Thank You Adrienne Rich

“Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
What would it mean to stand on the first
page to the end of despair?”

Adrienne Rich died last week at the age of 82. For some reason, as I read about her passing in the New York Times, I found myself catching my breath and felt, with the sting of tears, my surfacing grief. During my twenties, I came in brief contact with her words and then later in my thirties, I enrolled in a graduate course on Women Poets, with Adrienne Rich at the forefront of the syllabus.

I came of age during the late sixties, when “consciousness raising” was all the rage among women around me. Growing up in an overprotective, father-dominated household, all I knew then was that I wanted to be the first in my family to graduate from college and I wanted to have a life different from my submissive mother's. Many of us raised-during-the-fifties women yearned for strong, adventurous female role models, while simultaneously fearing the “radical feminist label.” How strange and mystical this decade of my twenties appears to me now from the vantage point of my sixth decade! As that young girl, I understood absolutely nothing at all about Lesbianism and had little interest in finding out. Forty years later, I consider myself a resolute feminist and have an amazing, beautiful, twenty-two-year-old Lesbian daughter.

Perhaps I am lying when I state I had little interest in understanding the roots of Lesbianism. Back in my youth Lesbian and Radical Feminist were terms held far away from us, as if in a forbidden land. But I was a curious nerd, always writing, reading, pondering, squeezing out every fiber of meaning I could from this life I was given. And my path continually led to an involvement with women's groups. As a vulnerable, sensitive, “out of place” individual, I wanted to know where I could fit in or if I could fit in.

I didn't “hate men;” I only hated how controlling my father tried to be. Believing he wouldn't let me grow up, I knew I had to get away. College and working my way through college changed everything. Most importantly, the right women and the right circumstances presented themselves and I grabbed both.

There was Megann and Shauna; they introduced me to a group of women who gathered monthly to talk about our lives as women. There was the time in my German language class that the “boys” talked about women only attending the university to find husbands. I stood up and stated, “This is simply not true...I came for an education.” The professor backed me up, and I walked across campus a bit straighter that day. Majoring in English and German Literature, I discovered my bachelor of arts degree rarely included women authors. I made up for this by starting my own study of women writers and later teaching classes on Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin and a multitude of women poets.

And then there was Adrienne Rich...there was always Adrienne Rich beside me, but I just didn't acknowledge her:

“I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.”

My dad started appearing on my apartment doorstep unannounced, his face haggard, his face belying his loneliness. We were so alike, my father and I. He too was an intellectual and physical explorer. He too was a man of words. My mother was not. But, as in my childhood, I began feeling smothered by his attention. The twenty-something me wasn't wise enough to see that his visits represented his overwhelming need for companionship, and were not threats of over protection. I quickly disposed of him and tried to create a buffer of independence between us. Our final separation came when I chose to fly thousands of miles overseas to become a study abroad student in Germany. I was gone for a year and a half...a year and a half that symbolically felt like three years and was the ultimate severing of my umbilical cord from my family.

Europe gave me freedom that I never had in the United States. I could travel alone; I could hitch hike. I could sit in a park or by a river and write, undisturbed, to my heart's content. I could have intellectual, philosophical, spiritual discussions that had nothing to do with gender expectations and everything to do with becoming an authentic and complete human being. I brought my liberation home to the final tumultuous wave of the sixties. I brought my liberation home to the rise of women's power.

“I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed”

And I began to embrace my feminist spirit; and I began to acknowledge that what I wanted from my life was to be respected, to be accepted on equal terms with my brother, my coworkers and my future mate. I didn't want to become “like a man” but rather, even though I am not a woman of color, I wanted to become like Alice Walker's definition of “Womanist:” “A black feminist or feminist of color...Usually referring to outrageous audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered 'good' for one...A woman who appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility and women's strength.”(From the Introduction to In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens)

Finally I turned around and saw how Adrienne Rich had been behind me all along my journey. And how her words had given me and so many other voiceless women a voice, had given me and so many women permission to simply be ourselves.

“We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.”

Thank you, Adrienne, for writing your words, speaking your truth, taking me under your wing and flying me to this more open space. I still have a lot to learn, but your poetic legacy has given me a sound beginning. Again, thank you!

© 2012