Being an Unmothered Child

My whole life has been an endless voyage seeking for healing, for understanding and for peace.  From the very beginning (at the age of two or three), I thought something was really wrong with me and I was all the time trying to fix that.

I’ve read books, I’ve joined groups, I’ve talked to people and no matter how high my spirit could fly, I would always have to go back because there was something missing.
There are times when clues are just uncovered and we can put all the pieces together and finally say: this is it.

A friend of mine sent me the Audio for “Warming the Stone Child” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés last night.  It was just a “coincidence” because I was looking for one of her new books.  Nevertheless when I started listening to it I realized I have been an unmothered child with collapsing syndrome and orphan complex altogether.

On one hand, the fact of being able to name it helps to understand things from the point of view of the left-hand side of my brain.  On the other hand, it makes me feel less weird and it gives the emotional right-hand side of my brain a relief for not being wrong, for knowing that everything up to now has been a natural response to a very unlucky and painful childhood.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

On the audio, Clarissa advises unmothered children to look at their favourite stories or books when they were children.  It does make sense, my favourite stories were:

Alice in Wonderland: what shocked me more was that the characters in the forest went for Happy Unbirthday and they had a tea party almost every day of the year but for one day.  I was delighted by the idea that each day should be celebrated and there was a reason to be happy.  I myself was not happy even on my Birthday “parties”.

Happy Unbirthday

The Wizard of Oz: I wanted to be Dorothy with my red shoes.  I wanted to be able to click my heels and find my way home, my true home where I could feel safe.  I wanted to find each of the witches and ask them all the questions nobody around me could answer.  I also wanted to help people find their heart like she did with Tin Man, because I was so sensitive and I had been born in a family who were Inuit themselves.

Dorothy and the red slippers

Heidi:  I read that book hundreds of times.   I can still recall the images I could see and the feelings I had when I read it.  I was Heidi. I wanted to be wild and free.  I wanted to be happy.  I can still see the fireplace at her grandpa’s cottage.  I can see the mountains; I can see her (myself) running and laughing in that place.  I can smell cheese melting and tasting it with homemade bread.  Melted cheese is still one of my favourite ingredients in meals and it comes from that reading.

Now, I can understand where my intuition comes from.  I can understand why the coldest the environment was the strongest my intuition grew.  I can also understand why I feel alive when I write.  As Estés states:

“One of the great gifts of the unmothered child - and also the healer, and the writer and the musician and all those in the arts who live so close with their ear against the heartbeat of the archetypal unconscious - one of their strongest aspects is intuition."

I would like to share one of the stories on the audio, there are many, but listening to this one was like reading Heidi through the eyes of the adult woman I am now.

The Stone Child – An Inuit Story
Told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes 

There was an orphan that was so lonely and so hungry that no one wanted to be near him.  His mouth was open all the time and his teeth were always showing and tears were always running down from his eyes, and he was so wild with hunger that they had to tie him in the entrance to one of the skin houses so he’d not try to eat the hunters on their way to the seal hunt; that’s how hungry he was. 

They would, on occasion, leave him some rancid reindeer meat or maybe some spoiled intestines to eat, but, as we know, it was more than hunger that was gnawing at him.  Those deep needs that not even the person themselves understand.  So everyday he stretched his chain a little bit and a little bit more, until he could get near a stone that was more or less the same size as himself.   

You see, his mother and father had died one night, and their bodies had been dragged off by bears, and all that had been left behind by them was this one particular stone.  So he wrapped both his arms and his legs around that rock and he wouldn’t let go of it.  And, of course, his people thought he was crazier than ever, and on their way home from the hunt, with animal carcasses slung over their shoulders, they would jeer at him, and they would say, “Analuk has taken a stone for a wife, ha ha.  It’s good for you to have a wife who is a stone, for then you cannot use your hunger and eat her.”  And they went on their way.   

But the boy was so lonely and so hungry that he really had reached the end of his feeling for life.  And even though he had that terrible loneliness and that gnawing hunger, he kept his body wrapped around that stone, and because the stone began to take the heat from his flesh, the boy began to die.  The stone took the heat from his hands, and then it took the heat from his thighs, and it even took the heat from his chin where he rested it on top of the stone.   

And just as the boy was living his last breath, the hunters of his village came by again on their way home from the hunt, and again they called him down, and they said, “You crazy boy!  You are nesting with that stone like it is an egg.  We should call you Bird Boy, you good-for-nothing creature.”  And because the boy was near death, his feelings were hurt more than he could ever say, and great icy tears began to roll down his face and across his parka, and his cold, cold tears hit the hot, hot stone with a sizzle and a hiss and a crack, and it broke the stone right in two. 

And inside was the most perfect little female the boy could ever want.  “Come,” she said, “I am here now, and you are an orphan no more.”  And she gave him a bow and arrows and a harpoon she had brought with her, and the boy and the girl made their house and had babies.  And, if they are not yet dead, they are in that land where the snow is violet and the night sky is black.  They are there, living still.

The story was transcribed from Estes’ audio recording, Warming the Stone Child: Myths and Stories about Abandonment and the Unmothered Child.  

Warming the Stone Child

Transcription taken from Keri.

You do not have to be good.  You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.  You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.- Mary Oliver

Susie
March 01st, 2013