The Jung Soul Archives | Motherhood Transformation

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About Time… How Being with Kids Shifts Our Perspective

Posted on February 9, 2016

Being with babies and small children invites us to leave, at least occasionally, the familiar constraints 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. I remember feeling both deeply moved by those moments of timelessness, and also resentful that I couldn’t operate like an adult a lot of the time. I had a dream that I took off my watch to bathe the kids, and then was unable to find it again. It was not a comfortable feeling.

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 watcher. 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.

Originally published on TheJungSoul.com.

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The Dark Mother

Posted on January 28, 2016

by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW

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I love 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 if somewhat disappointing 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. Well, yes dear. I suppose I am. 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.

Originally published on TheJungSoul.com.

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Carrying Authority — The Legend of the Gargoyle

Posted on January 21, 2016

by Lisa Marchiano, LCSW

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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 my kid 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 helped me learn 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?

Several years ago, 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 used with my strong-willed son when he needed 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 exhilarated. 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 the previous 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 was showing me how, as a mother, I had 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 was beginning 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.

Originally published on TheJungSoul.com.

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