JW: Before the Bear

This is not a reading in the sense of the lovely and stimulating one you did today. However, our conversation prompted the deeper dive into an old memory. I wrote it as if I would publish it but I'm not at all sure I will as it is a bit close to the bone. The bear memory is part of the newsletter post that will come out Sunday for Mothers Day. Thanks for all the conversations and the space to explore these things and not feel like a complete narcissist. 

At three, waking up alone in a car, I wonder where my parents are and decide that a bear has eaten them and I need to find new parents to take care of me.

I decide. At three. It wasn’t till many decades later that I decided that there was something incomplete about that memory. Actually, not until I had a willing and compassionate listener that this story began to seem odd, disjointed, out of place. When my friend wondered if I had felt abandoned, I said, “Of course.” But, now I wonder if that’s true and begin to contemplate that time before the bear. 

To feel abandoned is to feel undesired, left behind, insecure, or discarded. Therefore, in order to feel abandoned, one has to have first felt the opposite … desired, embraced, secure, chosen. Feelings of abandonment are created by the loss of that safe, secure, wanted state. As I have grown older, I have begun to feel the sting of abandonment while questioning whether that bear moment was abandonment or a further development of an even earlier state.

Abandonment is traumatic. But, I didn’t feel the trauma of abandonment when the bear came. It was more of a resolute question of “what do I do now?” It was a problem to be solved. I was firmly in my head. Why didn’t I feel abandoned? Wouldn’t that have been the more likely reaction?

All of this is conjecture since all I have are flashes and stories told. I could assume that I at least felt secure when I was within the womb and abandonment happened when I left that safe place. However, I’m not even sure that was true. My mom was an already divorced, unemployed, undereducated teenager. It’s more than likely that she wasn’t happy with her state and my impending birth. Most likely during that time she ignored the inevitable and continued smoking, drinking and eating badly. It’s not hard to imagine her suffering from stress, depression and anxiety resulting from the ending of her 3-month marriage and the journey through pregnancy to my birth, dependent upon her sister for a place to live and her father to pay her hospital bills.

Recently studies indicate that even though I was in a warm and safe womb, the emotional state of my young mother could have affected the development of my brain and my perception of the world through her stress and anxiety. To further complicate my particular path, my mother’s breast milk lacked nourishment so I was basically starving for the first few weeks of my life.

It’s impossible to know how all of this actually impacted my development and the bonding between my mother and me. However, one possibility is that I never truly felt safe and embraced and thus skipped over the feeling of abandonment that comes with leaving the womb and went straight to an independent, survival mode, never completely trusting the people around me to protect me, depending on my own, independent, primarily thinking, resources.

And, so what does that mean now? I want to feel compassion for that infant and I also want to let go a bit, trust the Universe, accept help from my friends, know that a forest is stronger and more resilient than a lone tree on a wind-swept plain. I am now in the last stage of life when the norm will be toward less independence rather than more. I want to embrace interdependence and accept the grace and wisdom that comes my way. 

And yet, I am loathe to lessen my hold on my independence, my solid foundation, my comfort zone which has protected me all these years. While the world is not demanding any specific letting go, I wonder if our present position on the Hero's Journey is suggesting it as a sacrifice I need to prepare for, as a crossing of the threshold and a test. The very act of accepting you as a companion on this journey suggests that this shift from independence to interdependence was part of what I would need to learn to accept and trust.

BTW ... looking at the dates on the early posts, we're in month 6 of the journey. It would be nice at some point to do a reflection and see if we could gather some of the insights.

7. Approach To The Inmost Cave
The inmost cave may represent many things in the Hero’s story such as an actual location in which lies a terrible danger or an inner conflict which up until now the Hero has not had to face. As the Hero approaches the cave he must make final preparations before taking that final leap into the great unknown.

At the threshold to the inmost cave the Hero may once again face some of the doubts and fears that first surfaced upon his call to adventure. He may need some time to reflect upon his journey and the treacherous road ahead in order to find the courage to continue. This brief respite helps the audience understand the magnitude of the ordeal that awaits the Hero and escalates the tension in anticipation of his ultimate test.