So Many Sarahs

A dream with a sense of humor, and a poem that gets serious.

Tzivia Gover

Apr 21, 2023

mickey mouse and minnie mouse illustration — There is not just one Sarah. She appears to each of us with a different face, and she appears differently each time we imagine her. Photo by LeeAnn Cline on Unsplash

Now I’m dreaming about her

Recently I dreamed I was in my old friend Sarah N’s apartment, where I met a young girl (also) named Sarah. As I left the apartment and stepped into the lobby, I ran into a former colleague’s wife, Sarah B. She was listening to a performance by a singer, who turned out to be Miriam G., who I’d known in my college days!

I am not going to try to interpret this dream here, but I’ll say this:

I have known many Sarahs.
Apparently, I’ve been spending so much time thinking about the Old Testament Sarah by day that multiple Sarahs (and now a Miriam, too!) have been visiting my dreams by night.
Dreams do have a sense of humor. (I woke up from this one smiling, anyway!)

This dream also reminds me that there is not just one Sarah, even when we are talking about the same one. That is, the Sarah who shows up in the Bible shows up to each of us differently.

Some see Sarah as:

an archetype of beauty, a righteous wife, a barren woman, someone with an expressive laugh, a spiritual leader, a woman filled with doubt, a paragon of faith, a theological renegade, a jealous wife who made harsh demands on a woman who served her, a loving mother, a heroic figure, a tragic one …

In today’s poem, “Sarah, who” I enumerate various Sarahs I have encountered in stories past and present.

These women, who went by various names, appear in the lines of my poem as Sarah. They are Sarahs to me because they are women whose children were sacrificed to unjust laws or inadequate institutions — or I could say, because of systems that deny, diminish, or degrade motherhood.