How I Ended Up Lost, and Then Found, in the Dark Woods

Do we become our favorite fairy tales…or were they about us to begin with?

Little Red Riding Hood

Almost ten years ago, I got lost in the woods. In all honesty, I don’t remember if it was intentional or not. I did go wandering, after all, into the darkest places, filled with trees and brambles and the kinds of sounds that only creatures with very big teeth would make.

So was it my fault I got lost?

It’s hard to say. Where does culpability begin or end when the entire world around you is a frightening woodland filled with dangerous creatures? When the people who promise they will protect you from that world carry you right to its borders and leave you there?

Is it so wrong to keep going? To face the inevitable?

As I stared into the darkness ahead, brambles curling and twisting everywhere, I felt like Little Red Riding Hood. I was equal parts foolish child who hadn’t yet learned that there were monsters hiding everywhere and curious fledgling who felt a deep need to know not just the paved streets, but the uncharted wilderness, too.

I was a maiden. Yes, even at 38. I was a maiden, fresh and new to the world.

I’d thought I was about to enter into a phase of wifehood, of motherhood. I’d been a loyal, loving companion to my partner for seven years by then. But as I mentioned, he walked me to the woodland’s border and left me there when he found another (literal) maiden that he felt was better suited for mothering his children.

Somehow, it felt as if a time slippage had occurred. As if the clock had slid back just a few hours. I was not going to become the matriarch of my household. I was not going to carry and birth a child.

I was made new again, a virgin maid, unclaimed by a man, left on the borders of a land I did not recognize. A place I had never ventured.

It seemed like a familiar story. The young girl wandering down the path to her grandmother’s house. Perhaps not her actual grandmother, but the elder woman she would become one day.

And curious, unwitting, maybe even foolish, she fails to heed the warning of the townspeople and ventures off into the pathless woods, unaware of the danger that awaits her.

I thought I had listened to people’s advice. I felt I had done everything right. Everyone told me what to do and how to do it — and I did exactly as instructed. And still, there I was, at the edge of the woods, left on my own. Lost.

Maybe there was more to Little Red Riding Hood’s story, too. Maybe she had already walked that same path, done everything she had been told, and maybe it hadn’t done her any good, either.

So like that dauntless heroine cloaked in the color of blood, I too stepped across the border and into the unknown.

The Big Bad Wolf

I am a Wolfe. As you can imagine, I have always known this. Since I was a child, I knew I was born into this clan. Whether fox, coyote, or wolf, I can feel the wild canine spirit within me, the one that runs across forests under the bright moon, howling and yipping and snarling.

But when I got lost in those woods, I felt afraid. I started at the slightest noise. I couldn’t stop looking over my shoulder. The hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention.

That’s when I realized why I had felt so driven to venture into those dark woods. I had forgotten the ways of the wolf. I had spent nine years in a relationship that had domesticated me. I’d been declawed. My teeth had been ripped out.

I didn’t know how to say no. I didn’t know how to snap at danger. I didn’t even know how to run.

I began barreling through those dark woods, my fear starting to melt away. Or perhaps it hadn’t gone anywhere, but I had learned to face it.

Little Red Riding Hood went into the woods on purpose. I knew it in my bones. She wasn’t afraid of the wolf. She was seeking him out.

He was her teacher. Her lover. Her protector. She could not be complete without his wildness. She would never grow out of maidenhood without him.

And when I heard that low rumble of a growl, when I saw that foreboding, four-legged figure stepping out from the brambly shadows, that’s when I truly understood.

Yes: teacher, lover, protector. But the wolf was not another being.

Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf were one soul. The maiden is simply a whelp who has not yet grown into her eyes, into her ears, into her claws, into her teeth.

Little Red Riding Hood roamed the woods with purpose. She was looking for herself.

The Woodsman

Once upon a time, a few years after I roamed into the forest, a man came into my woodland. I was deep in the process of reintegration. It was like a long, drawn out communion: me consuming and digesting my wolf, he consuming and digesting me.

I wrote about it. I created art to commemorate the transformation. And I practiced using the claws that I was sharpening, the teeth that were growing back.

