My Facebook feed abounds with articles and book reviews about parenting. Apparently, we are overvaluing, overscheduling, and overprotecting our children. The underlying message in all of these stories is this: We are doing it wrong. And if we are doing it wrong, then there must be some way to do it right. Some fine-tuned adjustment of the dial could help me tune in to just the right frequency, with an implied promise of happy, healthy, well-adjusted children.
A deeper consideration of the issue reveals that the goal of “perfect” parenting is of course illusory. The past week brought the ironic – and instructive – news that all of our efforts to protect our kids from food allergies may have in fact contributed to the alarming epidemic. Somehow, all of this trying so hard to get it right somehow brings about the very thing we were trying to avoid, at least in some instances. Sometimes we get things wrong by trying so hard to do them right.
According to Jung, the goal of our life’s journey should be wholeness, not perfection. He famously said that the “right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.” In other words, sometimes we get things right by doing them wrong.
The wisdom of fairy tales supports Jung’s observations. In many tales, it is the witch, the giant, or the evil sorcerer who paradoxically bring about the happy development of the hero in their apparent efforts to thwart him. At the end of the Hungarian tale The Boy Who Could Keep a Secret, a young man wronged as a child by his cruel mother acknowledges his gratitude to her. “If you had not beaten me nothing would have happened that has happened, and I should not now be King of Hungary.” If she hadn’t beaten him, he never would have set out on his hero’s journey.
Certainly, we are best advised not to beat our children. But isn’t it good to know that there really isn’t one right way to parent?
Picture this… a girl about six or seven years old sits on the edge of the pool, shivering and scared. Even after several years of group swim lessons, she’s still inept and frightened of the water. Finally, her mom just kind of gives up, and stops dragging her to swim lessons.
That was me. No, I never really learned to swim.
Fast forward several decades, and imagine me with my own timid daughter at the edge of another pool. Watching her contend with her own terror, as you can imagine, brought up a lot of memories. She used to come to me with tears in her eyes each week before her lesson and beg me not to make her go.
Now I want to tell you about an American folktale called Wiley and the Hairy Man. Wiley was a young boy who lived with his mother. His father had been killed many years ago by the Hairy Man. Wiley is always careful to take his dogs with him whenever he goes out into the woods, so that they can protect him and save him from the fate his father met with.
But one day, he forgets, and the Hairy Man comes to get him. He manages to trick the Hairy Man, and get away that day, but that just makes the Hairy Man even angrier. Wiley’s mom helps him to hide, and protects him. The Hairy Man comes and tells Wiley’s mother that she must hand him over, but together, Wiley and his mom manage to trick the Hairy Man again, and with that, he must go away and leave them alone forever!
Our children will likely face many of the same bugaboos that haunted our childhoods. Jung called these bugaboos “complexes.” When we see a child face a complex that once upon a time conquered us, complicated feelings can come up. We may feel those same awful feelings of vulnerability all over again. We may feel anger at our child as we watch him and her display a weakness we despise in ourselves. It wasn’t fun watching my daughter refuse to put her head under the water for a year and a half!
The tale of Wiley shows a situation in which a mother is able to deal with her own complex constructively, to use what she learned to help her son overcome the challenge. It doesn’t always happen like this. Sometimes we can’t rise to that challenge, and we have to face watching our kid get devoured by the same demon that once devoured us.
Happily for my daughter, that wasn’t the case for her. Like Wiley’s mom, I used what I remembered about my own swimming experience to make choices about how she would learn to swim that ultimately helped her to overcome the hurdle I never learned to get past. Imagine what it was like for me to watch her “get it” one day — to start swimming confidently, having fun. That particular hairy man won’t be coming around here again!
I’ve been thinking about ambition lately — my own for myself, and my own for my children, and how those two things intersect. The fairy tale Rumplestiltskin helps me as I ponder this topic. The heroine of the fairytale gets into her predicament when her father boasts to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. In fact, she can do no such thing. Many versions of the tale tell us that she is actually quite lazy, and that her father boasts to compensate for his shame at her lack of accomplishment.
