Things were very chaotic in my household. My mother suffered from manic depression and from a gender role perspective lived a strange double life. Before her marriage to my father, she was what Linda Scheirse Leonard calls The High Flyer or Don Juanna in her book Wounded Women: Healing the Father Daughter Relationship.
“The woman who flies high is another puella pattern. This puella lives by impulse, is free as the wind and exuberant. She seems to be spontaneous and free leading a wild and exciting life, going with the whim of the moment and with whatever is happening. Soaring away, she lives in the realm of possibilities. This lifestyle tends to be ethereal as well, magically appearing and disappearing like a cloud that forms for a moment and disappears. Timeless and “spacy,” this puella usually has a poor relationship to boundaries, to limits, to the practical order, to the corporeal realm, and to time. Her life is largely undirected and open to the synchronous. Such women are often intuitive, with artistic or mystical tendencies, living easily in imagination and close to the unconscious and archetypal reams. They share this in common with the shy and fragile puellas, but unlike the shy ones they are not fearful and retiring, nor are they hidden from the world. Rather, they are up there adventurously floating along in rarefied air, often seeking the thrills of danger.” (45-6)
I could make this poetic, but here’s some concrete details:
- Growing up, her father used to call her the “sheep” of the family and made her feel like she was the “bad” girl
- My mother’s parents got divorced when she was about 15
- She used to be very outspoken as a girl, raised with 4 siblings who all took other roles in the family
- She felt like she raised her little sister Lois, who lived as a lesbian for most of her life until she married my uncle. Not sure how that transition worked out….
- her father left the family after cheating on her mother with a very Calvinist, rigid woman that mother hated vehemently
- She refused to go to her father’s wedding to this woman out of anger
- Her mother was a Civil Rights activist who yodeled in a folk band and lived the second half of her life in a homosexual relationship with an African American woman who would become my oldest sister’s namesake. This all occurred during the 1960s and 70s, when these kind of relationships were extremely marginal.
- My grandmother definitely was resentful and angry about the divorce. I got the sense that my mother was taking her side during the whole ordeal.
- My mother went to Antioch for college and dropped out
- She traveled the world with her best friend Megan right in the late 60s when the whole world was up in Marxist revolution and free love
- She lived in a commune in Berkeley after college
- I once found a picture of her hidden amongst the family photos in which she was nude on a fishing boat holding a massive fish. I think she used to go on nudist fishing trips at sea with her friends.
- She and my dad met at Kaiser and were wild together. They used to ride around on motorcycles together.
- She has done probably every drug known to man. She lightly will say things like “oh yes, we used to drink poppy seed tea in the evening. Have you ever tried that?”
- She dated a famous rockstar that I won’t name
- She used to work for Bill Graham as a concert dancer for concert series in Berkeley
- She had three abortions in her life, if I recall correctly
- She was absolutely gorgeous and actually starred in a film/documentary about swingers in the 1970s.
As a young adult, my mother traveled the world in awe and experienced all there was to offer. She has, to this day, still the capacity to inspire. And I really respect that about her. It’s unfortunate that she entangles this great talent with her personal dilemmas. I think she was hunting in those years. She never felt at home in any role, couldn’t find a sense of self-worth whereever she went, and instead jumped from experience to experience hoping that this would be her great solution. I have a sense this is an ENFP thing. Finally they get exhausted and will try on another ‘role’ or ‘mask’ that will be more oppressive than anything in the past out of resignation. Unsurprisingly, there is another puella pattern in her that I see which really brings out this theme of self-worth: the misfit.
“Still another mode of the puella is the woman who, because of shame over her father, is rejected by and/or rebels against society. This woman may be identified with her father and remain attached to him in a positive way, so that when society rejects him, she rejects society. Or it may be that initially she rejected her father, but then there emerges the shadow side form the unconscious and she lives out that pattern anyway. In such a family situation, the mother often takes a self-righteous role and becomes the critic of the “bad father.” If the daughter shows any modes of behavior similar to that of the father, the mother will often castigate her, threatening her with the same doom as her father’s fate. Unless the daughter follows the “good advice” of the mother (most likely in that case taking an Amazon pattern), she may revel and repeat the father’s pattern, acting out his self-destructive side.” (56)
While my mother definitely didn’t rebel against her mother, I can see how she felt like a misfit. Her father had ousted her from the family, literally calling her the black sheep. He was quite a character. Almost comical in how ridiculous he is. Needless to say this man did not model a sensitive man who knows that calling kids names is a horrible, horrible thing to do. And I know my mother internalized it.
