by Amy Irvine McHarg
Crust - In geology, a crust is the outermost solid shell of a planet or moon. Crust is chemically and mechanically different from underlying material. Like any shell, the crust is brittle, and prone to fractures—the process by which the major plates are formed. The crust is where most earthquakes originate.
The year she nearly took her child’s life, the world was in a deadly mood all around. It had been a long winter to begin with, and then spring’s fecundity simply never happened. It was hard to look at the earth beneath her feet—for what should have been a surface increasingly radiant with the promise of new life remained instead a barren topography—so chillingly lackluster that anything trying to emerge verdant was intimidated right back into the ground. She would remember few details, save the morbid ones: Like the sky, how swept like an eraser across a chalkboard, its chilly troposphere both pale and vague. The lambs and calves—frozen solid if they weren’t birthed in barns—and only then with heat lamps glaring down. The alfalfa that never really flourished—mildewing in the pasture long before it was tall enough to thresh. And the bears. They woke up late and practically starved. One was desperate enough to come up out of the draw, into their yard. He dismissed three barking dogs, a floodlight and an impressive fence in its quest to eat her daughter’s pet goat. The creature had then circled back and damn near got her husband as he rummaged in the shed for his gun.
In hindsight, everything natural—rotations of weather, cycles of life, the instincts of animals—had become wholly irregular. There was no symmetry. No synchronicity. She saw only one fawn that summer—its mother had refused it after her dogs had separated the two in what they had intended to be a friendly game of chase. Right away she had called off the canines, but the doe’s instincts were shaken. She turned away from her baby, who stood wobble-legged and blinking with incomprehension as its mother receded into the cedar trees behind the house. That night, she had lain awake for hours, listening to the fawn’s strange, doleful cry as it paced the edge of the woodlands, just beyond the fenceline. She had deliberated how she might rescue it, had even gotten out of bed and begun to dress. But too soon there came the yips of coyotes, closing in. Their predation would be the single most predictable thing to occur for many months.
She could relate. To the doe. To the general state of things. Her own skin had always felt much like the current state of the earth’s surface—a thin and infertile barrier, hopelessly ineffective against environmental extremes. But now the elements seeped right in, and through the smallest of small fissures, they promptly laid waste to anything fertile. This produced a tremulousness in both the body and the mind, a shaky terrain beneath which the aquifers of empathy, patience, and imagination—the very wellsprings of mothering, each one a quality she had believed to be inherent—were drained. It’s not that she didn’t love her daughter. Indeed, everything about the child—her incorrigible strawberry blonde curls, her clever swerve of a smile—made her wild with devotion.
Still, not long before the summer solstice—in what should have been the most sumptuous days of the year—her daughter became sick. Again. It was the fifth day of a persistent fever of 105, and the child’s body had stopped producing urine. A few days earlier, the doctor had told her to ride it out, that the relentless burn was the result of nothing but a nasty flu. Since then, every effort had been made to ease her suffering, but five nights later, the child still cried all night, and on into the morning. It wasn’t a helpless whimper, which would have been perhaps more manageable. It was a white-hot sound, an expression of fury that torched the room the way a hurtling meteor sets the night sky ablaze. Finally she had carried her daughter up the stairs from the basement room that had served as a makeshift infirmary, put her in the car and headed out into a bleak, blinding storm. En route to the hospital, rain assaulted the windshield. She took it personally. It should have helped that she knew intimately the city’s streets—for they were the routes of her hometown, the backdrop for her own childhood. But she was disoriented. And the wretched wails from the backseat were beginning to shift things in her—things geologically proportionate—things she had she had thought were permanently affixed.
To this city she had made the six-hour drive, and with high hopes. They were staying at her mother’s house; her goal in coming here had been to find more sunshine and warmth than what they had at home on the mesa, in southwest Colorado. They had been sorely disappointed. And then her husband had called to tell them about the goat. Her own transparent despair stood in and overshadowed the child’s own attempt at grief. The fever ignited only minutes later.