Like the father in the tale, I can feel my irritation when one of my children doesn’t reach quite as high as I feel that he or she should. I can feel my desire to want to step in and push them forward. I can even feel my anger about.
The father’s boast lands his daughter in a potentially deadly situation. If she doesn’t succeed in spinning straw into gold, she will be killed. You certainly get the feeling that the father’s boasting about his daughter has more to do with his needs to be perceived a certain way than it has to do with what’s right for his daughter. The long-term effects of the father’s narcissistic treatment of his daughter can be seen in her inability to protect her own child.
If we grew up in families where everything we did was viewed in terms of whether or not it meets our parents needs, we may have great difficulty hanging on to our own creative offspring, whether it be a creative endeavor, an interest or passion, or an actual child. Growing up in families like that can inflict a grave wound to our creativity.
Of course, it is finally her need to protect her child that ultimately motives the heroine to come to terms with the demonic little man who rescued her. Rumplestiltskin can be viewed symbolically as the heroine’s own split off creative power, which she at last is able to reclaim when she learns his name.
I’ve been watching the Olympics with my kids recently. It’s been interesting to see how excited they get watching the athletes. When I see the atheletes and how young most of them are, I am reminded that the world of youth is one my children will be entering in the not to distant future. When my five year old son’s eyes light up as he watches speed skating, and he asks me if he could learn to do that, and would he be famous if he won a gold medal, I know that at this point in his life, it is my job to encourage his fearless confidence.
One of the aspects of Jack and the Beanstalk that I have always been most interested in is Jack’s exchange of the cow for the handful of beans, and his mother’s reaction to this. The milk cow is the one possession his family has, and she has recently ceased producing milk. The maternal principle here has dried up. There is no nurturance left in this family. Jack is charged with taking the cow to market to sell her for money. Since a cow that produces milk would be an asset that would continue to prodvide sustenance and a source of income while cash will eventually run out, we can imagine that the family is in desperate psychological straits. The mother’s emotional resources are dwindling and will soon be spent.
It is difficult not to have empathy for the mother in the story. She is so burdened with daily cares that she is no longer capable of being imaginative. Luckily for her, however, this is not the case for her son.
Jack is exceedingly optimistic and trusting when he trades the cow for the beans. His mother, of course, berates him. She is angry and despairing, and belittles and insults him for his choice. I think most parents have moments of reacting poorly to a handful of beans. I know my parents did. When I was five, I declared that I wanted to be an actress. I was told that that wasn’t a practical choice, that few succeeded at that profession, and I would have a hard life. I had just been told that my handful of enticing, beautiful magic beans were worthless and should be thrown out the window. At that point, I never got to find out if they would grow.
Of course my parents were only trying to steer me in what they thought would be the best direction. They were trying to spare me pain. But the outrageous confidence of young children is a neccessary attribute for someone who will shortly begin their hero’s journey. They need to believe in their handful of beans.
So I told my son that he could learn speed skating if he wanted to, and of course he would be very famous if he won a gold medal. And maybe he will. Most likely he won’t. But he will someday be offered a handful of magic beans. And I hope I will have given him the courage to take them.
My mother was never very good at saying no. When as a teenager I would ask her for something she needed to deny me, it would tie her in knots. She would get angry at me for having even asked. When my daughter became a toddler, we began to have battles over TV. She would scream and cry if I turned it off, and beg for me to turn it on at times. I remember feeling tied in knots. And then one day it hit me like someone throwing a brick through the window. If Gioia asked to watch TV, I could say no. She might scream and throw a fit, but I could still say no. All I had to do was hold firm to that one simple word, “no,” and be prepared to tolerate her reaction.
