Missing What We’ve LostThe Selkie Woman
Fairy tales can reflect our inner situation, helping to connect us to what is universal in our story. In the Scottish legend of the Selkie, a lonely fisherman encounters three beautiful naked women singing on a rock by the sea. He is enraptured by one in particular, but as he draws nearer to the women, they don dark skins and disappear under the water. The lonely fisherman cannot stop thinking about them. One day, he confides his troubles to an older man, who advises him to wait until the same time the next year. Then, he will see the women again. At that time, he must carefully approach them so that they do not detect him. Then, he must steal the skin of the one he has fallen in love with. The lonely fisherman follows the old man’s advice. When he holds the skin in his hand, the other two maidens quickly don theirs, and dive under the waves as before. But the one maiden begs him to return her skin. The fisherman does not do so, however. He offers her his coat to hide her nakedness, and takes her home with him, imploring her to marry him. After a time, the two have children. The Selkie wife is dutiful, providing all that her children could want. And yet, they never see her smile or laugh. Years pass. One day, her youngest son comes to her and asks why his father took an old skin out behind a loose brick in the wall and oiled it before replacing it in its hiding place. The Selkie woman laughs and kisses her son. Later, she combs her children’s hair, and hugs each of them. Then she goes to the wall and finds her skin, after which she happily returns to the sea. At times in our role as mother, we may feel a bit like the Selkie. Something wild and free in us does not wish to be roped to the demands of taking care of another person. Our essential nature may sometimes feel betrayed by the constraints in which we find ourselves. Like the Selkie woman, we may love and care for our children, and yet feel sad and mournful about a life we have lost. In some versions of the tale, the Selkie woman has other children under the sea, and thus feels torn. We too may feel torn between our children and creative offspring we may have spawned at earlier times that have not reached full maturity. There are few things more taboo, perhaps, in our culture than a mother leaving a child. And though few of us would ever seriously contemplate doing so, it is perhaps unhealthy not to have the space to admit that we did lose some part of ourselves when the children came. We may well be happy for what we gained, and know that we would never change a thing, even if we could. That does not mean, however, that there were not real losses that need to be mourned.
"The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things." |
