​Autumn. The final transition.
She has shed the snakeskin.
What began in Winter as a protective cocoon, and became clothing in later seasons, now lies at her feet. She no longer needs a second skin between herself and the world.
She stands naked and unashamed. Strong. Proud. One foot already set forward on the path she will continue walking.

There are diamonds in her hair, but unlike the goddesses who came before her, she doesn't use that hair to conceal herself. It is swept away from her face and bound down her back.
As if to say, Go ahead. Look at my butt, in which I’m well pleased

​Her hands are open—not grasping, not guarding. Perhaps they are open to receive whatever comes next. Perhaps they're simply there to feel her way along.
Probably both.

​And although the snakeskin has been discarded, it hasn't entirely disappeared. Look closely and you can still see its faint imprint on her body. What once protected her has become part of her. She doesn't need to carry the old skin anymore because she carries what it taught her.
Experience leaves marks.
Some are scars. Some are wisdom. Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference.

When I began this series more than a quarter of a century ago, I remember feeling very much stuck in Winter—even though, chronologically, I was already well into Summer. I created this woman before I understood her. I wondered whether I would ever know what she seemed to know. Whether I would ever feel that comfortable in my own skin— brave enough to live without the extra one.
Looking at her now, I realize something I couldn't have known when my younger hands formed her from clay:
She was showing me where I was going.
And I feel her.
​Smiling.

​The title, of course, plays on that famous reassurance about Santa Claus. Except our Virginia isn't waiting hopefully for something magical to arrive.
She's wondering when the hell it will leave.
At first glance, she might be a Madonna: mother in blue, babe in arms, eyes turned heavenward. Blue, traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary, lends her an air of serenity and devotion.
But serenity may be overstating things.
Look down.

​Clustered around her skirts are six small children, all hands reaching, mouths open, each apparently experiencing an emergency of biblical proportions. One needs something. Another wants something. Someone is undoubtedly hungry. Someone else is probably touching someone who has specifically asked NOT TO BE TOUCHED.
And tucked among this chorus of need, easy to miss at first, is the unmistakable swell beneath her gown.
​She's pregnant.
Again.

Did Virginia want all these children?
Perhaps she did. Perhaps every one of them was wanted, welcomed and loved.
But those are three different things.
For centuries, motherhood has been celebrated as one of the highest expressions of womanhood—and for many women it is. But when motherhood becomes not simply a path but the path, celebration can quietly become expectation.
Which makes those heavenward eyes more interesting.
Give me strength?
Give me patience?
Dear God, give me five uninterrupted minutes in the bathroom?
Or perhaps:
Did anyone ever ask me what I wanted?
Surely motherhood can be sacred without being compulsory.
The miracle isn't simply that a woman's body can create life. It is also that the woman inhabiting that body should have some say in the life she creates—and the life she will live afterward.
Which brings us back to menopause.
After years governed by cycles, fertility, pregnancies—or merely the possibility of them—the ending is complicated. Something is being lost.
But something may also be regained.
Her body is becoming entirely her own again.
Maybe that's the glimmer in those upturned eyes.
Not despair.
Not  resignation.
Hope.
Because unlike Santa Claus, Virginia, menopause really is coming.
Eventually.

And this too shall pass.

​What began in Winter as a cocoon—something to shelter within—and remained in Spring as a cloak she wasn't quite ready to shed, by Summer it has become something else entirely.

​Instead of the skin wearing her, she now wears it. And, she is finally having a little fun.

 The shoulders are bare. The gown hugs her curves. Pearls and crystals are tucked extravagantly into her hair. She is refined, feminine, a little flirty, a little sexy—and looking quite comfortable with all of it.
​
There is still modesty here, but it no longer feels like modesty imposed from outside.

After our earlier Goddesses struggled with weight, beauty, approval, sexuality, temptation and the persistent question of how women are supposed to be, Summer seems to have arrived at a rather liberating answer:
​
She gets to decide.
​

Perhaps that's why she's smiling.
In fact, hers may be the first truly knowing smile in the series. Winter slept. The others questioned, worried, wondered, performed, rebelled. Spring looked forward, curious about what might come next.
Summer looks as though she already knows.
What?
She's not saying.
And perhaps that's another kind of power—the realization that she doesn't have to explain herself.
She doesn't need to be understood by everyone in the room. 
She doesn't need permission to be who she is.
She has stepped into her own light.
Not naked.
Not armored.
Simply dressed as herself.

​Of all the transformations a woman may experience, surely one of the most miraculous—and bewildering—is motherhood.

​Is that wonder we see?
Terror?
Exhaustion?
Perhaps all three.
Her expression begs the question...

