The Red Tent

"My heart is a ladle of sweet water brimming over. Selah."
-- from The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

I work in a library, so you'd think I'd be ahead of the game in reading all the bestsellers and classics. Sadly, this is not the case. My "must-read" list of "Books I Should Have Read Already" overfloweth. My most recent reading accomplishment -- This year I read all of the Toni Morrison books I hadn't gotten around to in the last umpteen years. I also read The Red Tent.

This book by Anita Diamant was published in 1997, and it is a historical fictionalization of the Biblical figure, Dinah, whose story is told in Genesis, Chapter 34. Dinah is the daughter of Leah and Jacob, and in the Bible her story is told by her brothers. But Diamant allows Dinah to tell her own sweeping saga of growing up in Mesopotamia, living in Canaan, and dying in Egypt.

The women of Dinah's world were of a different time and culture, but I felt a connection to so many of them. I connected to the traditions of the women, and their time each month in the red tent, the stories they shared, the wisdom they passed along to each other.

I told my sister, Rhonda, about the book, and she read it, too. She felt what I felt, and began reading it to our mother, Dianne.

Our mother has ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease, so she is paralyzed and cannot speak. She has some movement in her right hand, but it's impossible for her to hold a book for any length of time. So, Rhonda is mama's audiobook. Rhonda didn't have to get too deep into the book to realize that our mother's bedroom is our "red tent."

Whenever our daughters, godmothers, aunts, sisterfriends and female cousins gather around mama in the bedroom, something inspirational always happens. We share our secrets. We pass along life lessons. We laugh. We cry.

For now, the red tent is in the Intensive Care Unit at the hospital, as mama fights to recover from another bridge she has crossed in her journey with ALS. Even though she is in pain, she still smiles and her eyes light up whenever all of us girls gather around her to comfort her and share our inside jokes about our womanhood.

Mama can no longer speak, but in our red tent, her voice and her laughter are loud and clear.