When I was thirteen, my father introduced me to archetypes. Actually, he started earlier than that, but this is when the heavy training kicked in. (Thirteen is about the age when, developmentally, people start being able to think symbolically and abstractly.) As it turns out, this stuff was my cup o' tea. We spent hours discussing the Jungian archetypes in film (Star Wars, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and American Graffiti, for example), and in Steinbeck, and all over the place.

At the basic level, and we're discussing this in really basic terms here, if one was female, one was the Earth Mother or the White Goddess. (Personally, I wanted to be the Hero or the Wise Old Man, but I digress...) I always got the impression from Dad that the Earth Mother was the way to go.

Well, I'm not her in her most idealized form. (Still simplifying here.) I love my children. I try to be a good mother. I am not the mother incarnate. I am a crappy gardener, house wife, and all other sorts of things. To be blunt, I care more about why Elisha rent his coat in twain than having a perfectly decorated house.

Hopefully I'm not the White Goddess, either. At least not in her idealized, yet simplified, form.

***

I have made a friend with a woman down the hill. I may have spoken of her before. I do like her quite a lot, but it's hard for me to spend time in her home. Things tend to be pretty ... erm ... I dunno. Tense, I guess. She and her husband yell at each other a lot, and pick at each other pretty much all the time. I go because she invites me and seems to really want me to come.

Tonight my friend and her husband, who is my friend, too, were on each other about whose fault it was that they had their third child, and how her birth screwed up their academic and professional careers. And about who was making dinner when.

I don't do well in these sorts of environments. First of all, there's the throwback to my childhood. Secondly, I can actually feel ... I don't know. But I can feel the emotions or something floating around, though this isn't unusual, and it feels like a sucking black hole. It's exhausting. It hurts.

And the woman has a lot of troubles. Most recently the biggest problem is that her mother is dying of cancer, and wants her to come to a town about four hours away for two weeks to hold up the rest of the family and prepare for her death. The woman can give her youngest to her sister to care for during this time, but there's the matter of the two older children, who are both in school. One is nine, one is six. The eldest, the girl, has problems of her own. She's on a lot of medications for behavior modification. I can look at her clever eyes and know there's so much going on that isn't happening with your average young girl. What will she do with her two eldest children during the two weeks she's gone? Her husband will probably be working the graveyard shift at his new job. Someone will have to be with the kids from eleven at night until they leave for school, and so on. Or the kids will need to stay with someone. The mother figures it will be easier to split them up.

And, of course, there I am, and I could take one of them. Even the boy. He's easy. He's a good kid. If he does something wrong I only have to tell him twice...

I told her I couldn't. Maybe if Rice were here with me, but he will be up north, working.

But her son could help me with my kids.

How can I explain that I am not, at this time, emotionally, psychologically, and emotionally capable of doing this? I am exhausted. I slept for about two hours last night; LD isn't having sleeping issues, and has been having them for months now. He'll go down for Rice easily enough, but not me; Mommy is for playing, not sleeping.

How do I explain how hard it can be for me to be at home with my kids, my spirited, wild, full of energy boys, by myself during the week.

How do I explain being an introvert who, right now, needs her space.

I don't want to be selfish. I want to help her. And I know all of this sounds selfish. But I am not capable of taking care of an extra person right now. And I don't care how fine a kid he is, how good -- I have babysat him and he does need taking care of. He is, after all, six. He's not that much older than Avadore, who will be five in a month.

If he were my own it would be different for so many reasons. First of all, we would have grown into each other. And it is different when they're your own child and you have grown into each other, and known each other.

And it's winter. The dark days are hard anyway.

Rice agrees with me -- maybe if he were here, but even then, this isn't a good time for me. I'm low on energy, in so many ways.

I'd mentioned I was going visiting to Winter. He asked how it went, and I told him. He thinks she's crazy for asking. He tells me I shouldn't feel guilty. But it's not guilt I feel. It's real sorrow for not being able to come through and help someone who needs it.

But where would we be if I did say yes?

He would be okay. I would take care of him. If I could keep myself together.

I know I'm not alone in this, but it still troubles me. Some days, once in a great while, when it's dark, and I'm having a hard time with my childhood, and the children are absolutely insane, and I'm exhausted and sore from the daily grind, I have to put myself away for awhile. I have to go hide in my room. Put myself in a time out, as it were. I don't worry about lashing out at the children and beating on them. I control that well. I can thank my mother for that. But sometimes I feel as if I may come apart, as if I could split and dissolve. Not that that would happen, but I've never pushed it. So I go away for half an hour, and come back later. Sometimes it takes forty-five minutes. And sometimes, thankfully, Rice comes home instead.

And what would I do with one more child, all of a sudden. At least one works into it with babies.

I am not the archetypal mother figure. I'm just some lady who wanted some kids, and had a couple she adores. I'm not perfect, I'm not ideal.

And I can only do so much.

And it feels like so much less than so many who were born able. Some women were born mothers.

But as Rice points out, can they write a story? Make gluten-free bread? Dissect an argument? Analyze a religous text? Can they feel within them when something is symbolic of something in a religious text, knowing what it is, and be right, but only know this after they find the one Hebraic scholar in the area after so many other religious scholars have interpreted it incorrectly as something else?

Well, maybe.


I believe my one consolation is that when the idea was approached, that instinctual part of me that always knows said don't do it.

But still, it hurts not to help.