In Leonard’s book, she talks about the character of Maggie in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, and it reminded me strikingly of my mother. My mother felt like her life depended on staying in a relationship with my father. She knew that it wasn’t feasible, I think deep down, but she was adamant in denying this reality.
“When Quentin first meets her, Maggie is very vulnerable to the advances of men and seems not to have an inner discretion about who will hurt her or be dangerous for her. She also sees Quentin as a god-like figure and feels her own self-value coming from his valuing her. Maggie, too, has no positive father influence, since her father left when she was an infant, even denying that he was the father. And so she grew up as a bastard. her mother, ashamed of this situation, became very moral and rejecting of Maggie. When Quentin comes along, Maggie projects upon him the power to save her, a projection which he finds irresistible. But along with this power goes the responsibilities for her life, and that, too, she gives to Quentin. Secretly, Maggie believes she is worth nothing, even calling herslef ‘Miss None’ when she registers in hotels.
….”With such low self-esteem and self-respect, Maggie needs to be adored as a compensation…Eventually, no matter what Quentin does, Maggie becomes jealous; because she has no self-valuing to ground her, she falls into despair and depression at every suspicion that Quentin is not toally devoted to her.To escape she turns to alocohol, an addiction that symbolizes her dependency and need for constant and total acceptance. It also recomfirms her fears that she really is “Miss NOne,” the lowest of the low, a victim of society. And it enables her to release her cynicism and aggression, which has been hiding behind her innocence, and this she vents against Quentin.
Quentin says, “Do you see it, Maggie? Right now? You’re trying to make me the one who does it to you?… But now I’m going away; so you’re not my victim anymore. It’s just you and your hand…You eat those pills to blind yourself, but if you could only say ‘I have been cruel,’ this frightening room would open. If you could say, ‘ I have been kicked around, but I have been just as inexcusably vicious to others, called my husband idiot in public, I have been utterly selfish despite my generosity, I have been hurt by a long line of men, but I have cooperated with my persecutors.” […]
The paradox at the bottom of this puella pattern is that despite the real humiliation, shame and rejection of past history, resulting in self-identification with the victim and worthless one, the way of redemption is to fight this identification rather than compulsively living out ht shame and repeating the pattern of rejection. This requires accepting that on is both innocent and guilty, and that within oneself exists both the power to destroy and to save. The task is to transform the cynical attitude, despair, and rejection into an attitude of hope and to consciously affirm oneself and life.
The theme here that I think is most blatant is this theme of self-worth. My mother has never had a strong conception of self-worth. She models her life after the men she is with, trying to fix her own existential despair by trying to regulate and be active in repairing her relationship. But the fundamental issue of self-worth is always circumnavigated.
Some of the biggest things she used to complain to be were related to issues like my father’s inability to make her feel like the most important thing in the room. She complained that he never laughed at her jokes and would overpower conversations when there were others present. Of course this spilled into another complex active in her, the martyr, but I think this was a superficial, surface level attempt for her to assert some control in the relationship without actually resolving these two fundamental issues in her. She was restless as hell and felt small. The only way to deal with that was to experience life and finally take up the identity of the mother as her redeeming factor.
It is uncomfortable to talk to her often because she has such a skewed sense of self-worth and can easily be hurt, yet obsesses over other people’s feeling, confident that she is to be blamed for causing any disharmony in the relationship. This was something that I must say gave me tons of insight.
(When I realized this, I realized that this was a paradigm that was still infecting me. I saw two extremes: a marriage that naturally worked well or a marriage that was terrible and filled to the brim with chaos. As a kid, I assumed that my mother’s battle was fruitless because her sense of despair was so prevalent beneath the surface of our conversations. I think I wanted to prove to her that there was no need have despair if a person could live their life more attentively. I was right to some degree, though as a result of this I became an obsessive compulsive intellectualizer and psychoanalyst. But more about this later.)