To be fair, she had been sick too. Her bones and brain had been bludgeoned by aches and exhaustion. But there had been little chance to tend to her own miseries. Instead, she held the child and rocked her, all the while sponging her skin and pushing droppers of electrolyte replacement between her cracked and blistered lips. This is what mothers do. The words became her mantra. And as long as she was this deprived of sleep—or any other kind of self care or sustenance—she possessed no ability to think or act beyond that singular, circular thought.
She peered out the windshield into a world dark and distorted; in turn it seemed to seep through the windows and penetrate her skin. She could not pull back. And with the wipers like fingers wagging in her face, she considered the measures of providing for a good childhood. She did not yet know how, but she knew she had failed to provide any one of these—for the child was sick, angry, and frustrated more often than not. Whenever she tried to explain that she wasn’t cut out for mothering, that she lacked some internal blueprint that other women possessed, there was always someone nodding too quickly, saying yes, and that’s why the child is in such a state.
And now: The negligence of spring seemed a fitting punishment for her ineptitudes. She understood this as a natural law of cause and effect—in fact, she interpreted such an external, impersonal event as just retribution, designed exclusively for her. A normal person—that is, someone with the ability to perceive themselves as distinct from the world beyond their own body—would not comprehend such a perverse logic. But for her, it explained everything—and foretold the futility of trying to make improvements. In the end, she would always be the problem—the-one-who-royally-fucked-up-her-daughter.
All realizations converged and made it easy to turn away from the hospital. To take instead a canyon road that wound its way up into the granite-gilded mountains that rose up at the edge of the city. She was soothed by her search for the right bend in the pavement—one without a guardrail but where canyon dropped away anyway. Within just a few miles, a lifetime of struggles coalesced into a single metallic bead, shining dead ahead—a perfect sphere of impervious logic: She could not give her daughter good health. She could not offer her peace of mind. These alone might have been forgiven, but she could see now that even her love was conditional—for she could only provide it when her skin was thick enough to resist the external environment, when she was able to stand on solid ground. In turn, she was teaching her child to stand in the world braced—as one stands in a doorway during an earthquake. As if the tectonic plates themselves were about to be pulled out from under her feet.
She continued up-canyon, past the chosen spot, just far enough from the curve to get a run at it. Then she slowed, made a four-point turnaround until the hood of the car faced it squarely. Engine idling, she sat there, now inured to her daughter’s screeches in the backseat. This infuriated the child, who threw a purple sippy cup at the back of her mother’s head. She hardly felt it. Death preoccupied her, the mere thought had caught her up like a clandestine lover.
This was not the first time. Those who knew of her preoccupation were disgusted, dismissing it either as a pathetic plea for attention, or an outright cop-out. But ever since her father had shot himself, the impulse had grown stronger, had honed itself like a knife straight off the whetting stone. And then she had given birth—only to find herself overwhelmed entirely. Yes, no matter what lay beyond this world, it had to be better than what was here and now. And yes, everyone would benefit by her being out of the picture.
Her mind ran back and forth across the blade, until the logic expanded: She knew firsthand from her father’s departure what that does to a child. Sure, she had felt a profound sense of relief when her father, an incorrigible alcoholic, had put a shotgun to his chest. But no matter how well she appreciated how unsustainable this world was for him, the legacy he left behind—a toxic cocktail of guilt and desertion—was nearly unbearable. And this is how she came to see her only option clearly, how the knife of logic at last gleamed with precision: Suicide would be the ultimate abandonment, one that would scar her daughter for life. For the child’s sake, she could not be left behind.
The night before, her husband must have heard through the phone an eerie prelude in her voice—for he had jumped in his car the next morning and was racing along an interstate through a storm that engulfed the entire Intermountain West. Every hour, he called. He called again just as she entered the canyon.
Just two more hours…then I will be there. He had screamed the words at her—a man both furious and frightened.
Oh… It was all she could muster, and the syllable echoed like she was standing at the far end of a tunnel.
Is there anyone who can take her while you pull yourself together? But he knew the answer. This may have been her hometown, but there wasn’t really that kind of support available.
Well then, shit. I don’t know. Pray? The question was for her. For him, there had never been any question. He was a man firmly planted in this world, a man who was in accordance with what God had in store for him.
