in honor of the women mothering themselves

its mother's day. time to get a little dark.

There once was a mother who wished for a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as her embroidery frame. The earth heard the desire of the woman’s heart and she gave birth to a daughter with white skin, red lips, and jet-black hair. And then, the woman died.

One year later the child’s father remarried, taking for his bride a woman beautiful but riddled with envy. Each day she would stand before a magical looking glass and ask to see the fairest one in the kingdom—and each day, the looking glass would assure her that it was she. Until the day it could no longer.

When the girl with red lips and black hair was just seven years old, the looking glass reported that she was now the fairest in all the land. The stepmother went mad with jealous rage and employed a huntsman to take the girl into the forest and cut out her heart. But once the two were in the belly of the woods, the huntsman couldn’t do it. He released the girl and carved out a wild boar’s heart instead, bringing it to the stepmother, who ate it mercilessly with a knife and fork.

Meanwhile, the young girl was taken into the home of seven dwarfs, where she was loved and honored. But the looking glass reported her, and three times the stepmother disguised herself and attempted the murder on her own. Three times she was thwarted.

Eventually, the girl grew to the age of marriage and captured the heart of a prince. When the stepmother got to the wedding and saw the bride she knew only too well, she was paralyzed by hatred. To punish her for her evil deeds, the happy newlyweds forced her to wear scalding hot iron shoes and dance until she fell down dead.

You surely recognize the story of Snow White, though the gruesomeness of the Brothers Grimm version may surprise you if you’ve been familiar with only the sanitized Disney interpretation. This beloved fairy tale is a fascinating elaboration on the dangers of the mother wound that are felt but rarely articulated—right down to the jealousy a mother may feel over her daughter’s youth and beauty (notably, things that give a woman value and power in a patriarchal society). Snow White’s embodiment of what the stepmother was losing with age served as a brutal reminder to the queen that her time for influence, esteem, and security was coming to an end.

But it’s not just age and physical attractiveness that can elicit a mother’s unwanted feelings of envy. Many women find themselves unwittingly jealous of the lifestyles, career opportunities, reproductive choice, education, egalitarian marriages, inner healing, or other successes of their adult daughters. Under the cruel umbrella of patriarchy, advancements for modern women can trigger feelings of pain, injustice, and grief in members of the previous generation, who had fewer options and rights. And yet most of us are not conscious enough to make sense of those feelings. We are just trying to survive here.

That’s why, over two hundred years after the tale was written, the story of Snow White still hits a nerve. That’s why fairy tales are a true art form. The mother wound’s prominence in the story of Snow White is far from an isolated case: unconscious wrestling with the mother figure is one of the most consistent themes in the catalog of fairy tales. Think about it: Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel. Mothers in fairy tales are almost guaranteed to be either dead or absent. You’ll be hard-pressed to find an exception. And in the void they leave, danger emerges—usually in the form of a wicked stepmother or a cunning witch.

This isn’t a coincidence. Fairy tales are composed with the intent of giving shape to a child’s unconscious. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim suggests that it feels safer for children to work out complicated feelings and urges about and against their mothers in a secondary way—with a buffer, if you will. Instead of naming faults or critiques of the most important figure in their life, children can wrestle through those things in the name of a stepmother or a witch.

As children, we are no fools: we know we need our mothers for survival. But we are also attuned to the cultural ideal of upholding the myth of the perfect mother at all costs. Children intuit that it is unwise to criticize the one person who is hailed for sacrificing herself for you; who is put on a social pedestal as ever gentle, kind, nurturing, and attentive; who is assumed to be an icon of maternal care.

We feel this as adults, too. Women who have painful relationships with their mothers are often shamed or labeled ungrateful for expressing them. As a culture, we are slow to make room for a maternal narrative that is anything but comfortable, for doing so would force questions about the cost of patriarchy and thereby threaten the very foundation of our society. So instead we silence those who try to tell the truth.

But back to the fairy tale, for there is another layer of wisdom in developing a children’s story around the absence of a mother: it requires that the young girl be centered instead. It is up to her to survive, to find protection, to outwit the enemy. The story becomes hers.

And while part of her would prefer to be shepherded by a nurturing and protective mother, another part of her is fascinated by the prospect of being the central woman in the narrative. She is curious about her own power. She begins learning to trust her intuition, explore possibilities, and chart her own course.

But, fairy tales teach us, first she must let herself feel afraid.

The journey of learning to self-mother is an uncomfortable one; one that demands time spent in a proverbial wilderness, often an engagement with previously avoided grief, and perhaps even dying a metaphorical death. Its a heroine’s journey; not a “princess lite.”

And so on this Mother’s Day, I honor the women who have found the courage to make the pilgrimage to self-motherhood. Whatever you have faced, whatever your experience of being mothered has been — perhaps wonderful, perhaps terrible, perhaps a mix of both — you have braved the wilderness and befriended the darkness, you have become the active character of your own tale, you have declared yourself worthy of nurture and protection.

You won’t let yourself down.

Happy Mother’s Day to you.

*Note: most of this post is an excerpt from my book, The Mystics Would Like a Word.