The Red Tent

by Anita Diamant

Maybe you heard it in the music of my name: the first vowel high and clear, as when a mother calls to her child at dusk; the second sound soft, for whispering secrets on pillows.

If you want to understand any woman you must first ask about her mother and then listen carefully.

Women needed men to make babies and to move heavy objects, but otherwise she didn’t understand their purpose, much less appreciate their charms.

the great mother-mystery, which is bought with pain and repaid with an infant’s sparkling smile and silken skin.

She had been a woman just as my mother was a woman, and yet she was a creature totally unlike my mother.

The women looked away from the tiny doomed girl, but I saw only her perfect beauty. Her eyelids were veined like a butterfly’s wing, her toes curled like the petals of a flower.

“In the red tent, the truth is known. In the red tent, where days pass like a gentle stream, as the gift of Innana courses through us, cleansing the body of last month’s death, preparing the body to receive the new month’s life, women give thanks—for repose and restoration, for the knowledge that life comes from between our legs, and that life costs blood.”

For a moment I weighed the idea of keeping my secret and remaining a girl, but the thought passed quickly. I could only be what I was. And I was a woman.

The story it told was unremarkable: a tale of love found and lost—the oldest story in the world. The only story.

The painful things—Werenro’s story, Re-nefer’s choice, even my own loneliness—seemed like the knots on a beautiful necklace, necessary for keeping the beads in place.

the cries of a laboring mother bring out other women like geese responding to the call of a leader in flight.

“We are all born of the same mother,” she said. After a lifetime, I knew that to be true.

Death is no enemy, but the foundation of gratitude, sympathy, and art. Of all life’s pleasures, only love owes no debt to death.

If you sit on the bank of a river, you see only a small part of its surface. And yet, the water before your eyes is proof of unknowable depths. My heart brims with thanks for the kindness you have shown me by sitting on the bank of this river, by visiting the echoes of my name.

On the day that the intelligence and talents of women are fully honored and employed, the human community and the planet itself will benefit in ways we can only begin to imagine.