How in the name of all things holy did this happen!

The sarcophagus seemed an appropriate container. Motherhood is, after all, both a birth and a burial. A child is born, but something of the woman who existed before that child is born disappears. Not lost—but transmuted. Her old life, her old freedoms, even her old understanding of herself are rearranged around this astonishing new creature who is utterly dependent upon her.

​On the sarcophagus' exterior, ancient Egypt morphs  with modern motherhood.
There she is driving her chariot, children aboard, soccer ball in hand, racing toward the next obligation. The family dog runs alongside—or perhaps that's Anubis, jackal-headed guardian of the dead. Frankly, when you're late for soccer practice, either seems plausible.

​On the other side, Mother offers ice cream cones to eager children while the family cat—or possibly Bast, Egyptian goddess of protection, pleasure and domestic life—observes from above.
The sacred and the mundane have become indistinguishable.
And perhaps that's the point.
Motherhood is creation at its most elemental, followed almost immediately by laundry, sleepless nights, scraped knees, snacks, carpools, forgotten homework and the profound realization that love is limitless.

Inspired by the multi-armed goddesses of Hindu tradition, she stands bare-breasted and unapologetic, crowned in pearls, holding four objects freighted with several thousand years of ideas about women, sex, temptation and knowledge.
And, just to keep things complicated, she's wearing a chastity belt.

​In one hand, an orchid—a nod to Georgia O'Keeffe and those lush, sensual flowers that generations of viewers have insisted suggested female anatomy. O'Keeffe herself resisted that interpretation, which makes the reference even more interesting: once again, who  decides what the image means—the woman who created it, or the people looking at it?

In another hand, the apple and the serpent.
​Eve takes a bite, humanity falls, and somehow the woman has been answering for it ever since.
Curiosity becomes disobedience.
Knowledge becomes sin.
​Female appetite becomes dangerous.

​Then there is the owl of Athena, goddess of wisdom. Because perhaps knowing—knowing one's mind, one's body, one's desires—isn't something to fear after all.

​And finally, Pandora's vessel. Not a box, despite what centuries of retelling have taught us, but a pithos—a large Greek storage jar. Pandora opens it and releases suffering into the world.
Another curious woman.
Another catastrophe.
Another woman blamed.
But the story has an important footnote: Hope remained.
Perhaps that deserves more attention.

​Our Goddess holds all these contradictions simultaneously: temptation and wisdom, innocence and experience, restraint and desire, danger and hope. Her breasts are exposed while her sexuality is literally under lock and key. Pearls—those old symbols of purity—form an extravagant crown on the head of a woman who no longer looks particularly interested in being pure for anyone.

​Good luck putting that back in the bottle.

​Poor Venus.

According to one version of the ancient myth, she sprang into existence fully formed from sea foam produced after Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and tossed the offending equipment into the sea.

Yes.
The Goddess of Beauty, Love and Sexuality was born from sea scum and severed genitals.
(Penis AND Uranus? Really???)
​
Botticelli gave the story considerably better public relations.
In The Birth of Venus, his goddess floats gracefully to shore on a scallop shell: naked, golden-haired, impossibly beautiful and, oddly, innocent. She is the embodiment of desire, yet she doesn't appear particularly desirous of anything herself. (To me, she looks sad. With a dash of vapid.)
That contradiction has always fascinated me.
So, my Venus arrives on her shell, too.
But mine is wearing a bunny suit.

Because apparently, somewhere in the 1960’s, nothing said "female sexuality" quite like a cute and fluffy woodland creature with  libidinous leanings.
 
She looks almost sweetly bewildered by the whole business. And perhaps she should be. Like Botticelli's Venus, she's been presented as an object of desire before she seems to have discovered desire for herself.

Therein lies the joke.
​
And perhaps something considerably less funny.
Women have long been handed contradictory instructions about sexuality: Be desirable, but not desiring. Be sexy, but not sexual. Attract attention, but don't appear to want it

​No wonder she looks confused.
Maybe that's why the bunny suit works.
What could be more harmless than a bunny?
Or less threatening? 
Next, we'll meet the goddess behind the bunny ears.

Spring is here.
Sort of.
Our Goddess has awakened from Winter's long sleep, although, apparently, she's not ready to abandon her cocoon altogether. So, she wears it—loosening here, opening there.
Because emerging isn't the same as arriving.
​
She still carries Winter's questions: Am I pretty enough? Thin enough? Good enough? Do you approve?
But something has changed.

