Authors: Clarissa Pincola Estes
THE CHILD MOTHER OR THE UNMOTHERED MOTHER
The image portrayed by the duck mother in the tale, as we can see, is very unsophisticated and naive. By far the most common kind of fragile mother is the unmothered mother. In the story, she who is so insistent on having babies eventually turns from her child. There are many reasons a human and/or psychic mother might act thusly. She may be an unmothered woman herself. She may be one of the fragile mothers, psychically very young or very naive.
She may be so psychically dislocated that she considers herself unlovable even by a baby. She may have been so tortured by her family and her culture that she cannot imagine herself worthy of touching the hem of the “radiant mother” archetype that accompanies new motherhood. You see, there are no two ways about it: a mother must be mothered in mothering her own offspring. Though a woman has an inalienable spiritual and physical bond with her offspring, in the world of the instinctual Wild Woman, she does not just suddenly become a fully formed temporal mother all by herself.
In olden times, the blessings of the wildish nature normally came through the hands and words of the women who nurtured the younger mothers. Especially first-time mothers have within them, not an experienced old crone, but a child-mother. A child- mother can be any age, eighteen or forty, it doesn’t matter. Every new mother begins as a child-mother. A child-mother is old enough to have babies and has good instincts in the right direction, but she needs the mothering of an older woman or women who essentially prompt, encourage, and support her in her mothering of her children.
For eons this role was served by the older women of the tribe or village. These human “Goddess-mothers,” who were later relegated by religious institutions to the role of “godmother,” constituted an essential female-to-female nutritional system that nourished the young mothers in particular, teaching them how to nourish the psyches and souls of their young in return. When the Goddess-mother role became more intellectualized, “godmother” came to mean someone who made sure the child did not stray from the precepts of the Church. Much was lost in the transmigration.
The older women were the arks of instinctual knowing and behavior who could invest the young mothers with the same. Women give this knowing to each other through words, but also by other means. Complicated messages about what and how to be are sent simply through a look, a touch with the palm of the hand, a murmur, or a special kind of “I cherish you” hug.
The instinctual self always blesses and helps those who come after. It is this way among healthy creatures and among healthy humans. In this way the child-mother is swept across the threshold into the circle of mature mothers, who welcome her with jokes, gifts, and stories.
This woman-to-woman circle was once the domain of Wild Woman, and it had open membership; anyone could belong. But all we have left of this today is the little tatter called a “baby shower,” where all the birthing jokes, mother gifts, and genitalia stories are squeezed into two hours’ time, no longer available to the woman throughout her entire lifetime as a mother.
In most parts of industrialized countries today, the young mother broods, births, and attempts to benefit her offspring all by herself. It is a tragedy of enormous proportions. Because many women w
ere born
to fragile mothers, child-mothers, and unmothered mothers, they may themselves possess a similar internal style of “selfmothering.”
The woman who has a child-mother or unmothered mother construct in her psyche, or glorified in the culture and maintained at work and in the family, is likely to suffer from naive presentiments, lack of seasoning, and in particular a weakened instinctual ability to imagine what will happen one hour, one week, one month, one year, five years, ten years from now.
A woman with a child-mother within takes on the aura of a child pretending to be a mother. Women in this state often have an undifferentiated “long live everything” attitude, a “do everything, be everyth
ing to everyone” brand of hyper
momism. They are not able to guide and support their children, but like the farmer s children in “The Ugly Duckling” story who are so thrilled to have a creature in the house but do not know how to give it proper care, the child-mother winds up leaving the child battered and bedraggled. Without realizing it, the child-mother tortures her off-
spring with various forms of destructive attention and in some cases lack of useful attention.
Sometimes the frail mother is herself a swan who has been raised by ducks. She has not been able to find her true identity soon enough to benefit her offspring. Then, as her daughter comes upon the great mystery of the wildish nature of the feminine in adolescence, the mother too finds herself having sympathy pangs and swan urges. The daughter’s search for identity may even inaugurate the mother’s “maiden” journey for her lost self at last. So in that household, between the mother and the daughter, there will be two wildish spirits down in the basement holding hands and hoping to be called upstairs.
So these are the things that can go awry when the mother is cut away from her own instinctive nature. But do not sigh too hard or too long, for there is help for all of this.
THE STRONG MOTHER, THE STRONG CHILD
The remedy is in gaining mothering for one’s young internal mother. This is gained from actual women in the outer world who are older and wiser and preferably who have been tempered like steel; they are fire-hardened for having gone through what they have gone through. Regardless of the cost even now, their eyes
see,
their ears
hear,
their tongues
speak,
and they are kind.
Even if you had the most wonderful mother in the world, you may eventually have more than one. As I have often tol
d my own daughters, “You are born
to one mother, but if you are lucky, you will have more than one. And among them all you will find most of what you need.” Your relationships with
todas las madres
, the many mothers, will most likely be ongoing ones, for the need for guidance and advisory is never outgrown, nor, from the point of view of women’s deep creative life, should it ever be.
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Relationships between women, whether the women share the same bloodlines or are psychic soulmates, whether the relationship is between analyst and analysand, between teacher and apprentice, or between kindred spirits, are kinship relationships of the most important kind.
