Breadcrumbs Episode 4: The Divine Feminine and a Mother’s Choice

When you go through a lot of change in a short amount of time, it’s easy to wake up one day and ask: How did I get here?

That question has followed me through my faith deconstruction, my motherhood journey, my politics, and my writing life. And what I’ve learned is that the answer is usually found long before the moment when everything falls apart.

Episode four of Breadcrumbs pulls back the curtain on Chapter Four of Faithfully Dissident Daughters and explores things that were already happening in my body and my faith long before the story in the book begins.

Chapter Four of Faithfully Dissident Daughters is called "The Divine Feminine and a Mother's Choice." It's a heavy chapter in the book, and I'm not going to give it away here — you'll have to read it. But in this month's Breadcrumbs episode, I went looking for the backstory. What I found surprised me because the conflict started before I was even married.

Praying About Birth Control (lol)

In April of 2011, a few months before my wedding, I didn’t have health insurance and was trying to figure out birth control. I was twenty-four years old, raised in evangelical culture, and genuinely uncertain whether going on the pill was spiritually okay. So I did what I had been taught to do: I prayed about it.

Reading the journal entry now, I feel tenderness for that version of me — trying to do right by God, by her culture, and by her body, all at once, without a framework to hold all three.

I ended up going to Planned Parenthood and asked my sister came with me. Walking through the door felt illicit. Instead, I found a friendly provider, a six-month supply of NuvaRings, and a Krispy Kreme next door with the "Hot Now" sign on.

What Happens When Doctors Don't Listen

The NuvaRing ended up wrecking me. I spiraled into depression, ended up in urgent care with extreme anxiety and vomiting, and was told — twice, by two different doctors — that hormonal birth control had nothing to do with it.

I knew my own body and that they were wrong. But I had been shaped by a culture that taught me to defer to authority, especially male authority, even in matters involving my own body. So I kept looking for someone who would believe me and eventually found a chiropractor who practiced applied kinesiology. My husband and I called him the witchcraft doctor. After a few appointments, he completely misread my situation.

I left and never went back.

That was one of the first times I trusted my own experience over an authority figure's interpretation of it.

The Silence That Says Everything

When I went looking for journal entries from my infertility and fertility treatment season a nearly 5 years later, I found almost nothing. That was such a pattern in my life; I didn't write about things I didn't know how to process. I just powered through. One of the reasons I didn't have words for it is that I didn't have a theology big enough to hold it.

That's what faith deconstruction often looks like from the inside — a grinding mismatch between your lived experience and the view of God you were handed. A God who was Father, who blessed the faithful with children and expected women to be vessels of obedience and grace. That God had no language for what my body was going through.

Going Looking for a Different God

Chapter Four is where I start searching and where I encountered the Divine Feminine in Christianity for the first time. That theology came from my own body, forcing me to go looking for a God who understood what it felt like to be in my skin.

The full Episode 4 of Breadcrumbs — including my actual journal entries from 2011 and the memoir piece that didn't make it into the book — is available to paid subscribers below the paywall.

Next month, we’ll move into Chapter Five: Compassion and the Womb of God