This was the beginning of a new phase in my learning about how to carry authority. Like many women, saying “no” in the face of fierce opposition and then tolerating the other’s unhappiness has never come easy for me. In my late 20’s, I achieved a senior management position at a non-profit. A seasoned employee came to my office with an outrageous request. He smiled, chatted me up, and asked nicely. I said yes. Some part of me knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t even imagine how to say no.
So having children taught me how to say no. I remember being curious as to whether being able to say “no” to a screaming four year old demanding dessert after consuming no dinner would carry over into “real” life. Would I now begin to feel more firmly rooted in my own authority in all areas of my life?
Last week, I had the following dream. I was in a beautiful boutique, and in a lit glass case was a priceless object carved in black stone. It was a gargoyle-type figure about the size of my fist. I somehow knew that it had been carved and used for religious purposes a long time ago. It hung on a cord. I asked the proprietor if I could see it. When I put it around my neck, its eyes began to glow red, and it came to life. It attacked the people I was with, choking off their breath, so that they clutched at their throats. I was frightened, but I fought to control the figure. To do so, I used the same counting technique I use with my strong-willed son when he needs to have a limit set. “That’s one!” I told the gargoyle firmly. It ceased its attack. My companions were alright. I had controlled this fiery power. I felt a little afraid, but also slightly exhilirated. The others in the shop agreed that the totem obviously belonged to me by right.
I couldn’t really figure out how to describe the carved figure until the kids and I were driving past the campus of the University of Pennsylvania and they asked me about the gargoyles on some of the dorm buildings. Then it hit me that the totem in the dream had been just like a gargoyle. “Mom,” my daughter asked. “Are the gargoyles there to scare things away?” “Yes,” I explained. I reminded her about the Chinese New Year celebration we had been to last year, where dragons were used to scare off evil spirits. “Sometimes you need one kind of demon to scare off another,” I found myself saying.
This discussion gave me a new appreciation for my dream, and made me want to learn more about gargoyles. It turns out that gargoyles originated with a medieval French legend of a fire breathing dragon-like creature called the “gargouille” that inhabited the Seine, devouring boats and terrorizing villages. Saint Romanus subdued and conquered to creature with the help of a convict and brought its remains back to be burned. The head and neck would not burn, however, since they had been long tempered with the creature’s own fire. This head and neck were hung on the cathedral to serve as a water spout.
It’s significant that the saint is able to conquer the gargouille with the help of an outcast and criminal. The convict in the legend would correspond to Jung’s concept of the shadow. This was the name that Jung gave to those aspects of ourselves that we would rather not know were ours. The shadow often contains elements that are truly objectionable, but also those that were unacceptable to our parents or culture, but may be of great value. Anger and aggression are likely to be in the shadow for many women. Certainly, they have been for me. Just as in the legend, accessing disowned parts of ourselves can help us to conquer our demons in a way that produces something of lasting value. The terrifying gargouille becomes a helpful gargoyle. Its energy is no longer destructive, but can be used for scaring off evil spirits, and channeling water.
My dream is showing me how, as a mother, I have begun to learn to tap into my own aggression and anger in a constructive way. My anger has always scared me, but in part through my experiences holding authority with my kids, I am now able to access that side of myself in a way that makes this tremendous power available to the conscious part of my personality.
My favorite quote about motherhood comes from the novelist Faye Weldon, who said that “The most wonderful thing about not having children must be that you can go on thinking of yourself as a nice person.” Maybe one of the gifts of motherhood is that we no longer have to be stuck thinking of ourselves as nice people.
My kids and I just finished listening for the second time to Neil Gaiman’s wonderful short novel “Coraline.” It seems to me that this terrifically frightening book shows how the dark side of the mother archetype is always present in potential. Carl Jung coined the term archetype to describe universal patterns of human experience that are inherent in all of our psyches. He likened the archetype to the crystal structure of molecules. In a solution, the crystalline structure is inherent, and only manifests when the conditions are right for the substance to take form. So these forms exist in potential in us from infancy as part of our human inheritance, and when the right conditions exist, we experience them in inner and outer ways.
