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| Me and Mom, home from the hospital |
The impossible thing about parenting, is that all parents are ordinary humans, with needs and weaknesses and faults and habits and desires and preferences. The child is also an ordinary human with needs and weaknesses and faults and habits and desires and preferences. There will be times when the two will come together in harmony, and other times when the parent, being the full grown one, will sublimate our own needs to support the needs of the growing child. And there will be times when the parent is dealing with their own mess and is not actually give the child what they needed most, or maybe can’t meet the child’s needs at all.
When we are little parents have such power in our lives- they are our whole world. Then as we grow up and begin to individuate, we notice the ways in which our parents couldn’t or wouldn’t meet our true needs, and we grieve that gap. We begin to imagine how we might have parented ourselves better than our actual parents did. I’ll just speak from my own experience, because I know every family is different, but my parents were generally decent human beings who tried to do the best by me they were able, given their own gifts and challenges, and brokenness and world view. And I tried to be generally the best child I was able, given my own gifts and challenges, and brokenness and world view. After I left home I spent some time in therapy figuring out who I am and what I need, and here I am, a functioning adult, Phew! Even my parenting still shapes me, and impacts me, for better and for worse.
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| Me and my son |
Now, as a parent myself, I have seen the impossibility of being the perfect parent of any child. I grieve the ways I was not the parent my son needed. Nick is now 21 and on the brink of graduating from college- As I look back I can see that sometimes I was a good parent to him, sometimes I missed the mark because I was a human having a bad day and was not the parent he needed me to be. I can also see mistakes I made because I parented my son as I might have needed, and not as a totally unique person who experiences the world differently.
One thing that this whole Covid period has changed for me and my family, is I let go and let go and let go of what I should be, what we should be, and I feel like it is quite a lot to just support one another in our humanness. It is quite a blessing to find a few other humans you trust enough to share your true self, and support one another just as we are. To support one another imperfectly because to be human is to be imperfect.
I must acknowledge that some families have great tragedies in them, of neglect, of trauma, of loss and grief. Some folks in our beloved community did not have “good enough” parents. The responsibility for nurturing you into the beautiful people you all are today was not met by your parents, so perhaps you had to nurture yourself beyond what any child should have to take on their own shoulders. Perhaps there were other people outside your family that supported you and nurtured you. I honor and make space for your reality today- whatever that may be. Your reality matters here.
Part of the reason that even talking about mother’s day is challenging, is because the idea of a mother is both amorphous and complex. It’s a concept shaped by stories and myths and commercials and Instagram. I wonder what that looks like in your imagination? What picture do you see in your mind when we use that word “mother”
Jungian folks make a distinction about the individual, the collective and the archetypal. And mothers are all 3. Each of us has our own person with a womb who brought us into this world, each of us had people who nurtured us as we grew. Maybe there was a person called “mom” that we think of on mother’s day, or maybe there wasn’t, and we feel that absence on Mother’s day. This modern cultural holiday can remind us acutely of those absences, those gaps, so it’s up to us as a faith community to support that complexity of our human experience.
Ideas in our Collective consciousness are those ways of thinking and understanding that bind us together as a culture, as a community. The collective consciousness shapes our thinking about the word mother. Every mom character on TV, every Instagram post, commercials, yes even Mother’s Day sermons shape our thinking about what a mom is, what is normal, what should be. We know this changes:
When some of us were growing up, (or so I get the impression from what I see on TV) the cultural idea of a perfect mom wore a tailored dress and petticoats, loved her new vacuum, and kept her suburban home and children clean and orderly for when her husband got home from work. My mom’s generation often had a full time job in addition to mothering, and wore navy blue power suits, and were supposed to be like the woman in the perfume commercial “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan.”
When I was a young mom, I knew a good mother practiced attachment parenting, and something called “positive discipline.” We had paid work outside the home (because what family could live on one salary?), was infinitely patient could leave her work-for-pay job at the drop of a hat to take her kids to their many activities, and somehow had time for yoga and a mom’s group.
Today’s parents are having fewer children and having them later. The ideal parent has achieved work life balance, were juggling their jobs and parenting and their own mental health needs during a pandemic, and still was supposed to time to post on Instagram how good they looked doing it.
Though the image of a perfect parent changes, each we all feel pressure to conform with the collective vision, and find ourselves, or our own families wanting.
Then there is the archetypal level. And mother is a powerful archetype of creating and nurturing life. Archetypes are the deep symbolic images that are not only shared by our culture, but are shared by many generations over the millennia. As long as there have been humans, there have been mothers. There’s not just one single “mother” archetype, but many facets and faces of the great mother. My symbol dictionary says She is “the origin of all flie, the containing principle; she symbolizes all phases of cosmic life, uniting all the elements, both celestial and chthonic. She is the queen of heaven, mother of god, opening of the way, keeper of the keys of fertility and the gates of birth, death and rebirth. …All great Mothers are weavers and spinners, weaving the web and pattern of life with the thread of destiny, she has the dual nature of the creator and destroyer, and is both nourisher, protector, provider of warmth and shelter, and the terrible forces of dissolution, devouring and death dealing. She is the creator and nourisher of all life and its grave.” [p. 108] Wow.
In the Christian religious tradition, the one mother archetype out of all of that which is revered is Mary, mother of Jesus, peaceful and compassionate. But there are so many other images of the Great archetypal mother. The symbol dictionary again says “In Buddhism and Taoism she is the passive, static principle, wisdom, realization and beatitude, with the lotus and open book of wisdom as her attribute. In her beneficent, nourishing, creative aspect she is … Isis, Hathor, Cybele Ishtar, Lakshmi, Parvati, Tara, Kwan-yin, Demeter, Sophia, Mary…as ensnaring and death dealing she is Astarte, Kali, Durga, Lilith, Hecate, Circe…[she] has serpent-hair or is of frightful appearance” [J.C. Cooper p. 109]
Because we are human, we can’t be all that, we can only be who we are. Some tiny piece of the great mother.
But because we are human, we need that great mother, our spirits need one larger than our little selves to be there before it all began, and to accompany us all through the end. We need the deep calm of the peaceful passive moon mother, and we need the fiery defender – the great bear defending her cubs. We need the mother earth who nourishes and feeds us, and my spirit longs for the great archetypal lap into which we can crawl, when I need to feel small, and comforted.
I saw on a friend’s fridge a photo of Michelle Obama with her daughters on her lap, but my friend and her buddy had photo-shopped their heads onto the photo. They thought Michelle Obama would be an ideal mom, and were inspired by this as they re-parented themselves. I love that idea- it’s so empowered. WE can finally be the parents to ourselves that we always needed. But I bet even Michelle Obama has bad days, even the Obama kids are going to have to re-parent themselves at some point as they grow into who they are, and know what they really need.
I’d like to invite you to consider: what images of mother are surfacing for you this year at Mother’s Day? What support do you need as you notice those gaps between what you long for and the reality of what is?
Let's close in the spirit of meditation/ prayer:
We call to mind with gratitude all who gave us life and nurtured us.
We acknowledge all our human parents could not be for us, even though we needed it deeply
We empower ourselves to be the parents we needed, to fill those gaps as we are able, and to ask for help supporting and nurturing ourselves in our human imperfection and frailty
We are called to birth, to hold, to comfort, to support, to nurture life as we are able in our own unique and imperfect human capacities
Finally we imagine the great archetypal mother who is so timeless, so huge, that even we full grown adults could rest into their love, feel supported by the life giving forces larger than ourselves, and held by the nurturing web of life
Amen
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