Mothers and Dragon-ing by Sara Frykenberg

Knowing that I like dragons and feminism, a friend of mine recently recommended the book, When Women Were Dragons (2022) by Kelly Barnhill. I have been reading it (okay listening to it on audiobook, but that counts right?) all week. The premise of the book is that women dragon, as an act, and can do so by choice or spontaneously; and in the “Mass Dragon-ing of 1955” over 600,000 women flew away from American homes, “wives and mothers all” (Barnhill, 2022). But despite the destruction, eaten husbands and bosses, and destroyed homes that dragons leave in their wake, society, the government, and individual families do everything they can to forget it happened. The history is repressed. Individual memory is policed and repressed. The dragon-ing goes on.

 Beginning this book the week before Mother’s Day, I found the recommendation timely, or even fateful, because with every chapter and hour that I listen, I find myself thinking of my mother. And I wonder if or when she would have dragon-ed if given the chance.

 Barnhill’s dragon-ing is an act of connecting to what Audre Lore calls the erotic: deep feeling and passion. In the book, dragon-ing is most frequently prompted by rage. The woman must be bigger and bursts out of her skin, often destroying a part of the building or male person(s) around her. She devours, sets fires, and flies free. Dragon-ing is also connected to a feeling of freedom, masterful creativity, or deep passion for another human being. It is also completely taboo, embarrassingly, and deeply “female,” akin to “bared breasts” and “soiled menstrual napkins” (Barnhill, 2022) so says the main character, Alex, who gradually learns to fear and resent dragons for what they took from her (and for what she blames them for as well)

Sounds familiar right?

What I find interesting and compelling about the metaphor of the dragon in this story is how clearly dangerous dragon-ing is. Dragon-ing is not safe. Dragon-ing punishes the patriarchy, certainly, but leaves homes destroyed, children abandoned, and relationships broken as well. The mass dragon-ing is a bit like the end of Kate Chopin’s Awakening times 600,000 (without the death, presumably). Alex is deeply hurt when her aunt dragon-s and leaves her and her little cousin behind. She doesn’t understand, and as her life becomes more complicated, her sense of abandonment only grows, ironically, compounded by her own abandonment of memory, truth (in favor of lies she’s forced to live), and ability to speak about her own experiences. To be fair, she doesn’t choose to surrender her feelings knowingly or willingly. The patriarchal powers that be double down on damage caused by dragon-ing by preventing any talk, research, or larger acknowledgement of the history of dragons at home and abroad. The culture won’t tolerate mention of dragons, men, and women alike. And Alex’s mother is her main enforcer.

Would my mother have dragon-ed?  I don’t think so, at least not after she had children. Though, I grew up with stories of her dragon-ing I think. There was that time when my father was stationed in Pensacola, Florida during the Vietnam War, and they had bought a new car – a Roadrunner that’s horn sounded “beep beep,” just like its namesake. While she was in the grocery store, her car literally blew up in the parking lot. Disputes between the seller and insurance agency culminated in a meeting at the dealership in which both parties refused to pay for the car, big men sitting in front of one presumably “small,” woman, alone, without her deployed husband. Well, like a dragon, she wasn’t so small. In a very feminine act of protest, she entered the showroom and approached each couple she saw. “Are you a Navy wife? This dealership takes advantage of Navy wives.” Couple after couple left the store. The “big men” panicked, replaced the car, and even, “paid for the first oil change,” my mother reports, always ending the story in the same way.

There was also the story about how she got back at a cheating boyfriend by baking x-lax into a cake. And how she gave back an engagement ring because she needed more from her fiancé before she would commit (yup, my dad, and they did eventually marry).

But she was also an enforcer, as so many women are and can hardly help but being, when internalizing patriarchal consciousness. There were many things we couldn’t talk about growing up; many realities that weren’t mentioned so didn’t exist. She told me once that her mother, my grandmother, had always told her to “hold onto the good and forget the bad.” Alex too feels that perhaps, just maybe, “there is a freedom in forgetting” (Barnhill, 2022); though, her confusion and distress when encountering what she wishes to forget only fuels the rage that demands that she dragon herself.

Alex’s mother didn’t dragon and she enforced the rule of silence to protect her children and herself. She was also afraid. I think those moments when my mom “didn’t dragon,” when I kind of wish she had, were probably for similar reasons. But what if there was a space for the danger of dragon-ing? What if society expected it, welcomed it, and made room for our, women’s, subsequent growth? It might still be hard and risky, as is all growth and change. But as I believe Barnhill is trying to suggest, it might also be less traumatic, less splitting, and give us so much more space to be.

I leave you some thoughts from my feminist “mothers,” from whom I learned about dragon-ing, not dragon-ing, and the spaces in-between. I am grateful to them. And I am grateful to my own mother. Happy Mother’s Day.

“New ways of knowing may create estrangement where there was none” –  bell hooks 
(Teaching to Transgress. 1994, p. 43)

“People who attempt to live deeply into their power in relations characteristically learn to associate this effort toward mutual empowerment with pain… the desire for mutuality almost invariably is punished rather than rewarded.” – Carter Heyward. 
(Touching Our Strength. 1989, p. 106)

 “Friends… bear one another up here and now and well into eternity… we suffer and celebrate together; [our friendship] is what we are willing to die for, hence, what we are able to live for.” – Carter Heyward
(Touching Our Strength. 1989, p. 183)

“[Community is] a specific space, location, or grouping of individuals whose sharing in common is claimed by and valued as a significant aspect of an individual’s identity.”—  Sheila Radford-Hill 
(Further to Fly. 2000, p.18) 

 “[Faith is] the tenacity to keep on believing in the power of mutuality /justice/ friendship, despite the NO being spoken, all around and within us, to this radical and sacred possibility.”—Carter Heyward.
(Touching Our Strength. 1989, p.139)

“This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time” – N.K. Jemisin
(The Fifth Season. 2015, p. 16 … And sorry – or your welcome –  you have to read the ENTIRE TRILOGY to see the beauty of this line here!)