The phone cut out, and his last word hung in her ear. It was odd, the way it shimmered there. Prayer was a thing of the past—something she knew only as an infrequent perfunctory exercise, and an abstract one at that. With rain coming down and steam rising spectral off the granite slabs that shored up the canyon like flying buttresses, she considered her spiritual void, how familiar it was to the point of being a thing—not the dearth of it. The deity of her upbringing had been much like her own father, absent mostly. And like her father, she knew that God was supposed to be revered, but instead she felt complete disinterest. It was hard to invest in anything with which you had so little contact.
She laid her head against the steering wheel and stared down at her hands in her lap. They were small, sun-spotted. They were not instruments of prayer, they were agents of destruction; everything they touched was eventually reduced to ash. She had practically burned through her third marriage—the way she had burned through careers, friendships, bank accounts. The results were disastrous, but soothingly predictable. The involvement of others, the intimacies required—once these were out of the way, there was always great relief in being alone.
She needed to believe in nothing. Its framework had served her well in the temporal world—had buffered her from the inevitable anxieties and disappointments. From there, being spiritually sociopathic had been a breeze.
And then it occurred to her. For all the professed nihilism, she really didn’t know what lay ahead. Perhaps death would actually bring her face-to-face with some kind of maker, perhaps with her father. It never crossed her mind that this could be a good thing; all she knew was that the idea of being in close quarters with either of them was something she could not entertain. And then there was her daughter: To think that she might be delivering her daughter into a realm even more emotionally spare than the one she provided was the one thing she could not allow to happen.
And so she resumed her original route. When she finally carried the hot child, still crying, into the emergency room, the automatic doors hissed shut behind her and she began to shake uncontrollably. It was not fear but relief that produced this response; here, there were people that could help, machines that would diagnose, medicines that would heal. The sense of relief was age-old, for she too had been a sick child. The repeated rushes for urgent care, the stays in the hospital—they had been heavenly. When a medical professional had helped restore the breath that her asthma had taken away, or administered the antibiotic that would kill off the infection, she saw these acts as bestowed miracles She put great stock in the whole thing; for it was here that she had come closest to feeling deep comfort and care.
To her left, in the waiting room, she could just barely see the people standing, peering out. And straight ahead, she could just make out the white-clothed figures rising from the intake desk, briskly moving forward with outstretched arms to catch her daughter as she thrust her forward. In the process, the child had become strangely quiet and still.
What’s wrong? The nurse quickly scanned the small, limp body for signs of harm.
Take her. Her jaw shook the words loose off her tongue.
You must take her and make her better. I cannot do this. I cannot do this. I will kill us both.
She turned and walked away.
*
Mantle – The Earth’s middle layer, the mantle, is the thickest layer of Earth. There is intense and increasing pressure as one travels deeper into the mantle. In April 2005, scientists drilled a hole in the ocean floor that descended all the way through the earth’s top layer. It took 8 weeks to drill 4,644 feet. Their next goal: to pierce the “Mohorovicic discontinuity”—or Moho—the boundary that separates the earth’s brittle crust from the hotter, more pliable mantle below.
It takes time and effort, no matter what resources are provided for the excavation. And it’s a gamble, to see what gets exposed. You start by scratching the surface—with small lies, fictions, the presentation of things in third-person. This is because you believe that what you have to show will appear more plausible, invoke less harsh judgment—and they do. It’s how you keep your friends and family from disowning you. Your lover from divorcing you. It’s how you imagine your daughter reading your words when she’s old enough to see them. But in the end, no matter how long it takes, one must dig until the hot, liquid heart is exposed.
And so now I’ll say it: I only made it as far as the automatic glass doors. That woman—the one who actually combed the canyon road for a place to drive off, the one who walked away from her ailing, frightened child—I was that woman.
