Manifesting Joy During Despair

In two days my mother will have her second surgery this year.  The goal is to try to remove more of the cancer that has spread in her body.  It will be a longer and more invasive surgery this time, and the recovery time will be lengthier as well.  The current treatment plan is to begin chemotherapy 3 weeks post-surgery.

All of these facts terrifies my mother.

It is against this backdrop that I brought her to the beach this past weekend.

At first, she was in no mood for it.  Understandably. 

Eventually though, without too much arm twisting, she agreed and climbed in my truck for the 1 hour drive to the Atlantic Ocean; this was after I threw in the promise of a seafood meal and time with her 2 year-old granddaughter which might have helped.

We spent the next 4 hours mindfully feeding our senses by watching my daughter play in the sand, listening to the waves crash against the shoreline, riding bikes along the nearby salt marsh, and eating yummy scallops and french fries.  And there was joy.

Here are some of the photographs I took that day…

Within about 10 minutes of our drive home though, my mother began to worry out loud again about the surgery.  She began to express concerns about the VNA who would be coming to her house. About the 5-6 months of chemotherapy and radiation following the surgery…Etc. Etc.

As I listened quietly to her speak, I tried to remember German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke’s (1875-1926) famous words that have helped me in so many other difficult situations:

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.  Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

I think memorable quotations can be like great works of music or art in that at any given moment, we can draw some different meaning from the offering that enhances our life in some new way. 

This past weekend, Rilke’s words reminded me that it is vital to intentionally bring in moments of joy and happiness--as well as future aspirations--during times of great turmoil.  In fact, I think it is as necessary to our soul as air is to our lungs.

So I’m glad my mother decided to join my daughter and me for a day at the beach this past weekend.

I know it did not solve all her problems. I know it did not take away her pain.  But perhaps when we nourish the soul with activities and people that we love at the most unlikely of times, it does full-fill an unarticulated need that can be a catalyst for a life worth living even with the inevitable pain and suffering that accompanies it.

Housing a Soul, Part VI: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

Becoming Free: Removing the Scaffolding

I was recently talking with a friend of mine who I have known since we were 10 years-old.  We were discussing the approaching of our big 4-0 birthday, and we both agreed how, now, we are much more comfortable in our own skin than we ever were in our early 30’s, 20’s, and especially our teens.

Similar to the process snakes go through when they shed their skin because their more youthful skin no longer serves them, it strikes me as analogous to the process a person goes through when they let go of their false self or ego.

It seems so ironic that we parents might take such special care to help nourish and protect a soul with a sturdy and stable ego, only to have the whole thing come down one day for the soul, or True Self, to live freely.

But honestly, as someone who remains herself in the process of letting go of false self and ego, it feels pretty damn good to keep shedding all this skin as I move closer and closer to my true self. 

To borrow my friend’s language, which tends to be more colorful than my own, it makes me believe my 40’s will be as “epic” as she predicts.

To me, this unexpected paradoxical element in the arc of the development of Self is fascinating.

To put it simply, the bottom line is: if all goes well, if all the hard-won construction is complete on the house ego or false self and the soul or True Self is well nourished and protected, the next step is a spiritual practice in nonattachment to let the whole thing go. 

What had been so carefully and thoughtfully constructed to house the jewel, as Franciscan priest and author Richard Rorh calls the True Self or soul in his book Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self, becomes obsolete. 

I think of this process as similar to the process of making a mandala. 

The creation of a mandala is a meditation of sorts that is made by monastics.  In the process, monks and nuns work for many days straight for up to 10 hours a day to create intricate and creative designs out of colored grains of sand that in any other context would be considered works of art.

But the kicker comes in the last moments of the mandala meditation when the same monks and nuns who labored for days in concentrated skill and effort sweep away the entire mandala to nothing.  It is the ultimate practice of what is thought of in Buddhist Psychology as nonattachment.

I think of this as exactly what the caregiver must do for the child, adolescent and young adult, or more accurately I suppose, what the child, adolescent or young adult must do for themselves.

