Sue Monk Kidd - Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story

Table of Contents

ALSO BY SUE MONK KIDD

The Secret Life of Bees

The Mermaid Chair

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

Firstlight

When the Heart Waits

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Sue Monk Kidd Ltd. and Ann Kidd Taylor Ltd., 2009

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

Ceres Looks at the Morning from The Lost Land by Eavan Boland. Copyright 1998 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The Music Master from The Essential Rumi , translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne (HarperOne). By permission of Coleman Barks.

When a woman feels alone, when the room from Collected Poems 1930-1993 by May Sarton. Copyright 1984 by May Sarton. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Sweet Darkness from The House of Belonging by David Whyte. Reprinted with permission of Many Rivers Press, Langley, Washington. www.davidwhyte.com

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Kidd, Sue Monk.

Traveling with pomegranates : a mother daughter story / by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-14491-6

1. Kidd, Sue MonkTravelGreece. 2. Kidd, Sue MonkFamily. 3. Mothers and daughtersUnited States. 4. Authors, American21st centuryBiography. 5. Taylor, Ann Kidd. I. Taylor, Ann Kidd. II. Title.

PS3611.I44Z.6 Bdc22 2009009388

Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

http://us.penguingroup.com

To Terry and Mandy Helwig with love

SIGHTS AND PLACES IN

Traveling with Pomegranates

LOSS

Greece / Turkey / South Carolina

1998 -1999

Sue

National Archaeological Museum-Athens

Sitting on a bench in the National Archaeological Museum in Greece, I watch my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Ann, angle her camera before a marble bas-relief of Demeter and Persephone unaware of the small ballet shes performingher slow, precise steps forward, the tilt of her head, the way she dips to one knee as she turns her torso, leaning into the sharp afternoon light. The scene reminds me of something, a memory maybe, but I cant recall what. I only know she looks beautiful and impossibly grown, and for reasons not clear to me Im possessed by an acute feeling of loss.

Its the summer of 1998, a few days before my fiftieth birthday. Ann and I have been in Athens a whole twenty-seven hours, a good portion of which Ive spent lying awake in a room in the Hotel Grande Bretagne, waiting for blessed daylight. I tell myself the bereft feeling that washed over me means nothingIm jet-lagged, thats all. But that doesnt feel particularly convincing.

I close my eyes and even in the tumult of the museum, where there seem to be ten tourists per square inch, I know the feeling is actually everything . It is the undisclosed reason Ive come to the other side of the world with my daughter. Because in a way which makes no sense, she seems lost to me now. Because she is grown and a stranger. And I miss her almost violently.

Our trip to Greece began as a birthday present to myself and a college graduation gift to Ann. The extravagant idea popped into my head six months earlier as the realization of turning fifty set in and I felt for the first time the overtures of an ending.

Those were the days I stood before the bathroom mirror examining new lines and sags around my eyes and mouth like a seismologist studying unstable tectonic plates. The days I dug through photo albums in search of images of my mother and grandmother at fifty, scrutinizing their faces and comparing them to my own.

Surely Im above this sort of thing. I could not be one of those women who clings to the faades of youth. I didnt understand why I was responding to the prospect of aging with such shallowness and dread, only that there had to be more to it than the etchings of time on my skin. Was I dabbling in the politics of vanity or did I obsess on my face to avoid my soul? Furthermore, whatever room I happened to be in seemed unnaturally overheated. During the nights I wandered in long, sleepless corridors. At forty-nine my body was engaged in vague, mutinous behaviors.

These werent the only hints that I was about to emigrate to a new universe. At the same time I was observing the goings-on in the mirror, I came down with an irrepressible need to leave my old geographya small town in upstate South Carolina where wed lived for twenty-two yearsand move to an unfamiliar landscape. I envisioned a place tucked away somewhere, quiet and untamed, near water, marsh grass, and tidal rhythms. In an act of boldness or recklessness, or some perfect combination thereof, my husband, Sandy, and I put our house on the market and moved to Charleston, where we subsisted in a minuscule one-bedroom apartment while searching for this magical and necessary place. I never said out loud that I thought it was mandatory for my soul and my creative life (how could I explain that?), but I assure you, I was thinking it.