Jung also said of archetypes that they always have both a positive and a negative pole, and you can’t have one without the other. The Great Mother archetype encompasses both the loving, nurting Madonna, and the devouring, terrifying witch. If Jung is right, this means we can’t be a mother without experiencing some of each side of the archetype. Likewise, our children will bring with them into the world their own inherent potential for experiencing both good and bad mothering.
In “Coraline,” the young protagonist has an adequate is somewhat dissapointing mother. Her plunge in the dark world of the terrifying Other Mother is seemingly precipitated by her own mother’s lack of attunement during a shopping trip to buy new school clothes. Coraline would like the day-glo green gloves, but her mother ignores her, and buys only dreary, practical things. We as readers feel Coraline’s hurt and disappointment. We relate to her feeling of not having been seen or understood on this shopping trip.
Once home from the shops, Coraline’s mother runs out quickly to get something for dinner, and Coraline in her boredom while waiting for her mother to return takes down the key that opens the door in the living room. The door used to lead to another part of the house, but the passageway had long ago been bricked up. This time, however, Coraline mysteriously finds a passage where before there had been just a brick wall. The experience of the Negative Mother has been constellated for Coraline by the disappointment of the shopping trip, and she now has access to the Dark Mother’s world. The passage leads to the fascinating, but ulimately terrifying realm of her Other Mother, a woman with paper white skin, and black button eyes, who wants to devour Coraline.
It’s worth lifting up that we will all, like Coraline’s real mother, sometimes hurt, disappoint, thwart, and frustrate our children, sometimes in ways that are truly damaging. We can’t possibly only embody the bright pole of the archetype. And when we do hurt them, we will likely create the conditions for our child to experience the archetypal Negative Mother. I remember when my daughter was three, and I firmly asked her to clean up after herself. She yelled at me stridently that I was like Cinderella’s evil stepmother! In time, Coraline again finds her “real, wonderful, maddening, infuriating, glorious mother.”
As real, human mothers, we will at times be both wonderful, and maddening.
A mother once had a beautiful little boy, even-tempered and pleasant. She turned her back on him for a moment to go down to the stream to wash some churns, and when she came back, the boy shrieked and howled in a vicious and ugly way. From then on, he was an unpleasant child who cried often and no longer spoke. The mother consulted a wise woman who lived in the village, and was told that the boy was a changeling. A fairy had taken her real son and left the squalling child in his place. The wise woman then advised her how to trick the changeling into revealing himself so that her real son could be returned.
Changeling stories abound in folklore. They inevitably involve the exchange of an attractive, pleasant child for an ugly, detestable one. The reaction of the mother is usually one of distress, sorrow, and anger. Changeling stories illustrate symbolically what happens when our connection with our child — which most of the time is colored by affectionate and loving feelings — changes to a connection characterized by annoyance, irritation, rage, or even momentary hate. Although it may be difficult to admit to ourselves, it is normal to feel all these things toward our children at times. It seems significant that changeling stories almost always involve young children. Toddlers are infamous in their ability to melt our hearts one minute, and incite us to fits of rage the next. In reality, of course, it is the same child who inspires both reactions, but it may very well indeed feel as though someone has replaced our beloved son or daughter with an ugly imp.
Changeling stories are also consistent in how they end. The mother must always employ some humorous trick to get the changeling to reveal its true nature so that the real child can be reclaimed. This seems to suggest one possible way to deal with our inevitable breaks of loving connection with our children. We may need to have a sense of humor with ourselves, and not take ourselves too seriously. This in turn will open the way to our being able to name our own ugly feelings so that we can see them for what they are, allowing a loving connection to be restored.