If the house of ego was well constructed and renovated, with  the same mindful attention as in the trimming of a bonsai tree, it will one day fade away to allow the True Self or jewel to shimmer in the sunlight for all to see.  The soul no longer requires a house for protection because it is now savvy to the ways of the world and can skillfully navigate pain and harm.

So the question is, who do we know who has successfully made it through this comprehensive developmental process?

Well, some of the famous people we all might know from a distance.  Names that come to my mind are Dr. Maya Angelou, Sylvia Boorstein, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Thich Nhat Hanh, among many others. 

These individuals looked confident and competent.  They seemed to walk with their heads up with integrity, but not superiority.  These individuals gave the impression of greatness and humility. They appeared to have an ease about them, and were quick to laugh out loud and smile. These souls were often seen surrounded by others because people were drawn to their calm and graceful way of walking through the world.

I think each of these individuals was (or is) able to be so skillful in the art of living because s/he has allowed her/his false self or ego to fall away so that their naked soul or True Self can be viewed by all.  This ability is such a courageous act because it leaves the Self so vulnerable and yet so exquisite because we get to see the breathtaking jewel inside.

To come full circle, it's like the classic children’s story we all know of The Velveteen Rabbit; the story of a stuffed animal bunny who transforms into a real rabbit. 

The story begins with the stuffed toy bunny learning from the old toy rocking horse what it means to be real.  The old rocking horse says:

“Real isn’t how you are made…It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

Then the stuffed bunny asks,

“Does it hurt?” 

And the rocking horse replies,

“Sometimes.” But adds, “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

The stuffed bunny is wary though, and wants to know if the process is sudden or gradual. How does it unfold? And the rocking horse explains:

“It doesn’t happen all at once…You become. It is a long time.  That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges…Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.  But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand…But once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

It’s just like that isn’t it?  Moving from a False Self to True Self.  Moving from a life where you walk the world with your shell of ego, to a life where your soul is exposed and yet you don’t feel helpless or in danger.  Where the False Self of a stuffed bunny can fall away and, as if by the magic of a fairy, the True Self of the actual rabbit can emerge.  Beautiful. 

I like that the author of the Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams, knew it was in part the process of being loved hard through a caregiver’s validating mindful attention that allows for this magnificent unfolding to take place. 

This progression is the quintessential caterpillar in the chrysalis who emerges as a butterfly.

As parents, we can never underestimate the value and necessity for our work in being the holding environment just like the chrysalis.  Though unquestionably a daunting task, the piece of development in which we parents help the child soul become real because, in part, of our share played in the artistry of a well-constructed ego, however temporary it maybe, is critical to a development that will help the soul manage the dings and dents that are inevitable in the process of this emergence. 

As in the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, it is the validation, mindfulness, life skills teaching, and modeling of how to manage stress, distress, and emotions that comes from caregivers that allows for the house of ego to be built, and consequently let go of, so that one unique soul can follow god’s will for it on this earth. 

May it be so for all of us.

Housing a Soul, Part V: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

Following Our Ancestors’ Blueprint- Or Not

As a parent, one frequently looks to previous generations for guidance on how to do such important work as nourish and protect the soul of a child.  It can get tricky though, if you are unsure if those past models are reliable or valid to begin with.

Many years ago, before I was even thinking about the spiritual tasks of parenting, I went to a conference where the main speaker led an icebreaker in which conference participants were asked to introduce themselves by telling the group who their role model was. 

Some participants said familiar famous names like Maya Angelou and Mahatma Gandhi, but most named people in their family.  Mothers. Grandmothers. Great-grandmothers. And Aunties- literally generations of (mostly female) role models.

I was one of the participants who named a famous-somebody, but I remember being bothered by that.  I secretly wished I was able to call one of my ancestors a role model.

Fast forward to about 6 months ago when I learned about a Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience named Rachel Yehuda who’s research focuses on new evidence that the stress and trauma experienced by one generation can be transmitted through DNA to the next, and something called epigenetics says that it might be possible for genes to actually be turned on and off.

