Opposing Archetypes of the Mother Goddess in Birth Mothers

Mary Anne Cohen

Demeter and Kali: Opposing Archetypes of the Mother Goddess in
Birth Mothers
"Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass
or only gaze a little while…" -- W.B. Yeats

What can we as mothers who have surrendered a child do to let the world know what we have suffered in a way that will be heard, respected, and believed? What can we do to understand and welcome our children in reunion, and support adoptees in general in the fight for their civil rights, rather than projecting our hurts on to them? How can we avoid being overshadowed by bitterness, despair, and preoccupation with our own misery? How can we know and deal with our real and deep hurts, without blowing them out of proportion, or trampling on the rights and feelings of others? How can we live with something that for some of us is incurable, and resistant to the usual psychological and practical remedies? How we can have the courage to love when that love is not returned, or is misunderstood or mocked? How can we move forward to a livable future without denying or minimizing the trauma of the past? Why can some mothers get beyond the pain, and others cannot?

To all these questions the answer I must humbly give is: "I don't know." The small amount of healing and peace I have found is as mysterious to me as the Holy Grail, and as elusive. But I do have some vague thoughts, perceptions, intuitions that I would like to share with you all here to see if together we can begin to see a bit more clearly the whole picture, and what holds us back, or what opens doors. I who said I would never change, now feel some things are shifting and flowing into other shapes and images. This is both freeing and frightening, and it comes only after great loss and pain, on many levels. Part of this is in reaction to seeing what I do not like and could not face in myself reflected back in other. Much of it is probably just getting old and hopefully, a little wise! The furious anger I held to for years seems to be fading away, not replaced with apathy or joy yet, but with a deep sadness that so much that is, cannot be changed, and must be endured. Much of the mystery of life is how love and beauty and hope can coexist with the most terrible anguish. But I know it does.

I have come to question the worth of adoption support groups as they are now constituted, as real avenues to healing and understanding, and to fear that instead they are a place where many of us get stuck in a downward spiral we all fuel, some of us for decades. I had thought for a while that this was a function of the internet, and endemic more to email support groups than to those that meet in the real world, but now I doubt that the medium in this case has that much to do with the message.

I know that for years I was as angry and bitter and focused on surrender as "the worst fate" as any raging birthmother in anti-adoption internet groups, and as opposed to adoption in a rigid and fanatical way. Ideology came first, individuals second. For the most part my contact with adoption support groups reinforced these feelings, either directly in the "misery loves company" mode, or by reaction to the feeble and often downright stupid alternatives offered by those "feel good" philosophies some factions sometimes proposed as a solution. So it is hard for me to really think that others now are just "that way" because of internet lists, although the of illusion of intimacy combined with impersonality so endemic to the internet do lend themselves to extremes of all kinds. The worst feelings coming out sooner and with more vehemence, and those who are truly mentally unbalanced are able to dominate internet groups in a way they could not in face to face settings.

I do not claim any expertise in the field of depth psychology, or more than a beginner's knowledge of the influence of archetypes, but I have some tentative theories about how mother archetypes may influence our groups, for good and ill, and how by being aware we might be able to avoid some of the worst pitfalls.

We are all familiar with the concept of "good mother" and "bad mother", "Holy Virgin" and "Shameless Slut", that play back in forth in society's (and our own) view of birthmothers. In terms of ancient Goddesses, which many writers use to personify archetypes, the good mother is the Greek Demeter, Goddess of fertility, and birth: the all-sacrificing mother who defied the powers or Hell to bring back her child. From another culture, that of ancient Hindu India, we get Kali the Destroyer, the ultimate bad mother, a Death Goddess pictured with skulls around her neck: the opposite principal, the devouring, insatiable mother who takes back the life she once gave. Both are faces or aspects of Nature, which both creates and destroys. All that is born must fade and die. Dualistic systems separate them into good and evil, dark and light, and try to distance themselves from the dark, or to pretend that it is utterly "other", or does not exist. And what we deny, or push into darkness, grows and grows and takes power from our efforts to ignore it. Eventually it becomes a mask that we place on the face of "The Other", making him not a person but a demon to hate and destroy.