As an adult, my mother’s child-like character is impossible to ignore. It makes me filled with pity for her, because I could never blame a child for making the kind of mistakes that she did. As a child, however, this was not the same persona that I detected.
When shit really started to hit the fan with my parents, my mother started to latch onto her role as a mother in order to defend her worth in the relationship. With the positive sense of worth gained from motherhood, she started to become more of an Amazon-type. She flaunted being the “Martyr” in all the sacrifices that she had to make to raise her children. So guilt became a favorite emotion in our household. “The martyr-mother role has a passive-submissive masochistic aspect which covers up a feeling of superiority, hostility, and contempt of the male.” (75)
I think the masochism came from her puella tendencies – especially as her life as a misfit became more and more pronounced in the very conventional place we lived in. She felt like she was fighting a battle against all the adults that I was interacting with outside of school. She would say cynically but also in a light-hearted way (it’s hard to encapsulate the ambiguity of my mother’s behavior) that she wanted to become “June Cleaver” and then got herself very involved in my school life. While she mainly raised my sisters in alternative settings (self-created learning environments that really reflected her creativity and joy), she took up positions of leadership in my school life and so she carried her fights everywhere and I was pulled in as well.
As a younger child I know there was a time when I was confident in my creative abilities, because my father has told me that as a kid my mother used to get angry with us for being too “arrogant”. I have interpreted this to mean that she would get angry at us for being too much like my father. When I started to exhibit “warning” behaviors – being totally afraid of going away from home, getting lost easily, staying in my room alone with my fantasy life, telling my mother strange stories about past lives, her natural reaction would be to force me into public situations, trying to tell me it was ok when I felt scared and unsupported. As I grew and my life started to get more difficult, I grew more and more self-deprecating and introverted. I started to lose friendships and felt more and more depressed.
My mother’s life was getting more difficult too. We were cooped up in that house together and while my sisters were fighting their own raging battles, my mother and I remained the two people who desired peace in the household. Our reasons for desiring peace, of course, were extremely different. My mother wanted peace so that her relationship with my father could last and she would be safe. I wanted peace because I was horribly frightened of the world and at the same time left feeling like a kind of outcast in my dark emotional space. I needed to feel like I was capable of making it in the world, while she wanted to feel like she was capable of staying at home.
Over time, we grew to be very close. She would sit outside on the porch with me and we would talk for hours about life. When I was in high school, I would go on long walks around the city – sometimes for 3 full hours – and my mother would join along and talk and talk and talk with me. She would give me the most inspirational pep talks and pour out complements that had been so elusive and difficult to gain as a younger child. In exchange, I would listen to her problems. I doled out advice for her and made her feel like she made me feel. In her puella-like mind, this was a perfectly acceptable exchange.
However, this relationship tested the boundary of self to a dangerous degree. The times when I needed to be taught self-discipline and learn through penalty how to regulate my anxiety, my mother would be conveniently there to “save” me. I remember forgetting my homework at home and my mother would drive up to the school and sneak it to me through the bars. On the flip side, I was growing more and more perfectionistic at school. I am sure she felt bad because I was holding myself to such an insane standard. But that’s because I didn’t really know how to develop standards on my own. Not with a personality like my mothers which would take my emotions around the galaxy in a heartbeat.
Chaos reigned our relationship. Her personality was raging and yet singing at the same time. It was such a close encounter between explosive joy and anger that I started to develop a kind of mistrust of her exuberance. As a teen, I felt myself grow darker and darker, being drawn into lofty existentialist philosophies and dark, sinister art forms like Hindemith’s compositions for viola and abstract modern art. I wanted to eschew the naivete from my life, but I also wanted to punch the masculine world in the face for causing so much chaos in my life. My sense of self-worth was entirely dependent upon her moods, which were complicated, manic, restless, and deceiving. And yet I felt this strong loyalty towards her. She was the only one who understood what it was like to be a misfit. She was the only one that knew how confusing and painful my insides were. And yet the very reason why this was the case was because she had caused those feelings in the first place. A tragic double-bind for a girl trying to be her best.
The Child Philosopher 