That day at the hospital, the staff never got to the heart of my daughter’s problem—me. I would come to understand that later, in the form of a diagnosis known as Borderline Personality Disorder, or BPD. Fundamentally, a personality disorder describes a pattern of abnormal thoughts and behaviors that impairs relationships with others. Those who fit the borderline diagnosis teeter back and forth between lucidity and lunacy, always struggling with a “deep-seated feeling that one is flawed, defective, damaged or bad in some way, with a tendency to go to extremes in thinking, feeling or behavior.” I will have to come to terms with the fact that, under extreme stress, “there can be brief psychotic episodes with loss of contact with reality.”[1]
Borderline personality disorder is thought to develop in children who receive inadequate emotional support following parental abandonment through death or divorce—and in children who suffer parental abuse, emotional neglect, or chronic denigration.[2] Often mistaken for other mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, the disorder is also described as a struggle with a constantly shifting self-image, while everything else around the individual is fixed in black and white—an inflexible us against them mentality which means the most benign situation can deeply offend. There is a bitter irony here: Despite their overly dualistic thinking, individuals with BPD cannot recognize the clear boundary that exists between themselves and the rest of the world. Failing to see the nuances, they dwell in a poorly defined place—a place where fear and paranoia reign supreme.
I would learn that it can be considered a generational disease—for kids model what behaviors they witness in their caregivers. My father’s drinking didn’t help; so unsteady was he that even threading a worm on a hook during an afternoon at the kids’ fishing pond could leave me bloodied and shaking. But children with mothers who suffer from BPD are especially at risk. And so as obvious a culprit as my father was, I must consider too the women in my family—none of which were great nurturers. Not that I blame them, the tough-love style that permeated our clan seemed as much a matter of culture and heredity as anything. My mother and father both descended from tough, frontier-taming Mormon settlers—an already dense gene pool even further consolidated by horny patriarchs who believed a man must have at least three wives in order to attain the highest level of the afterlife, a place where they would become gods and rule their own planets. But the wives were divinely destined to remain mere helpmeets to the men-turned-gods—and thus was their role on earth. It was telling that in all of Mormon theology, even the angels who made cameo appearances as heavenly messengers were distinctly masculine. Mother Mary was ignored entirely—save a brief and silent stint in the manger scene of the Christmas Nativity. The result: A complete lack of divine imagery in which to model and honor their maternal psyches and spiritual worth left women born out of Mormon tradition wanting for a sense of self-potency. From there, any task they set upon—especially raising children—would be tainted by their bitterness, their uncertainty, of what was never realized.
That day at the hospital, the doctors and nurses would determine only that Ruby was dehydrated, and that she didn’t yet suffer from any sort of secondary infection. The mental health specialist sent in to evaluate what had been labeled “an unstable situation” concluded that I was doing everything right, that I was simply exhausted. I stared at her, my mouth hanging open like a half moon.
“You mean you aren’t going to call Child Services? Get her into protective custody?”
She smiled, as if I were making a joke.
“How about me? You’ll take me? For evaluation? Or at least prescribe something—a mild sedative? Just for a few days?”
But with each plea, she shook her head.
“You are just fine,” she said. “I see mothers like you every week.” As she was leaving the room she winked at Ruby, who had made an astonishingly rapid recovery, and sat on her best behavior, smiling sweetly.
Herb arrives in Salt Lake, whisks Ruby away so I can sleep. A few days later, he escorts us back home, scrambles to catch up at work while still attending to things at home—the pieces I can’t seem to get to. I aim at him arrows aflame with guilt and shame I cannot stand to own. Whenever he is down, I feed on his every weakness like a predator.
Meanwhile the world on the mesa has grown more frigid, more barren. The forsythia and china rose we planted earlier in the year never took hold, and begin to die off. Missing too are the honey bees. One day I am out walking, jacket zipped up and leaning into the wind, while my daughter naps beneath blankets in the stroller. My neighbor, a crusty old rancher, stops his Ford pickup, tips his sweat-stained cap. As always, we talk about the weather. He scoffs, says the cold and damp prove those environmentalists are a bunch of alarmist crackpots, that global warming sure as shit ain’t our problem. Then late August: We have given up on summer, the way we eventually gave up on spring—when the temperatures on the mesa suddenly shoot up twenty degrees. Things dry and curl like paper. There is an increase in local seismic activity—small but noticeable tremors. There is a rash of wildfires. Things tremble and burn all around.