Using this model, perhaps what happens in our support groups is a fear of the "Kali" in all of us, that drives some of us to become what we fear, hateful, destroying, despairing, and blaming everyone, even our children, for our sad state. This is the mindset that says that adoption is as bad as death or the Holocaust, or worse, and that birthmothers, because they have suffered as badly as anyone, have a right to say or do anything they feel and never be challenged or criticized. Could some of this be our subconscious fear that we ARE the "bad mother" the adoption industry said we were, and the futile attempt to take on the "blameless eternal victim" role instead? There is a terrible fear in anti-adoption circles that for a mother who surrendered to take any responsibility at all, damns her to the role of pure evil that they prefer to assign to all adoptive parents, all agencies, all social workers, and the Adoption Industry to whom they attribute much more power and monolithic solidarity than it ever had.

Some of us have tried for so many years to be the perfect, "Demeter" mother, both in our adoption world and in our daily lives that it comes as a relief at first to let that dark side out, and let it howl, especially among our own kind. This is especially true of mothers who took on the cloak of secrecy that was forced on most of us at the time of surrender, along with denial that we had a right to feel any grief at all over what was, after all, "our own choice". Those new to being "out" as mothers who surrendered a child, and new to reunion and search, need to go through the dark side, the devastating grief, the fury, the murderous rage at the system and at all who contributed to the loss of our children. But we do not need to stay there forever. We do not need to let unthinking rage harden into hateful, self-justifying ideology. This is where I think our groups have failed us, and where we fail the newer birthmothers coming into our movement.

What we have been offered in the past as an alternative to this; "self- esteem". "empowerment", various forms of magical thinking (it was "meant to be", or preordained karma) ,"stages of grief" with charts and timetables, and other pop psychology concepts, hardly scratch the surface of the mess we are in, or begin to touch the complexity and variety of the adoption experience on a soul level. No wonder it is easier for so many of us to reinforce each other's pathology in our "birthmother ghettos" than to try to see beyond this self-focused point of view to some possibility of peace!

I do not feel this is anyone or any group's fault, or what anyone wants or intends. If this is at all about fault, I am as much to blame as anyone, having been involved for so many years and simply going around that same tiresome wheel of self-pity as so many others. None of us have really seen this clearly yet, nor have we devised a truly healing, coherent, and realistic philosophy or psychology of surrender and reconciliation. Some of us are starting to try, but it is just a start. We have so far to go.

One small step out of the pit of grief and self-justification is simply to open our eyes and hearts to adoptees and adoptive parents, and to the greater world, in empathy and understanding, and with a willingness to see all things in perspective, in many subtle, graded shades, not just in stark black and white. There are many greater forms of human suffering in the world, and in our daily lives and circles of friends, than adoption and surrender. If we cannot see this around us, we are spiritually blind, and in soul-deep trouble.

This does not mean we have to negate our pain, or the very real and permanent harm that the adoption system has done to many of us. We do need to be clear and precise in how we describe that particular and distinct pain, and with what we compare it. Adoption is not "like the Holocaust" or "worse than death" and most people are revolted and stop listening to us when we make such analogies. This doesn't mean there is nothing wrong with adoption. Far from it!

We need to be able to differentiate, in ourselves and in our groups, between justified anger at actual wrongs and the individuals or institutions responsible, which is healthy and appropriate, and the kind of global, infantile rage that goes off like a bomb at anyone unlucky enough to get too close, and leaves no room for empathy or reason. This leads to ugly statements like "I wish my child had been stillborn rather than given up" or "adoptive parents are all kidnappers" which win us no allies, and make us sound heartless, fanatical, and crazy. It also fosters the attitude that all birthmothers are innocent and right, no matter what their actual actions and circumstances, and that all who disagree are "the enemy", even our own children. The lack of challenge or critical thinking that is endemic to the support group model, while appropriate for new and fragile members, ill-serves our groups and their members in the long run. Many of us have stayed in these groups for decades now with very little to show for it.

We have to be willing to open our hearts even what that seems foolish, or self- defeating, or just hurts like hell, forgetting what is "fair" or "in it for us", and we have to tolerate more ambiguity and confusion than is ever comfortable. We need to see Kali and Demeter for what they are, and no more, and try to make some peace with both Mother archetypes within and around all of us. We are all the good mother and bad mother at different times, but most of all we are imperfect, human, and children of God. As long as we can see our own failings and imperfections, as well as our own goodness and strength, we will be less likely to project on to others what we most fear in ourselves.

By Mary Anne Cohen, 1998