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...