I stumble across a book called Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable and Volatile Relationship. The author describes the world of the BPD mother as a place where where “inconsistency, unpredictability, and inappropriate intensity rule.”[3] She coins it Borderland.
This is a geography all too familiar. I have scrambled to its summits, slithered into its canyons. But now this place has a name, and its contours have been thoroughly surveyed, mapped and explored. And so I begin to try to moderate my responses to the world, to recognize myself as the source of damages I had once believed to be the result of natural disasters. My husband can’t yet see my efforts. He is too busy worrying about whether he should leave a loaded gun in the house—for the rogue bear has been back and tried to get in—or if he should keep our firearms far from my reach. It’s a tough call, when you live in a place like we do. When you’re married to a woman like me.
Borderland. Now that I can the demarcation of its boundaries, see how distinguishable it is from the territory beyond, I feel ambivalent about leaving. For me, this landscape is a vast, untrammeled wilderness. Things are terrifying there—and survival instincts are a must. And yet it evokes poetry. Passions. The stuff that makes me feel like, somewhere below the strata, there is something without dark flaw and damage, something that exists by seismic shivers of grace.
But I have a daughter to raise. A committed spouse who is at his wits’ end. And now that my perceptions of nearly every situation are suspect, there seems to be no choice. I must go. I must find my way out, and stay out. Even if I lose something deeply vital.
Autumn is nowhere in sight. The heat burgeons in September, along with an astonishing population of black widows. I find their glistening black orbs crouched beneath every surface of my life: Just below the house’s exterior paneling, where it meets the foundation, their sticky, sloppy webs have multiplied until they look like one continuous panel of latticework. Under nearly every rock that lines the gravel walkway, every stacked stone that landscapes our yard, we find not one—but two, or three—most often there is also a ball of white gauze, full of their eggs. They take up residency in my daughter’s sandbox. They stroll casually across the floorboards below the sink, spin strands in the corners under Ruby’s bed.
One morning, my husband finds our oldest dog, Jack, paralyzed on the floor of the shed. The shaggy old shepherd can just barely contract his lungs, but everything else, even his eyes, have lost their mobility. We make him a bed on the porch, and Ruby, Herb and I keep vigil. We speak of rushing him down to the animal clinic, but he is going too fast. Herb talks the dog through each breath, while Ruby curls into his body and nuzzles him. There is one last deep gasp—the one that exhales the soul. Then his brown eyes frost over. Later, when I discuss Jack’s sudden death with the vet, she will be surprised. Just two weeks prior, she had completed lab tests on him—in which she concluded he was in the beginning stages of kidney failure. She had assured us then that he would have many months before we would be faced with a serious quality of life issue. She will ask if he had any swelling, any lumps, which would have indicated a bite. I will shrug. Jack was an old dog, covered from head to paw with cysts. The doc’s best guess will be that his life, already compromised, was halted prematurely by the venom of a poisonous spider.
Herb and I spend the rest of the day digging Jack’s grave amid a circle of Gambel’s oak while Ruby adorns his body with sprigs of sage and chew toys. One by one the other cats and dogs come to say farewell, and the sky fills with birds of prey—Jack’s favorite pastime had been chasing their shadows as they skimmed the property in search of rodents. The shovels go deeper. When Herb reaches the all-too-shallow bedrock, he uses a pick and with great heaves, blasts through it. Grief fuels the man’s strength. I sit back, careful not to let things start slipping under my skin. I am just as careful to not let what’s inside leak out and taint all that is happening. And for once, I succeed in not making a situation more difficult than it already is. My family seems relieved. Ruby squints up at the spiral of redtails, ravens and kestrels. Then she stares into the hole, and asks the defining question—the one that exposes just how much our minds seek symmetry: Since his body goes down in the earth, does his spirit go up in the sky?
Over tea, I describe our bumper crop of black widows to a friend who is a Naropa-trained therapist. I tell her I am ready to spray, that the spider traps, the release of house geckos—nothing has beaten them back.
“The Buddhist way,” she chides. “Is to make allies out of your adversaries.”
