Letting the Too-Good Mother die

“The reward for being nice in oppressive circumstances is to be mistreated more.”

Coming across these 13 words above made me stop instantly in my tracks while reading Clarissa Pincola Estes’ book, Women Who Run With the Wolves. This book is swiftly bringing up a lot of past experiences for me. There have been many times in my life that I did not listen to my intuition…

Waking up in survival mode every morning at 8 years old and feeling unsafe and frightened in my own home, and still at 12 and again later at 21 and 25.

Processing through these old memories that this book is bringing up, is taking up a lot of my energy. And I’m digging it. Consciously enjoying the process. I’m digging through it and feeling all of these feelings instead of ignoring or covering up. Standing up for myself. Working on: doing my work, so to speak. And I’d like to share (most) of this chapter with all of you women out there reading.

In chapter 3, Doctor Estes tells the story of the child, Vasalisa, and her doll. “The relationship between the doll and Vasalisa symbolizes a form of empathic magic between woman and her intuition. This is the thing that must be handed down from woman to woman, this blessed binding, testing and feeding intuition. We, like Vasalisa, strengthen our bond with our intuitive nature by listening inwardly at every turn in the road.”

“In all our lives as daughters, there is a time when the good mother of the psyche-the one which served us appropriately and well in earlier times-turns into a too-good mother, one which by virtue of her safeguarding values begins to prevent us from responding to new challenges and thereby to deeper development. In the natural process of our maturing, the too-good mother must become thinner and thinner, must dwindle away until we are left to care for ourselves in a new way. While we always retain a core of her warmth, this natural psychic transition leaves us on our own in a world that is not motherly to us. But wait. This too-good mother is not all she at first seems. Under a blanket, she has a tiny doll to give her daughter. Ah, there is something of the Wild Mother underneath this figure. But the too-good mother cannot completely live this out, for she is the milk-teeth mother, the blessed one every baby needs in order to gain a toehold in the psychic world of love.”

“So even though this too-good mother cannot live beyond a certain point in a girl’s life, she does right by her offspring. She blesses her with the doll, and this, as we see, is a great blessing indeed… For some girls, however, the process of developing a new, more shrewd, inner mother- the mother called intuition- was only half completed then, and women so inducted have wandered for years wishing for and wanting the complete initiatory experience, and patching themselves up as best they could.”

I have reread this chapter over and over for almost 2 weeks. It speaks to me so deeply. I remember when I lost my mother. I felt so alone, and so lost. In a sense I began scratching at the walls and begging for a replacement, of the “too-good mother” searching for a safe space where I could feel guarded and protected again. Not realizing, that the “wild mother” and my own intuition is really what I should have searched for. And I wouldn't find either until years later after conceiving my child.

“Often we hear voices within our minds which encourage us to hold back, to stay safe. These voices say things like, ‘Oh, don’t say that,’ or ‘You can’t do that.’ These are all voices of the frightened and rather exasperated too-good mother within the psyche… we must be able to see that for the intuitive psyche to be invigorated, the nice hovering protector must recede.”

“It is typical for women to be afraid to let the too-comfortable and too-safe life die. She must be willing to feel anxious sometimes, otherwise she might as well have stayed in the nest. Sometimes a woman is afraid to be without security or without certainty, for even a short time. Sometimes a woman is so bound up in being the too-good mother to other adults that they have latched onto her tetas, teats, and are not about to let her leave them. In this case a woman has to kick them off with her hind leg and go on anyway… Loosening our hold on the glowing archetype of the ever-sweet and too-good mother of the psyche is the first step. There is a wild mother waiting to teach us.”

Vasalisa must face the fearsome beast called Baba Yaga, or the Wild Goddess, in order to save her family/herself. When the original sweet mother gifts Vasalisa the intuitive doll, the process is incomplete without the task-giving and testing done by the Old Wild One. Baba Yaga represents the Life/Death/Life Goddess and is the keeper of the sky and earth beings. When Vasalisa sets eyes on her, she stands there and accepts the Wild Mother divinity, warts and all. “To gaze into her face is to see vagina dentata, eyes of blood, the perfect newborn child and the wings of angels all at once.”

“Many women are in recovery from their ‘Nice-Nice’ complexes, wherein, no matter how they felt, no matter who assailed them, they responded so sweetly as to be practically fattening. This too-nice overadaptation in women often occurs when they are desperately afeared of being disenfranchised or found ‘unnecessary.’”

“In this initiation drama, Baba Yaga is Wild Woman in the guise of the witch. Like the word wild, the word witch has come to be understood as a pejorative, but long ago it was an appellation given to both old and young women healers, the word witch deriving from the word wit, meaning wise. This was before the one-God-only religions began to overwhelm the older Wild Mother religions. But regardless, the ogress, the witch, the wild nature, and whatever other criaturas and aspects the culture finds awful in the psyches of women are the very blessed things which women need most to retrieve and bring to the surface.”

“If men are going to ever learn to stand it, then without a doubt women have to learn to stand it. If men are ever going to understand women, women are going to have to teach the configurations of the wild feminine to them.”

To be Yaga-ish is good! “To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way, it means to be able to learn, to be able to stand what we know. It means to stand and live.”

To have a relationship with the ancient feminine takes work. Following your cycle and honoring it instead of using it as an excuse to be down on yourself. Follow the cycle of the moon. Cleanse your thinking, renew your values on a regular basis. Clear the psyche of trivia, sweep one’s self, clean up all your thinking and feeling states on a regular basis. Build creative fire and cook up ideas. Create something. Make something with your hands. Feed the relationship between oneself and the wildish nature. Keep doing the work. Keep sorting.

“The garden is a meditation practice, that of saying when it is time for something to die. In the garden one can see the time coming for both fruition and for dying back. In the garden one is moving with rather than against the inhalations and the exhalations of greater wild Nature. Through this meditation, we acknowledge that the Life/Death/Life cycle is a natural one. Both Wild Woman’s life-giving and death-dealing natures are waiting to be befriended, forever loved. In this process, we become like the cyclical wild. We have the ability to infuse energy and strengthen life, and to stand out of the way of what dies.”

Choosing who and what is in our garden is crucial as well. Directing our power to grow what we want and weed out what we don’t. Saying no to the weeds and anything that does not serve our Highest purpose. Calming ourselves, quieting our minds and listening to our intuition can bring much peace. Keep feeding that intuition and stare YOUR wild women right in the eyes.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.

Sending love & healing,

Dana Marie