One morning, while I (Starhawk) was lying in bed recovering from the flu, my Goddess-daughter and housemate Florence, who was then two years old, wandered in for a visit. I was not up to doing much entertaining, but she amused herself by examining the collection of Goddesses which filled my shelves.

She was first drawn to an African Akuaba figure, who has a disc-shaped head like a sacred lollipop atop a stick-cylinder of a body, which showed a slight swelling in the center that looked like a newly-pregnant belly. Florence, who had recently seen her baby sister born, pointed at the belly and said, "Baby coming out."

I was impressed at her ability to read symbols. "That's right, there is a baby in there. That's the Goddess, Florence. She comes from Africa, where your father comes from."

"Beautiful!" Florence said, gazing at the Goddess with a wonder and reverence. I realized with a sense of awe that I was seeing what might be the first awakening of her feeling for spirituality. I felt incredibly privileged; as if I had found the first ripe berry of the summer, or caught a glimpse of a rare wild animal. Florence picked up a Toltec fertility Goddess portrayed with a baby's head emerging from her vulva.

"Baby coming out!" she said.

"That's right."

"Mommy all bloody."

"Yes, there's a lot of blood, but Mommy wasn't hurt."

"Baby coming out," she repeated, and went on to make similar observations about my extensive collection of fertility Goddesses. We talked, over and over again, about the baby, the blood, and the beauty of what had been the most profound experience of her life so far.

As we talked, I felt my own understanding and appreciation of the Goddess tradition take on a new depth. For Florence, there was an absolute congruence between these images of the sacred and her own experience. The Goddess figures affirmed that the most life-changing, awesome, beautiful and frightening event of her life was indeed, what other people considered sacred. They gave her a chance to talk about the experience, to work through what I began to realize must have been considerable fear, to relive the event and integrate it in a spiritual context. The Goddesses were doll-like, something she could hold and touch and play with, as well as awesome and beautiful. The great mysteries of birth and death were literally within her grasp.

Watching her, I felt own connection to the Goddess sink a new tap root. For those of us who come to the Goddess as adults, there is always some part of us that wonders if we haven't simply lost our minds, betrayed our people, succumbed to idol worship or Devil worship, allowed ourselves to be deflected from doing Real Political Work, or simply moved to Bonkers, MO. But to Florence, the Goddess was no abstraction, no heresy, no theological or thealogical construct, but a simple portrayal of the power and importance of what is. She has an understanding of the Goddess that I can never have, an aquaintance that is intimate, rooted in the body and primal in a way mine will never be.

Moments like this one illuminate for me how important it is that we share the Goddess tradition with children. I have no children of my own. At one time, I wanted very much to have a baby from my own body--that's why I had such an extensive collection of fertility Goddesses around my room. Now, I feel content to have expressed my creativity in other ways. I have stepdaughters, step-grandchildren, Goddess-daughters and sons, and I have been a Mad Auntie to the children of others. Whether or not any one of us becomes a parent, we all need children in our lives to challenge us, to keep our spirituality grounded and at the same time show us glimpses of the places we can never go.

The Goddess tradition has been somewhat slow in providing for our children. In the Jewish tradition in which I was raised, the first thing a new community is supposed to do is build a school--before building a synagogue. In the Goddess tradition, we have focused on creating rituals for adults far more than we have focused on children. Of course, there are sound reasons for our emphasis. Jews have an intact, unbroken tradition to pass on; those of us who worship the Goddess have had to research, reconstruct and create our tradition. We cannot pass on what we don't yet have. Almost all of us have come to the Goddess as adults, so we have needed time to grow comfortable in a new spiritual tradition. Because we were not raised as Pagans, we often aren't quite sure how to raise our children as Pagans. We cannot draw on our own childhood memories--in fact, many of us are in recovery from some aspect of our childhood! Children represent the future of any tradition, but because so many of us have broken from our parents' ways, we have perhaps less of an expectation that children will remain what they are raised to be. And many of us who pioneered the Pagan revival were of the generation that deferred children, so only in recent years has there been a substantial Pagan baby boom.

Now the Goddess tradition is maturing. As a community, we've been the Wild Maiden, exploring new territory, taking on new challenges. Now, as more and more children are born to us, it is time for us to integrate the Mother, just as we must integrate the Crone to serve those among us who face disease, death and aging.

Children will challenge us. I remember when my youngest stepdaughter, Julie, who at the time was ten years old, had a battle with her mother who was attempting to impress upon her that it was not wise to tell everyone at school that she was a Witch. Raised by political activists, encouraged all her life to speak truth to power, Julie was outraged at the idea that she could be silenced in any way. "How are we going to get this to Reagan if we can't talk about it!" she protested. Later she came in, waving a dollar bill. "Look at this!" she said in righteous anger, pointing at the printed phrase, 'In God We Trust.' "How come they get to put their god on the money, and we can't even talk about ours?"

Her question made me shift my thinking about some of the deep issues that face our community as we grow larger and more visible. Like a lot of people attracted to the Goddess tradition, I like to think of myself as anti-authoritarian, anti-institution, as someone happy to take an unpopular stand and buck the tide. I appreciated the efforts of those in the Pagan community who were working for more legitimization, but my heart wasn't in that battle. I'm happy to live on the boundary of institiutions, to use Mary Daly's phrase. I didn't mind being a rebel, or even a spiritual outlaw, and I could live with the consequences. I didn't need anyone else to legitimize my spiritual path.

But the things that to me were courageous, liberating stands to take, to Julie were simply normal. To be told not to talk about what was basic to her world view was wounding. It was, in fact, oppression.

I had, at times, attempted to raise the issue of Pagan oppression in feminist groups, mostly to see it shunted aside as not on a par with the real oppressions of gender, race, class, etc. After all, the lesbian and gay movement was waging a struggle based on the premise that people did not choose to be gay, they simply were. And we had indisputably chosen to be Pagan.

And for those of us who have come to the Goddess as adults, the oppression we face as Witches is, in truth, less wounding than the pain we might have experienced, going back to our earliest childhood, because of our race, our gender, our religion, our unique bodies or uncommon desires. As adults, we have the life experience and ego strength to face prejudice without internalizing it. We have resources for mobilizing support and taking action.

But our children are not yet adults. Unlike us, they did not choose to be Pagan, except perhaps in so far as we choose our parents before birth. They do not have the resources we do, and they are naturally susceptible to the judgments of others. Not only that, children are logical. If something is good, we should be able to talk about it openly. If something must be kept a secret, it becomes a source of shame. If children can't talk openly about what is normal to them, they will begin to feel abnormal.

What can we do? Some would say, "Don't raise your kids as Pagans if it's going to be a source of pain for them. Don't burden them with that oppression." But how can we be in honest relationship to our children if we cannot be who we are? By that reasoning, my parents should have converted to Christianity to spare me the pain of anti-Semitism. African-American parents should, perhaps, not have children at all in order to spare them the pain of racism.

No, what we must do is simply change the world. Our children have the right to talk about their religion in school without fearing ridicule or reprisals. Our children deserve the same kinds of opportunities and resources children of other traditions have, from religious education to summer camps. It's up to us to provide them.

Julie's remark made me confront the part of myself that still didn't quite believe we were as legitimate as other religions, the place that had internalized my mother's undying hope that this was just a phase I was going through. I became less fearful of institutionalization, and more fearful of eternal marginalization. I could claim our religious oppression as a political fight, linked to other struggles, and as serious and valid an issue as any fight for human rights.