She reminds me too that Native American traditions believe the spider to be the great creator, the wise weaver of the stories that shaped the cosmos. I counter that Jung believed spiders, especially widows, to symbolize the Dark Mother—that is, the entrapment of the child in the sticky strands of its mother’s dramas and emotions. In other words, she represents our inability to become free of that which bore us—which binds us. When she dominates, she must be destroyed.
“Besides,” I say with a shudder. “There’s the widow’s nasty habit of devouring her mate, post-coitus.”
When my friend asks if I have tried talking to the interloping arachnids, I tell her I scream at them every night, for they have also infested my dreams. She nods.
“This is what it has come to: Your projections have manifested—both in the outer world and in the psyche. It’s how the world’s imbalances make themselves known. Your task is now to help restore the equilibrium—both internally and externally.”
I had thought the problem was absent fathers, floating somewhere out in the ether. Now I see it’s murderous mothers, lurking in the dark recesses. To think that prayer seemed difficult. By comparison, a probe into the underworld seems deadly.
*
Core - The inner core of the Earth is a solid, spinning ball of nickel and iron. Its diameter is only about 70% that of the Moon, and most likely generates even more heat than the Sun’s surface. The core is surrounded by what is called the “shadow zone”—a liquid barrier through which certain seismic waves cannot travel—which for a long time prevented researchers from measuring the innermost part of the planet. One scientist has theorized that the dangers of global warming come not from climate change, but rather from the overheating of the Earth’s interior. His hypothesis: Heat generated inside the planet is largely nuclear, and cooling occurs only at the surface. As increasing greenhouse gases trap more solar heat, the cooling rate of the planetary interior is diminished. The hypothetical result: “Centrifugal segregation of unstable isotopes in the molten part of the spinning planetary core…would “enrich” the nuclear fuel in the core to the point of creating conditions for a chain reaction and a gigantic atomic explosion.”[4]
I maintain a cool exterior. But what is happening internally is totally incongruent with what I portray the world; the axis of my being spins and burns. There is no outlet, and I feel things begin to build—the pressure results, I believe, from living a lie. My daughter calls my bluff. She begins to turn away from me, instead seeks out conversations with what she calls her “spirit mother.” I ask her where she learned about such a thing. She says she just showed up, that she came to take care of her since sometimes I cannot.
I stick to managing the superficialities. The tangibles. I call pest control. The man arrives in a golf shirt and jeans—no mask, no gloves. He ambles around the perimeter of my house waving a thick wand of broad-spectrum insecticide as if he were playing a leisurely game of badminton. I scramble to get the dogs and Ruby far upwind. When he’s finished, I ask him why he thinks we’ve got such a spider problem. He shrugs, says that everywhere he works—across three counties—the conditions are just right this year. He also says that, in his two decades of experience, the bugs are definitely multiplying.
“They’re taking over everything,” he says. “And this year is the worst one yet.”
When we move back into the house a few days later, not a single fly remains. The house is sterile—and it is a bit creepy. But the spiders remain in my dreams. And so I make another phone call. This time to a healer I knew—a man that had treated cured my post-partum physical ills with great success. Christopher is a lighthearted and generous man who indulges in cigarettes and fine chocolate. He wears hair gel and fabulous eyeglasses, and looks into you as if he can read every hidden layer. He is also well-known for his skill in homeopathy—a system of medicine that believes “like cures like.” When Ruby was two, I had gone to him out of desperation, for conventional medicine—and even other forms of “natural” medicine, were not helping. Homeopathy differs from the other types of diagnosis by inquiring into the patient’s entire experience, then finds the thing in nature that produces those same symptoms in a healthy person. In other words, a person who has been bitten by a black widow would receive black widow venom—but in a form so diluted that not a single molecule of the original substance could be detected. For the proper remedy to be identified, a patient interview can take as long as three hours.
I had initially wanted Christopher to treat Ruby right alongside me. That first day at his house, he peered over the rim of his glasses—first at me, then at her. Then he asked Herb to take our child out of the room.
Whatever cures the mother will cure the daughter. Little did I know how true his words would prove to be.
