Becoming Our True Selves: Motherhood as a Journey of Transformation

When we are able to listen to our inner wisdom and have claimed the power that allows us to act on our own deep knowledge, we are better mothers. We are also a more expansive self, and live from our own center in all areas of our life. We live authentically, and claim our own authority. For many women – and I count myself among them – it did not feel possible to claim our own authority before having children. It was too difficult or frightening to stand up to the patriarchy. And so we let our souls be gnawed at, and didn’t bother to rock the boat over numerous smalls losses. But when we have children, the story changes. Suddenly, there is another human being at stake for whom we are responsible. It is no longer good enough to be quiet.

The Handless Maiden

The fairy tale “The Handless Maiden” tells the story of a young woman who lost her ability to act in the world through having been sacrificed on behalf of the patriarchy, and how motherhood helped her to reclaim her agency.

In the Grimm version, the story begins with a miller who had fallen into poverty. While walking in the woods one day, he met a man who promised him wealth in exchange for what stood behind his mill. Thinking this meant an apple tree, the miller agreed. The old man said that he would collect what was his in three years. When he returned home, the miller was delighted to find his house filled with gold. When he told his wife what had happened, she was distraught. She told him that the man must have been the devil, and that their daughter had been behind the mill sweeping the yard. When the devil came for her three years later, she washed herself clean and drew a circle of chalk about her so that the devil couldn’t take her. The devil was enraged, and insisted that she be taken away from all water so that she couldn’t cleanse herself. The father complied, but the maiden wept on her hands so that the devil was still powerless. The devil then insisted that the father cut off her hands, and threatened to take him if he did not do as he asked. When the father approached his daughter, she said, “Dear father, do with me what you will – I am your daughter.”

Many of us do this. We obediently comply with cultural or familial requests that we amputate some essential part of ourselves. We give up our hands, our ability to manipulate our world as we choose. Without hands, we have no agency, and must be passive. The mutilation of the miller’s daughter is a potent image of how women collude with the wounding perpetrated by the father. This can be a personal father with whom we have had a difficult relationship, or it can be the cultural father of the patriarchy. In either case, the wounding agent is alive inside the soul of the woman. We all carry our perpetrators inside us.

The miller’s daughter bound her arms behind her back and went into the world. At nightfall, she found a beautiful garden with pear trees in it. Unable to pick a pear, she was nevertheless able to eat one with her mouth as it hung on the bough. But the garden belonged to a king, and he noticed the missing pear. The next night, he watched in his garden and saw again the maiden eating a pear, and questioned her. She told him her story, and he took her home to his palace. Because she was so beautiful, he fell in love with her, and had hands of silver made for her.

When looking at fairy tales from a psychological perspective, the king usually represents the dominant collective values. So in this story, the handless maiden is able to adapt to collective values after her amputation. The silver hands also represent this. They are something mechanical, not natural. They allow her to function better than before, and yet they are not truly authentic, not of her. The Jungian analyst Marie Louise Von Franz considered that the silver hands were analogous to a mother who, because of her wounding, cannot be spontaneous with her child. She says of such women that“…they over-compensate by reading books on how to bring up children and try to be perfect as possible. Instead of spontaneity, collective standards are adopted” (1972, p. 84). The marriage to the king and the attainment of the silver hands is an intermediate adaptation, not the happy ending.

The king goes away to war, and soon afterwards, the maiden gives birth to a boy. While the king is away, there is an exchange of false letters that ends with the girl having her baby tied to her back and forced out into the wilderness. In the Grimm version, the true letters are exchanged for false ones by the Devil. In most other versions, it is the jealous mother-in-law that orchestrates the girl’s exile.

In the Italian version of the tale, the heroine is named Olive, and she gives birth to twins. She wanders alone in the woods, holding her two babies in her handless arms, and arrives at a pool of water where a little old woman is washing clothes. She asks the woman to squeeze some water from a cloth into her mouth.

“No,” replied the old woman, “do as I say: kneel down and drink right from the pool.”
“But can’t you see I have no hands and must hold my babies in my arms?”
“That doesn’t matter. Go on and try!”
Olive knelt down, but as she bent over the pool, both babies slipped out of her arms, one after the other, and disappeared under the water.
“Oh my babies! My babies! Help! They’re drowning! Help me!”
The old woman didn’t budge.
“Don’t be afraid, they won’t drown. Fish them out.”
“How can I? Don’t you see I have no hands?”
“Plunge in your stumps.”
Olive immersed her stumps in the water and felt her hands growing back. With her hands she then grabbed hold of the babies and pulled them up safe and sound.
“Be on your way now,” said the old woman. “You no longer lack hands to do for yourself. Farewell.” She was out of sight before Olive could even thank her for her fine deed (Calvino, 1980, p. 259).

When we have sacrificed our hands to the patriarchy, it is too easy for our children to slip into the water. But for many of us, we know that passively accepting our wounds and the damage they have done is no longer an option when our children are at stake. Olive has had an encounter with ancient feminine knowing – the goddess, for that is clearly who the old woman at the pool is. This deep, instinctual feminine wisdom will let her be passive no longer – not when it comes to the safety of her children. And when we strive for all our might to do something that before seemed impossible, but now we know we must attempt to protect our children, in that desperate moment we are healed. We have our own hands. We have grown into our own authentic selves, and live according to our own inner authority.

Suzanne’s Story

Suzanne was a woman in my practice who came to me with the relatively severe diagnosis of a dissociative disorder when her daughter was eight months old. She had a history of childhood abuse, and had been hospitalized psychiatrically on more than one occasion. She had had a severe history of cutting, and bore long, red, thick scars on her arms. She had had more than one suicide attempt.

The “story” about Suzanne was that she was sick, so compromised that she couldn’t work or be productive. This was the premise of her marriage. She was sick, and her husband was the stable one who kept her sane. She had met her husband at a particularly vulnerable time in her life, and he had taken advantage of this. Her first hospitalization took place during the early period of the relationship, and she later received the diagnosis of dissociative disorder largely as a result of information supplied to clinicians by her then-boyfriend. He was quite invested in maintaining the fiction that Suzanne was too ill to care for herself without his help and support. It allowed him to retain power over her.

But things began to change for Suzanne shortly after Sophia was conceived. Right away, she stopped cutting. She had never before been able to master this behavior, but knowing she was now responsible for another life, she stopped it instantly. After Sophia was born, Suzanne continued to grow as a person. Taking care of a baby was difficult and at times intensely frightening for Suzanne. Like the women mentioned in the quote by Marie Louise Von Franz, Suzanne read a library’s worth of parenting books. These were her silver hands, her learned coping skills that, while not authentically hers, did represent a partial healing. She was drawn to parenting philosophies that emphasized the importance of a mother’s own instincts rather than stressing “techniques.”

Over time, she discovered that was an extraordinarily competent mother. Her instincts were trustworthy. When Sophia threatened a tantrum, her spouse did not know what to do, and often made the situation worse. But Suzanne usually knew how to diffuse the situation.

When her relationship with her husband became violent, she responded immediately by taking all precautions possible to ensure that she and her daughter were safe. She continued to establish her own business so that one day she could leave her husband and support herself and Sophia.

At the end of our work together, it had become clear both to me and to Suzanne that she was not sick. She was healthy, resourceful, and resilient. Like mothers everywhere, she was not going to let her baby drown, even when she thought she was too maimed to save her, and in protecting Sophia, she learned how strong she really was.

References

Calvino, I. (1980). Italian Folktales. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Von Franz, M. L. (1972). The feminine in fairy tales. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications.

"Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own."

Carl Jung