Now I am someone who is frequently found awe-struck with what learning and understanding is rapidly unfolding in regards to our biology and particularly our neurobiology (even if I only understand about .01% of it), but this information touched me in a more meaningful way.

I began to consider how Dr. Yehuda’s scientific research findings and spiritual traditions like Buddhism may hold the same wisdom.

A common belief in many Buddhist traditions is rebirth or reincarnation which occurs in a cycle called samsara.  This cycle is said to end only when an individual attains enlightenment, and it is karma, intentional actions that lead to future consequences, which perpetuates the cycle.

Might these two ideas over-lap?  Are these divisions between soul, mind and brain/biology as distinctive as we’d previously imagined them to be? 

If not, where does that leave me? What about my DNA? What about my personal karma and ancestral karma?  Am I, and in turn my children, essentially biogically and karmically screwed?

Or, could I use my ancestors as role models in the sense that I will learn from their mistakes.  I will intentionally (which is a necessary component for karma) stand on the shoulders of my ancestors in the sense that I will gain wisdom through their unhappy experiences.  From this, I could make new and different choices that would nourish and protect the souls of my children; thereby potentially affecting future DNA and the cycle of rebirth, samsara.

What do you think? Are you still with me?

Now, let’s rewind.  I’m back at the conference many years ago.  The main speaker asks each participant to introduce herself by sharing one of her role models…I answer, “my paternal grandmother.”

Much wisdom, and therefore meaning, could be gained through empathic examination and understanding of her life that could be helpful for me in my own spiritual and parenting journey- would that not be the definition of a role model?

So who was she?

My paternal grandmother, who’s name I also took as a pseudonym for this blog, got pregnant and married (in that order) during World War II.  Her husband was at war in Europe for the first year and change of their marriage, and was not there when their first (of 6!) child was born. 

When my grandfather returned from the war, my grandmother quickly got pregnant with her second child, and soon after the decision was made to move several hundred miles away from her family, whom she had continued to live with while my grandfather was at war, to a house in New England nearby my grandfather’s family.

Unfortunately, the “house” my grandfather moved his young family to was not much. 

It was an old farm house with no plumbing and no electricity, and my grandmother initially decided to high-tail it right back to her parents’ house with her 4 year-old son (my father) and 2 year-old daughter until my grandfather could get his "house" in order. 

It wasn’t long before my grandfather came to get her though, and she went with him back to the farmhouse.

My grandmother went on to have 4 more children, and my grandfather never really got his “house” in order.  Though by all accounts a likable guy, due to frequently changing jobs, inability to keep money in the bank, and being known for his infidelities, it’s safe to say my grandfather was not known for his dependability or resilience, and his literal house and figurative house (his ego) was full of cracks and unfinished parts that were so poorly constructed they were weak at best, but arguably dangerous- an ego structure made of cards.

But my grandmother didn’t know that in the beginning- couldn’t have known that.  As the story went for an uneducated, unemployed, pregnant woman in the 1940’s, when you got pregnant, you got married, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Regrettably, I was never able to meet this grandmother.  She died of cancer in her 50's a year before I was born.

Some days I wish I could tap my magic wand and give my grandmother a re-do similar to the character of George Monroe in the 2001 movie Life as a House. 

Like my grandfather, George Monroe, played by Kevin Kline in the movie, inherited a dilapidated house from his father, both figuratively and literally, that the movie character continued to live in.  

In the film, the house is a perfect metaphor for the construction of ego with emphasis on the important role of intentional parenting as one of its major themes throughout the film. 

However in the movie, unlike in my grandfather’s own life, when the movie character’s life implodes after being fired from his job and learning he has cancer, he does decide to tear down the original “house” to the bare bones and rebuild from ground up in order to create and pass-on a worthy “house” to his only child.  The movie character understood that it is never too late to start rebuilding.