The first remedy he gave me was mercury—used for people who have extreme reactions to the world around them. The second one he gave me was petroleum, that dark, thick fluid that has been dredged up from the depths of the earth to be burned as fuel. With each one, my body responded overnight. Many of Ruby’s symptoms also greatly improved.
Now I was calling to tell him we had more work to do; that my physical body was healed but my mind was apparently not. And then there was my daughter—still prone to illness and mostly off-kilter. I tell him what I had done, in the car, at the hospital. About the black widows. And about my diagnosis. When I try to tell him more, he is already talking, as if he has been waiting to have this conversation, as if he knew how it would all unfold with me.
“Sweetheart,” he says. “You suffer not from mental illness. You suffer from not living the life you were meant to live. Now, there are Rainbow Mothers and Crazy Tooth Mamas. The sooner you accept that you are not a Rainbow Mother, the better off everyone will be.”
I asked him to explain.
“In ancient indigenous traditions, there was a vast spectrum of mother archetypes. The Rainbow Mother represents the quintessential mother we all know and adore—even if we didn’t have one to raise us. She is the bottomless well of sacrifice and unconditional love. She bakes bread and happily tends to the home while the children play between the folds of her skirts. She is the one, the only one, to exemplify the maternal in this culture. This makes the Rainbow Mother disproportionately influential—and as wonderful as she is—without the others to balance her—she can be a dangerous thing.”
“The others?” I ask.
“Well, first off, she needs the masculine for balance—the father. There is also a spectrum of maternal archetypes to complement her energy—and at the end of that spectrum there’s the Crazy Tooth Mama. She is sometimes dark and unsettled, often unavailable. She must retreat, delve deep—for she has important work she has been called to do there.”
“But my daughter…” He interrupted me.
“Your daughter chose you, knowing full well what you were. You are infuriating her, and causing great duress, by trying to pretend to be something you are not.”
I google. I find Kali, the black Hindu goddess of destruction. And Tara, the Buddhist goddess of compassion. There is the Corn Mother, who in Native American tradition brings on the harvest, but in eastern European mythology, kills it. I begin to see the symmetry—how for every benevolent archetype there is a wrathful one. They correspond with the “good” in us, and with what psychoanalysts have referred to as the repressed “shadow self.” The goal in many spiritual or psychological traditions is to bring the two sides into consciousness—and therefore into balance. By doing so, many believe, we will no longer project our shadows—our fear and loathing—into the world. This allows others, to achieve their own restoration. Some believe the effect can heal the entire cosmos.
But everywhere I look, there is no sign of the Crazy Tooth Mama. I call Christopher again, tell him there’s nothing out there. Once more, he laughs.
“She lives underground these days. She was visible during the time of nomads—thousands of years ago when people were far more interconnected with one another and to the world around them. There were real tribes—where everyone—even the elders, the eccentrics—had a place and a role. There was none of this nuclear family-living-in-isolation bullshit. Crazy Tooth was there. She was the village madwoman, a sort of female shaman. Specifically, in Buddhist terms, she was a dakini—the embodiment of the feminine divine.”
I tell him that I have no business emulating a shaman—let alone a dakini. I ask him to give me another image with which to work, another framework that will translate. I tell him that I feel like an imposter, trying to borrow from another culture’s archetypes. I remind him that I was raised white, western, and Mormon. That I need something really pretty basic. He reminds me that archetypes, no matter what their form or theology, are universal. That they are necessary expressions of the basic human psyche.
“Joseph Campbell would say that our mentally ill may have been shamans, had they lived in another time, another way. He says they are most ripe for a shamanic experience, which is nothing short of a “schizophrenic crack-up—where the consciousness opens up and the individual falls in.”[5] Well, Crazy Tooth fell in, all the way in. From there she became a conduit to other realms, other possibilities.”
He snorts. “Borderline Personality my ass. It’s no disorder, girl. It’s a gift. Go find the myth you need, the one that strikes a chord. Hold a candle to it—scrutinize its heroes and heroines, its victims and its villians. Then turn it upside down. See what emerges.”