Another Goddess has emerged from her cocoon.
She's learned about food. She's learned about beauty. She's learned that thin is good and thinner is apparently better.
Now she learns something even more problematic:
Ask someone else what they think.

Ah, validation! That peculiar habit of handing someone else the measuring stick and then anxiously waiting for the results.
Well?
Does this ass make my butt look big?

​There are, of course, several things wrong with the question.
Beginning with the fact that she's naked.
On a donkey.
Apparently, those details don't concern her.
Yet her bottom does.

The donkey, meanwhile, looks as though it would very much like to be excluded from the conversation.
Its expression could be sympathetic. Perhaps it understands the burden of being judged by appearances.
Or perhaps it's simply thinking:
Lady, I'm an ass. What exactly did you expect?
​
​And maybe that's the joke beneath the joke.
She's looking outward for reassurance when perhaps she should be looking inward. Open-eyed, but not quite seeing. Still measuring herself against standards she didn't invent ​and seeking answers from anyone willing—or unfortunate enough—to provide them.

​She's still in Winter, after all.
Still becoming.
Still learning the difference between being seen and seeing herself.

Exiting Winter's cocoon, our next Goddess enters the world.
And the world has suggestions.

Be attractive.
Be desirable.
Be disciplined.

And above all, be thin.
Very thin.

I know.  I'm admitting my age here, but for women of my generation, thinness wasn't merely one version of beauty. It was the prerequisite. There could be no pretty without thin.

Inspired by Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian Bombshell from the mid 1950’s who introduced fruit basket haberdashery decades before Edible Arrangements arrived on the runway, ‘We are What We Eat’ balances an entire food pyramid on her head: healthy fruits and vegetables near the bottom, followed by increasingly questionable choices as we climb toward the heavens. Bread. Pie. Candy. Chocolate.
And, presiding over the whole nutritional enterprise? A martini.
​Balance is everything.

But look at her.
She doesn't seem entirely convinced.

​Is she leaning because she's struggling to keep everything in balance?
Or is that slight tilt something else entirely?

Maybe she's beginning to suspect the whole arrangement is ridiculous.

After all, We Are What We Eat may have less to do with what's on our plates than with what we're fed.
Ideas about beauty.
Ideas about our bodies.
Ideas about what we must deny ourselves in order to belong.
We consume those too.
And some of them take a very long time to digest.
Perhaps becoming begins when we start questioning the menu.
​

​If our Playboy Bunny represented female sexuality as imagined from the outside, this Goddess is what happens when the woman herself gets a vote.
Suddenly, two arms simply aren't enough.
Inspired by the multi-armed goddesses of Hindu tradition, she stands bare-breasted and unapologetic, crowned in pearls, holding four objects freighted with several thousand years of ideas about women, sex, temptation and knowledge.
And, just to keep things complicated, she's wearing a chastity belt.
Mixed messages, anyone?

​In one hand, an orchid—a nod to Georgia O'Keeffe and those lush, sensual flowers that generations of viewers have insisted on seeing as female anatomy. O'Keeffe herself resisted that interpretation, which makes the reference even more interesting: once again, who gets to decide what the female image means—the woman who created it, or the people looking at it?

​In another hand, the apple and the serpent. Eve takes a bite, humanity falls, and somehow the woman has been answering for it ever since. Curiosity becomes disobedience. Knowledge becomes sin. Female appetite becomes dangerous.

​Then there is the owl of Athena, goddess of wisdom. Because perhaps knowing—knowing one's mind, one's body, one's desires—isn't something to fear after all.

And finally, Pandora's vessel. Not a box, despite what centuries of retelling have taught us, but a pithos—a large Greek storage jar. Pandora opens it and releases suffering into the world.
Another curious woman.
Another catastrophe.
Another woman blamed.
But the story has an important footnote: Hope remained.
Perhaps that deserves more attention.
​
Our Goddess holds all these contradictions simultaneously: temptation and wisdom, innocence and experience, restraint and desire, danger and hope. Her breasts are exposed while her sexuality is literally under lock and key. Pearls—those old symbols of purity—form an extravagant crown on the head of a woman who no longer looks particularly interested in being pure for anyone.

And look at her face.
Unlike our bewildered Bunny Venus, she doesn't seem to be asking how she should be seen.
She knows we're looking.
She just doesn't appear terribly concerned about what we think.
Maybe that's the reality of female sexuality: not a single thing at all. Not something bestowed by an admirer, defined by a religion, packaged by Playboy, blamed by mythology or contained by a chastity belt.
It can be sensual. Cerebral. Curious. Contradictory. Complicated. Funny. Powerful. 
And entirely her own.
​
Good luck putting that back in the bottle.