But maybe for some, rebuilding does not happen until a future generation comes along.  A generation that looks at some of the ancestral blueprints and decides there are necessary structural changes to be made.

I think this is where gratitude comes in.

Austrian born, Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, who has a great Ted-Talk called “Want to be Happy? Be Grateful,” says that to experience gratitude we do not have to be grateful for hardship or painful events.  But, and this is a big but, we can experience gratitude in every moment due to the opportunity for growth, learning and wisdom that is available to us in every moment.

In this way, my grandmother is one of my role models, and I have gratitude for her and her life.  She is one of many ancestors whose life experience will guide me as I make decisions that will build and shape the home that will house the souls of my own children.  And for that I am grateful.

This blog entry is the 5^th in a 6 Part Series.

To be concluded…

Housing a Soul, Part IV: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

The Role of Environment & Timing

The age-old question about child development is: if 2 children are raised under the same roof, by the same people, following the same rules, how do the 2 children come out so different?

Answer: variables, variables, variables. 

And though I’m sure there are many more, here, I’d like to highlight just three.  These include: differences in the environment, differences in the cues of each child, and differences in the caregiver.

To illustrate how differences in the environment impact the construction of ego, I’d like to share a story about my childhood pets.  Three cats to be exact: Fluffernutter, Morris and Maxine.

When I was a child I had a cat named Fluffernutter.  She was a gorgeous long-haired calico who loved to snuggle and love on both people and other cats.  She looked a little like this cat:

Fluffernutter had two litters of kittens. 

The first litter was born in our family room in a lovely nest of blankets in a medium size cardboard box where the new little family could spend their first weeks together undisturbed.  From this litter of kittens, Fluffernutter had her son Morris. 

Morris was skinny and orange, and was actually the runt of the litter. He had all kinds of difficulty learning to nurse from his mother and trouble successfully competing with his siblings for his mom’s attention.  So my older sister ended up having to bottle feed Morris to keep him well-nourished.

Not long later, Fluffernutter was pregnant again before we were able to get her spade. So, though not planned, we again set up another nest for the second-time mom in our family room to create a supportive and safe environment for the soon-to-arrive kittens. 

Unfortunately though, Fluffernutter had her second litter of kittens outside in our chicken coop, and we did not know the new litter was out there for a whole week.

Maxine was one of the kittens who was born in the chicken coop.  She was not the runt of the litter.  She was healthy with long pitch-black hair, and in fact quite resourceful and energetic.

Of Fluffernutter’s kittens, Morris and Maxine were the 2 we kept from each litter, and these 2 siblings couldn’t have ended up being any more different in character.  Though both cats had the same mom (who was a very doting mama to all her kittens), who grew up in the same house with the same family, by all the same rules.

Morris became very similar to his mother in personality. He was quite snuggly, fat, slow-moving, kind of lazy with frequent naps throughout the day often on someone’s lap, bed or pillow.

Maxine on the other hand, developed into a very nervous scaredy-cat.  We never quite knew where she was in the house because she was always hiding under a bed somewhere and she never liked to be held by anyone.

I use this very light example of my pets to demonstrate the potential role early environment can play in that critical time of ego development which could lead one child to be very different from her sibling. 

In the human world, this might look like a caregiver who is doing her very best to protect and nourish a new soul, but the external circumstances of being poor in a ramshackle house might make it very difficult. 

A few year later though, after a new brother or sister has come along, the family might have moved into a working class neighborhood because the caregiver got a higher paying job, though already these 2 very different environments might have been just enough to impact the construction of ego development around each sibling’s soul. 

I am sure it played a role for my maternal grandmother and her sister.

My grandmother, who’s name I borrowed as pseudonym for this blog, graduated high school just one year before the financial United States Stock Market Crash of 1929.  Her younger sister graduated exactly one year after. 

Need I say more?

At a critical time of ego development, late adolescence, my great aunt’s environment was financially devastated from an event that could not have been prevented by her caregivers.

How could such an environmental variable not impact my great-aunt’s sense of safety and security in her own home? How could she not feel robbed? 