While some who write in psychology today tout the leaving of the entire mother matrix as though it were a coup, that, if not
accomplished, taints one forever, and though some say that denigration of one’s personal mother is good for an individual’s mental health, in truth, the construct and concept of the wild mother can never and should never be abandoned. For if it is, a woman abandons her own deep nature, the one with all the knowing in it, all the bags of seeds, all the thorn needles for mending, all the medicines for work and rest and love and hope.
Rather than disengaging from the mother, we are seeking a wild and wise mother. We are not, cannot be, separate from her. Our relationship to this soulful mother is meant to turn and turn, and to change and change, and it is a paradox. Th
is mother is a school we are born
into, a school we are students in, a school we are teachers at, all at the same time, and for the rest of our lives. Whether we have children or not, whether we nourish the garden, the sciences, or the thunderworld of poetics, we always brush against the wild mother on our way to anywhere else. And this is as it should be.
But what shall we say for the woman who truly has had an experience of destructive mothering in her own childhood? Of course that time cannot be erased, but it can be eased. It cannot be sweetened up, but it can be rebuilt, strongly, and properly, now. It is not the rebuilding of the internal mother that is so frightening to so many, but rather the fear that something essential died back then, something that can never be brought back to life, something that received no nourishment, for psychically one’s own mother was dead herself. For you, I say, be at peace, you are not dead, you are not lethally injured.
As in nature, the soul and the spirit have resources that are astonishing. Like wolves and other creatures, the soul and spirit are able to thrive on very little, and sometimes for a long time on nothing. To me, it is the miracle of miracles that this is so.
Once
I was transplanting a hedgerow of lilac. One great bush was dead from a mysterious cause, but the rest were shaggy with purple in springtime. The dead one cracked and crunched like peanut brittle as I dug it out. I found that its root system was attached to all the other living lilacs up and down the fence line.
Even more astounding, the dead one was the “mother.” She had the thickest and oldest roots. All her big babies were doing fine even though she herself was
botas arribas
, boots up, so to speak.
Lilacs reproduce with what is called a sucker system, so each tree is a root offshoot of the primal parent In this system, even if die mother fails, the offspring can survive. This is the psychic pattern and promise for those with little or no, as well as those who have had torturous mothering. Even though the mother somehow falls over, even though she has nothing to offer, the offspring will develop and grow independently and still thrive.
Bad Company
The ugly duckling goes from pillar to post trying to find a place to be at rest. While the instinct about exactly where to go may not be fully developed, the instinct to rove until one finds what one needs is well intact. Yet there is a kind of pathology sometimes in the ugly duckling syndrome. One keeps knocking at the wrong doors even after one knows better. It is hard to imagine how a person is supposed to know which doors are right doors if one has never known a right door to begin with. However, the wrong doors are those that cause you to feel the outcast all over again.
This is the “looking for love in all the wrong places” response to exile. When a woman turns to repetitive compulsive behavior—repeating over and over again a behavior that is not fulfilling, that causes decline instead of sustained vitality—in order to salve her exile, she is actually causing more damage because the original wounded state is not being attended to and she incurs new wounding with each foray.
This is like putting some puny medicine on your nose when you have a gash in your arm. Different women choose different kinds of “wrong medicine.” Some choose the obviously wrong, such as bad company, overindulgences that are harmful or soul-stealing, things that first build a woman way up and then tear her down to ground zero minus five.
The solutions to these bad choices are severalfold. If the woman were able to sit herself down and peer into her own heart, she would see there a need to have her talents, her gifts, and her limitations respectfully acknowledged and accepted. So, to begin healing, stop kidding yourself that a little feel-good of the wrong sort will take care of a broken leg. Tell the truth about your wound,
and then you will get a truthful picture of the remedy to apply to it. Don’t pack whatever is easiest or most available into the emptiness. Hold out for the right medicine. You will recognize it because it makes your life stronger rather than weaker.
Not Looking Right
Like the ugly duckling, an outsider learns to stay away from situations where one may be able to act right but still doesn’t look right. The duckling, for instance, can swim well, but still doesn’t look right. Conversely, a woman may look right, but may not be able to act right. There are many sayings about persons who cannot hide what they are (and in their hearts don’t wish to), all the way from the east Texan “You can dress ’em up, but you can’t take ’em out” to the Spanish “She was a woman with a black feather under her skirt.”
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In the story, the duckling begins to act like a dummling,
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the one who can’t do anything
right...
he flaps dust into the butter and falls into the flour barrel, but not until he has first fallen into the milk pitcher. We all have had times like this. Can’t do anything right. Try to make it better. Makes it worse instead. Duckling had no business in that house. But you see what happens when one is desperate. One goes to the wrong place for the wrong thing. As one of my dear late colleagues used to say, “You can’t get milk at the ram’s house.”
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While it is useful to make bridges even to those groups one does not belong to, and it is important to try to be kind, it is also imperative to not strive too hard, to not believe too deeply that if one acts just right, if one manages to tie down all the itches and twitches of the wildish
criatura
, that one can actually pass for a nice, restrained, subdued, and demure lady-woman. It is that kind of acting, that kind of ego-wish to belong at all costs, that knocks out the Wild Woman connection in the psyche. Then instead of a vital woman you have a nice woman who is de-clawed. Then you have a well-behaved, well-meaning, nervous woman, panting to be good. No, it is better, more graceful, and far more soulful to just be what and as you are and let the other creatures be what they are too.