marriage. I kept talking, talking, talking, weighing every angle, arguing myself into corners and then around and around in circles.
Eventually she said, “Glennon, stop. You are in your head. The answers you need this time aren’t in there. They’re in your body. Try dropping into your body. Right now on the phone. Drop lower.”
This was becoming a theme in my life, all this sinking and dropping.
She asked, “You in there yet?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Okay, now consider both decisions. Inhabit yourself and feel. Does saying good-bye to Abby feel warm to you?”
“No. That feels cold, actually. It feels icy. It makes me feel like I’ll die of cold.”
“Now consider being with Abby. How does that feel?”
“It feels warm. Soft. Spacious.”
“Okay, Glennon. Your body is nature, and nature is pure. I know that’s hard for you to accept because you have been at war with your body for so long. You think your body is bad, but it is not. It’s wise. Your body will tell you things your mind will talk you out of. Your body is telling you what direction life is in. Try trusting it. Turn away from what feels cold. Go toward what feels warm.”
Now when I sense danger, I believe the cold and leave. When I sense joy, I believe the warm and stay.
These days, in business meetings, when I request an explanation for a decision someone has made, the women on my team know that I’m not looking for justifications, judgments, or opinions. I’m looking for Knowing. So the decision maker will say, “I did the research and sat with these options for a while. This option felt warm to me. The alternative felt cold.” That will be the end of the discussion. I trust women who trust themselves.
For a long while I pretended not to know that even though I had only one life, I was spending it inside a lonely marriage.
When the Knowing threatened to rise, I’d shove it back down. There was no point in admitting I knew what I knew, because I would never do what the Knowing would require me to do. I would never leave my children’s father. I’d just pretend not to know forever. I was a mother, and I had responsibilities.
In middle school we learned about parenting by caring for an egg. In order to pass the unit, we had to return the uncracked egg to the teacher at the end of the week. Those who left their egg home in the dark all week fared best; some of their eggs went rotten, but that didn’t matter as long as they remained uncracked.
I parented Tish like she was an egg. I’d say, “She is so sensitive, so fragile.” I worried about her and counted that as love. I protected her and counted that as mothering. I’d have kept her at home in the dark forever if I could have. She and I were living in a story I had written, and I was the hero. I would never let her crack, and I would pass parenting.
I am drinking coffee on Tish’s bed, watching her get ready for school. She is brushing her yards of Rapunzel hair.
I watch her look at herself in the mirror and then back at me. She says, “My hair is too babyish. Can I cut it like yours?”
I look at the two of us in that mirror. Right there in front of me, I can finally see that Tish is not an egg. She is a girl, becoming a woman.
Every time she looks at me, she is seeing herself, too. And she is asking:
Mom, how does a woman wear her hair?
Mom, how does a woman love and be loved?
Mom, how does a woman live?
Tish asks, “Will you put my hair up in a pony, Mom?”
I walk into the bathroom, find a ponytail holder, come back, and stand behind her. I have pulled her hair up a thousand times, but all of a sudden, she’s too tall. I can’t even see the top of her head. She has grown at least an inch overnight. When she was a baby, every day felt like a year. Now every morning, another inch.
I look at Tish and I think:
I am staying in this marriage for my little girl.
But would I want this marriage for my little girl?
When Craig and I moved to our home in Naples, we bought a gigantic silver mirror that we found on clearance. We never got around to hanging it. We just leaned it against our bedroom wall and hoped the leaning looked purposeful and artsy.
The day my therapist insisted that my feelings weren’t real, I decided to say good-bye to Abby and remain in my marriage. She was the expert, and she was right. Good mothers don’t break their children’s hearts in order to follow their own.
I sat on my bedroom carpet cross-legged, looking directly into my own eyes in that mirror.
It’s important to take a good look at yourself every once in a while. Not the way you look at yourself while you’re getting dressed or putting on makeup. Not the way you look at your thighs or sunspots or chin hairs. Not that way. I mean you need to look dead into your own eyes—at your real self. You need to make sure there are no lies there. You need to make sure the eyes in the mirror are the eyes of a woman you respect.
As I looked deep into my own eyes, the woman in the mirror and I had a reckoning.
I asked myself: Is the decision to continue abandoning yourself really what your children need from you?
Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.
What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible burden for our daughters to bear—to know that if they choose to become mothers, this will be their fate, too. Because if we show them that being a martyr is the highest form of love, that is what they will become. They will feel obligated to love as well as their mothers loved, after all. They will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live.