But my grandmother, on the other hand, seemed remarkably untouched by it developmentally. 

As the oldest of 4 children, in a family that valued higher education for all of their children but after The Crash of ’29 could now only afford it for one, my grandmother was sent to college at one of the great mid-west schools that had only recently integrated women.  My great-aunt was kept at home until she married.

Two souls, only two years apart, who grew up in the very same house, with the very same caregivers, but who went on to lead quite different lives.

Another factor that can affect the differences among siblings in the creation of a solidified house of ego is the actual cues each child soul offers to his or her caregiver.  For this illustration I’ll use my sister and I. 

If we think of cues as those things we say and do to signal what we need from another, my older sister was a bold, direct communicator. She was verbal, outgoing and expressive. In fact, I would say it would have been damn near impossible for even the most self-focused of caregivers to have missed my sister’s cues for what her needs were to develop a supportive ego to house her soul. 

Me on the other hand…I was harder to read for sure. 

As a child I was mostly quiet and reserved, preferring to fly under the radar or behind the scenes. While my sister might have put herself center stage, I was probably not even in the auditorium, or if I was, I was acting as usher to help people find comfortable seats. 

It most definitely would have required an astutely observant and inquisitive caregiver to have picked up my cues. 

For this reason, it makes total sense that a seemingly small difference such as the intensity and frequency of direct and indirect communication from child to caregiver would leave 2 siblings living in the same house, with the same caregivers, with a potential sharp contrast in how their houses were constructed, or not, to the expressed needs of each soul.

The last variable to consider in the context of ego development in siblings is changes in the life stage of the caregiver. 

I have a great friend who was born to a teenage mom- she only 15 years-old in fact. My friend’s mom later went on to have another child, my friend’s younger brother, when she was well into her 20’s.  As one would expect, my friend and her brother had a very different experience in their ego development.

And it makes absolute sense.  For most of us, the amount of inner resources we would have to construct a nourishing and protective house of ego in our teens would naturally be far less than in our twenties.  Or thirties…

I myself had my son when I was 31 years-old and my daughter when I was 36.  I like to think in those 5 years I changed in a lot of ways, hopefully positive, that inherently would make me a different caregiver to my daughter than I was to my son. 

It’s not that I was a “bad” caregiver to my son in any way, I wasn’t. 

I think of it more like the difference between a 2009 car make and model and a 2013.  If you can afford it, you want the 2013 model. 

In the 2013 model presumably the little tweaks and adjustments and recalls have already happened, so you can feel more confident in the newer and improved version of the same car that was already  pretty good to begin with.

But what if that is not the case? What happens when the ideal and the good enough do not take place?  For the individual child or the siblings?

More on the way…

Housing a Soul, Part III: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

Renovating My Own House

So when I became a parent 7 years ago no one told me about the de facto self-examination that would emerge in the unfolding process of motherhood.  (Somebody really should have!)

On the other hand, one could also argue that the process of self-examination has helped me gain greater awareness as a parent to be more mindful of its various tasks (and minefields) including the spiritual development of each of my children.

When I think about the role of ego in the nourishment and protection of the soul, I’m reminded, to be candid, that 20^th century psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott’s famous phrase “good enough” is what I had.

This is not said with disdain or lack of gratitude.  I actually feel enormous relief (as an adult child, as a parent, and as a psychotherapist) that good enough in most cases will be sufficient.  It helps remind me of miraculous human capacities like resilience, neuroplasticity and one of my personal favorites: catching a second wind.  And because in my early life a solid foundation was constructed for a healthy ego development, I am extraordinarily grateful, because it kept my child soul safe and protected.

But later, as it became apparent my own caregivers, or construction workers, had to shift their attention to their own unfinished houses to attend to their own transitions to mid-life, my house was left incomplete, leaving me exposed and at times, vulnerable.  

In my case, the construction workers left the job site half done.  