“Enjoy being the big bad wolf,” this man said to me. “But be aware the woodsman is out there and he still has his axe.”

My inner wolf was not ready for this. I had no fierceness with which to respond. No courage. No bite.

I had, up until that point, rarely been so frightened by something someone said to me. This felt like a death threat. I woke up in cold sweats night after night, dreaming of the dark woods, and a man stepping out of the shadows, an axe raised above his head.

I spent over a year with these words in the back of my mind. Every man I encountered in the cyberwoods, I wondered: Was this him? Was this the woodcutter who was ready to take a swing at me?

And how many other men felt the same but were too afraid to come out and say it? How many of them fantasized about picking up an axe to bury into my body or that of any other woman who spoke too firmly?

But one day I realized these were my woods. Many had ventured here, uninvited, feeling entitled to the riches of my dark forest, and eventually, they were all escorted out, though not always fast enough to prevent them from doing damage.

I wasn’t very effective at this job. Not yet, anyways. But I was learning.

I wasn’t Little Red Riding Hood. I wasn’t the big, bad wolf. I was everyone in this story.

Yes, the woodsman, too.

I picked up an axe one day and began swinging it in wide arcs. I was no longer afraid.

I remembered reading once, in Clarissa Pinkola-Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves, that the axe is an old symbol of the goddess. It once belonged to the world of women, not the world of men. It is associated with the silver of the moon and in the old Minoan religion, it was “used to mark the ritual path of the initiate and to mark the places designated as holy.”

No man could come into my woods and do true damage with the goddess’ axe. So I took it back, re-marking my own path, my own sacred places in these holy woods of mine.

Grandmother

It has been almost ten years since I entered these woods. I am no longer lost.

Yet something has changed. Things look unfamiliar, somehow, even after all this time.

I look at the pathways I have created in these woods and realize I know them too well. I look at myself in the red dress and realize I am not just that curious young girl anymore. I know the big, bad wolf within that I have been growing into and understand I am not just that fierce beast anymore. I practice swinging my axe and am certain that this keeper of the woods is also not all that I am.

I just turned 47 a few weeks ago. I have been alive for almost half a century. My ovaries are running out of viable eggs. My body is changing.

The woman who was left at the edge of these woods nearly a decade ago is entering a new phase. Elderhood. I am becoming the old woman in the woods.

It’s a strange thing, all these journeys of womanhood. I have learned that the paths are not linear. We do not start at Point A and end up at Point B.

It is circular. Perhaps spherical.

I have walked the path of the maiden so many times. Incredibly, I am a maiden still, even at 47. I belong to no man, to no person. There are many rites of passage I have never experienced. I am a virgin, according to the old world — an independent, autonomous woman.

I am a mother yet a living child has never passed through my body. Yet I have guided and loved so many children through the world. And when my partner left me at the forest’s edge all those years ago, he left me not alone, but with the ghost of a baby I had lost twenty years prior, and the ghost of the child I believed we would have together.

I am a wild woman. A wolf. An instinctive being. Once, a long time ago, and relearning that part of me now. And I am a hero and protector, the one who saves the day, axe swinging in victory.

Now is my time to fill out even more of this sphere of my selfhood. Not newly embarking on the journey into elderhood, but simply again. I have been here before, this woman who so many said had the soul of an old lady, and now, for the first time, I’m walking this path of elderhood when my body is transforming, journeying toward grandmotherhood. Yes, even for this woman who doesn’t have children.

This fairy tale has meant so much to me over the years. It has held so many lessons. And I suppose it has brought me home to myself.

All these years, I thought I was Little Red Riding Hood, wandering the dark woods. And now I know I am all of the characters and the dark woods. Every part of that story is me.

I feel the same thrill of wonder and shivers of trepidation at the thought of meeting myself in the cottage deep in these dark woods. There will be herbs hanging from the rafters. A basket of wool waiting to be spun next to a creaky old rocking chair.

I made it through this forest as wolf, as maiden, as woodcutter. And now I will settle here once and for all, the old woman in the wild woods.

© Yael Wolfe 2023

Yael Wolfe is a writer, artist, and photographer. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com. If you love her writing, leave her a tip over at Ko-fi.

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