That night, I toss wildly in bed. Sweat saturates the sheets. I want to tear off my skin. Finally, my dreams take me along the edge of a ravine that borders the west end of our mesa home. It is a beautiful place, one that in the waking world was proposed for wilderness designation. That was before the oil and gas corporations greased palms for the opportunity to plunge their drills. Before my cowboy neighbor threatened to take up arms if the elected officials pursued the issue.
Below the rim, there is a broad ledge covered with junk—old box springs, a Dodge pickup, a wheelchair. Things tossed over the years by the locals. In the dream I am peering down at the junk when I hear voices behind me. I turn, and there is a line of women standing there, each one carrying a basket of fruit, or grains. They wear white, and their heads are adorned with wreaths of flowers. Their voices ring out like bells.
Sisterhood. The single-word thought comes with a deep sense of yearning. No wonder my Mormon ancestors agreed to polygamy. Their unity, their reflections in one another—it was all they had to shore themselves up. I begin to walk toward them. I seek the faces of my mother, my grandmothers, my sister and aunts. I recognize no one.
Then I see: Beneath each diaphanous dress there is the soft round belly, the mother belly. On each one I can just make out the blood-red curves of an hourglass. I turn to run, but they have formed an arc around me, a rainbow of women closing in.
I turn and jump. I fall past the junk piles, past soft sandstone cliffs that give way to a slope of oak, yucca, and lemonade bush. And as I brace for impact, the canyon floor, its silver stream and stands of willow, crack open. The earth implodes. I plunge into the gash. In a rain of soil, unearthed bones and arrowheads fall in too.
I tumble down, through bedrock. Then through viscous strata, growing hotter. Growing darker.
Then brightness. The ground I hit pings—metallic. I rise to my hands and knees, a ring of fire surrounds. I see my daughter on the other side of the flames, cheeks glowing, eyes ablaze. She looks wildly, devilishly alive. She looks straight at me, claps her hands in sheer delight. Next to her stands a man, tall and dark, steam rising off his skin.
Hell. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had always told me that I was such a bad child, that this is where I would end up.
The man smiles. It’s a fervent grin, one not quite menacing, but searingly ravenous and passionate. He points up. Far above, on the canyon rim, the women have cast webs across the sky. The silky strands are so thick they block the sun. Dark ice crystals fall to the earth. Before my eyes, the trees and flowers freeze solid. Now the women are leaning over the abyss, screeching my name. Their long spidery fingers point at the man, demanding my return, my daughter’s. Their voices hiss accusations.
Abductor… Rapist…
The man hands me an iron scepter. He nods at me to brandish it. Haltingly, I give it a wave at the flames. The fire rolls on itself, pushes upward like molten liquid from a volcano. Sparks fly, torching the sky webs. They sizzle and burn away, and the sun beams down once more. The women fall back. Their bodies morph into wolves, grizzlies, whooping cranes. Creatures rare and endangered. They turn and scatter to the winds.[6]
I look down. The flames have crept up on me. My skin sizzles, falls away. The feeble armor burns at my feet.
Adversaries. Allies. Symmetry.
And even in my sleep I am thinking how it’s only a dream, but things will never be quite the same.
The man takes my hand, as if I were queen. My daughter skips forward, throws her tiny arms around my legs.
Earth. Mother. Daughter. Like cures like.
Welcome home. He says it as if he’s been waiting for me all along.
*
This essay has appeared in Triquarterly Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.
[1] Richard J. Corelli, M.D., http://www.stanford.edu/~corelli/borderline.html, referenced in August 2008.
[2] Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship. Maryland: (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004), p. 42.
[3] Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship. (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2004), p. 6.
[4] Dr. Tom J. Chalko MSc, PhD, “No Second Chance? Can Earth Explode as a Result of Global Warming?” (NU Journal of Discovery, Vol 3, May 2001, NU Journal.net.), p.3.1.
[5] Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday), p. 85.
[6] I credit here dreamwork practitioner Marc Bregman’s book The Secret of the Pomegranate, which offered me the initial subversion of the myth of Persephone—which serves as framework for the dream.