What’s more, I was not aware of this for some time, and rather than picking up my own hammer to work on my own house of ego, instead, I began to work on the fragmented areas of my caregivers’ houses.  Not realizing at the time that the roles had flipped, I began to work on shoring up the very foundation of one parent’s house and became the home décor, Nate Berkus expert for the other parent’s house to build up their real estate value of ego, while unknowingly neglecting my own.

There did come a point though in my early 30’s when I decided it was imperative that I turn my attention back toward myself to work on my own house of ego again.  This decision was born of my new role as a parent.

For you parents out there, this is probably not surprisingly to you.  Sure, it meant finding a new team of carpenters to help me. But this time, I myself was head foreman, and it didn’t even feel like a choice honestly.  I knew I could no longer work on my caregivers’ houses anymore, which regrettably left them somewhat confused and exposed for a brief time. 

This process of my own home renovation ended up being far more comprehensive than initially thought (as most home projects are), and it included several spiritual milestones like: a pilgrimage, a ceremony officiated by a reverend, a radical decision to speak honestly rather than politely (even if it meant conflict with people I love).

This chapter in my spiritual life ended with me fully knowing and believing, for the first time in my life, that I am actually a child of god, not my parents.

Now, I love my house.  I still tweak this and adjust that, but I feel like the major renovations are complete.

This makes me feel more available for working on my children’s houses to help them develop an ego structure that will help them nourish and protect their own souls until the time may come, maybe in this lifetime, when they feel ready and able to let all of the scaffolding come down- to become real.

This blog entry is the 3^rd in a 6 Part Series.

To be continued…

Housing a Soul Part II: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

Building the House

Parenting has many tasks, but one primary spiritual task is to nourish and protect the soul of the child.

I think of this parenting task as analogous to carpenters on a construction site who are charged with building a house where the head architect is, of course, god, and the house is a metaphor for the child’s psychological ego that is to be built around the child’ soul.  The intention of this house is to protect the soul until it knows how to navigate the earth without a shell.

I think this process of constructing a strong and stable house or ego begins as early naming the child.  Ask a parent what process they went through to assign a name to their infant, and you will get a little window into how that caregiver is beginning to construct the house of ego.

But aside from the ritual process of naming, when the soul first arrives in the world as an infant, it predominantly lives within the house or ego of his or her caregivers.  Referring back to my earlier training in psychodynamic theory, from an Object Relations Theory perspective, this would be the symbiotic stage of Separation Individuation.

For some, this means a warm, clean, safe, and stable house.

For others though, it means moving into a house with a leaky roof, a broken window and half-finished renovations- after all, we are all acutely aware that this earthly world is by no means created equal.  

There are child souls who grow up in the holding environment, another favorite term of mine by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, of caregivers with ego structures that never quite got solidified themselves. And there are some child souls who grow up virtually homeless because their caregiver had little to no sense of their own self, or ego, to possibly be able to loan it or share it with another. It's not that they didn't want to let the child soul move in to their house, they just had no house to move in to. There was nothing to share.

Those select souls can sometimes feel like feral cats. A soul born and raised out in the elements that creates a quite skittish or even aggressive ego structure. As a metaphoric home, I imagine this ego structure as a shantytown hut or shack, like in India or Brazil, where orphan kids may be raising themselves; where the door is a piece of metal stolen from a junkyard and a bed is a sack found in the market.

But what comes next? After the child soul has lived within the construct of their caregivers’ house or ego, they begin to move into their own house that is still on the caregivers’ property. Ideally, while the child soul was held in the safety and stability of his or her caregivers’ home, the caregivers we constructing a specially designed kid house that was completely unique to that emerging understanding of who this child soul appeared to be.

Each day the caregivers would swing that hammer and try to read the blueprints God the architect had sent for this totally original soul. The caregiver was listening for each time the child soul said “I prefer this color. I'd like to read this book.” And the caregiver was also teaching the child soul how to live in his or her own unique house for when the time came. For example, the caregiver modeled how to handle grief and heartache as well as how to get up and go to work or school when he or she didn’t want to.