Being with babies and small children invites us to leave, at least occasionally, the familiar contraints of clock time, and enter into the timeless fluidity of the moment. One minute, we can be entirely focused on a mundane task, doing something we did a dozen times last week, and will do a dozen times more before the week is out. And then something happens to shift our perspective, and through our children’s eyes, we have a dizzying glimpse of something immensely greater than ourselves. How many times a day do we as mothers switch back and forth between these two perspectives, one time-bound, the other timeless? The painting shows the toddler Krishna, whose mother Yahsoda scolded him upon hearing that her had been eating dirt. She asked him to open his moth for her to see. When she looked in her little boy’s mouth, she saw all of creation there. It seems to me that both the time-bound and timeless perspectives are good and necessary ones. That they are sometimes at odds with each other is merely part of the fascinating tension of mothering.
It may at times be difficult for us to allow ourselves to enter the realm of timelessness. Trying to get out the door on time with one or more young children can be exasperating, and it can be nearly impossible to appreciate our children’s wonderful immersion in a world where time means nothing. This will likely be even more true if we are juggling lots of time-bound responsibilities, such as jobs outside of the home. For our sake and our children’s, we will need to take on the role of clock watched. However, if we can’t allow our children to at least occasionally drop us into timelessness as the young Krishna did for Yashoda that day, then I think we are missing out on a wonderful gift that motherhood has to offer.
There often aren’t clear cut answers when it comes to mothering, and yet of course we want to do the very best thing possible. Sometimes, the advice of those we trust goes against our own instincts. Whether it’s about sleep training, school choices, or video games, making different decisions can make us feel vulnerable and isolated. Jung said that “…loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” Motherhood can at times be a very lonely experience.
We may find that, in order to follow our own instincts, we must go against the advice of mothers, husbands, friends, or parenting experts. For me, sleep training was such an issue. My daughter did not sleep through the night until she was 18 months old. Those around me, including her father, encouraged me to “let her cry it out,” but that felt wrong to me. I know of another woman who felt she had to stand alone in her decision not to breastfeed, since most of the mothers around her had chosen to nurse, and were subtlely judgmental. Other women have been challenged in this same way regarding their decisions to work or stay home.
Motherhood has a way of forcing us to search for our own true ground on any number of issues both large and small, and then challenges us to stand on that ground, whether alone or well-companioned. Choosing to follow the inner dictates of our own heart when they conflict with majority opinion is a part of what Jung called “individuation.” Individuation is the goal of psychological develpment, and requires that we live life according to our own truth. Motherhood provides us with abundant opportunities to test our ability to do just that.
When we are able to listen to our inner wisdom and have claimed the power that allows us to act on our own deep knowledge, we are better mothers. We are also a more expansive self, and live from our own center in all areas of our life. We live authentically, and claim our own authority. For many women – and I count myself among them – it did not feel possible to claim our own authority before having children. It was too difficult or frightening to stand up for ourselves — or it just didn’t seem important enough. And so we let our souls be gnawed at, and didn’t bother to rock the boat over numerous smalls losses. But when we have children, the story changes. Suddenly, there is another human being at stake for whom we are responsible. It is no longer good enough to be quiet. The image at left recalls the Russian version of the fairy tale “The Handless Maiden.” Her hands grow back when she plunges her arms into the water to save her drowning children.
The feminine in our culture has been badly maimed. Many of us feel this when we become mothers and have difficulty accessing or listening to our own inner wisdom. Being a mother may offer us the opportunity to reconnect with our lost sense of agency and authority. A woman I know had always been very soft-spoken. Her in-laws were often inconsiderate of her, but she never spoke up. After her first child was born, her in-laws were talking and laughing loudly while she was putting the baby down for a nap. She emerged from the baby’s room, and respectfully but pointedly and authoritatively requested that her in-laws be quiet. They just gaped at her, dumbfounded, not knowing what to make of her new-found moxy.
I suspect that motherhood helps many of us grow back our maimed hands.
I'm a Jungian analyst in private practice in Philadelphia. I'm interested in how motherhood can be a catalyst for personal growth, a process which Jung called "individuation." You can learn more about my practice and approach by visiting my website.