I think of the ideal ego or house construction for this child soul as similar to a children's book I loved as a child and now read to my son. It is called Andrew Henry's Meadow.

In the book there is a boy named Andrew Henry who loves to build and invent things. But he doesn't feel he has the space to do it in his house with his parents and 4 other siblings. What's more, he also doesn't feel his family seems to appreciate or enjoy his talent for building or for the inventions that he dreams up. So the boy decides to leave home and build his own house in a meadow; a house that is the perfect space in terms of size, shape and design for a budding inventor. 

But Andrew Henry has barely finished his own house before another child shows up in the meadow. This child, a girl named Alice, asks Andrew Henry to build her a house too, but requests that her’s be the perfect size, shape and design for all of her birds and birdhouses which are her unique passion. And so he does.

Andrew Henry builds his friend Alice a house that is in fact the literal shape of a birdhouse, up in a tree, where Alice can be completely “at home” with herself.

Before long, the meadow is filled with children who are now living in little homes that are completely unique and special to their individual personalities. Each child soul now has an ego structure in place that is validating and reflective of the soul that resides within. 

I have to tell you, I love this story... 

In particular because the story implies that each child has an ability to intuit what their soul is drawn to, even before it is fully fleshed out and articulated in adulthood. 

Because we know, for some, this intuition of true self will eventually make it necessary for some adult souls go on to change aspects of themselves like their names, or in some cases, their genders.  These souls have determined and accepted that their houses are in need of radical renovations.  Their caregiver had constructed a condominium, but their soul needed a yurt.  Sometimes it is because the caregivers were not paying close enough attention to the cues from the child soul as to what kind of enclosure would be most fitting for that unique soul.

In interviews, Paulo Coelho, author of the now classic The Alchemist, tells the story of his parents trying to cram him in to the house of lawyer when he clearly showed no signs that his house was built of the law. This might be similar to a parent who keeps insisting that her daughter wear dresses and Mary Janes when the daughter is clearly more at home in shorts and sneakers.

In those cases, the caregiver is not actually building a new house for this one precious jewel that Fr. Rohr wrote about in Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self. No, they are either: A. Building additions on their own houses.  Or B. Building houses for themselves for the first time or finalizing the unfinished parts of their own houses meanwhile saying, and maybe even believing, it was for the child. 

Arguably, another good example of this invalidating construction of ego could come from the world of literature in the form of Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

You remember Mrs. Bennett, right? She is the novel’s memorable nineteenth century English mother who has taken on the task of finding suitable husbands for all of her 5 daughters.  But, rather than considering the needs, wants and cues for each of her very different and unique daughters, including the main character Elizabeth, Mrs. Bennett tries to just squeeze each daughter into whatever marriage works best for the mother in terms of her own financial security and reputation.

And of course, though it is beyond the scope of this piece, the external shaping of ego goes far beyond the caregivers.

Our ego houses do not live in vacuums, and therefore environmental influences like neighborhood, culture and religion, and the societal isms like racism, sexism, heterosexism, anti-Semitisms, able-ism, among others also influence the nourishment and protection of the child’s soul.

Whereby, for example, a young African American girl might put a bath towel on her head to pretend she has long hair because she has absorbed and internalized the racism of the larger society that values long, straight hair; thereby possibly skewing the foundation of her very own house.

Other times though, we as caregivers were watching for those cues but just, for whatever reason, missed them. 

Then, it is not until the child soul turns teenage, and then young adult, that they let us know all the mistakes we made in the construction of their house of ego. “You put the door here, it really should have gone there. You made my bedroom a square, how could you not know I'm a circle?” 

Yes, mistakes will be made. Renovations will be necessary. Repairs in the form of apologies or maybe family therapy might be called for. But all of that is okay. All of that is, as D.W. Winnicott famously said, good enough.  And in most cases, good enough is good enough.

This blog entry is the 2^nd in a 6 Part Series.

Stayed tuned for more...