Kissing the Hag by Emma Restall Orr

Author:Emma Restall Orr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780999708
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2008-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

MOTHER AS SANCTUARY AND CARING

Mother is the facet of woman that seems the most obvious.

Indeed, in many ways it is in her very nature to be obvious. She lives in the daylight that balances the whore’s night. She appears to be approachable and amenable, acceptable. Lovingly, she cares, nurturing the beauty in all things. Just as she holds the newborn infant, so does she hold our own nascent creativity, providing safe space for our first words, our first steps, our first colours tentatively painted in the light. She nourishes us and all that we long to have acknowledged, recognising the tender aspirations before they are affirmed: the part of our self expression that so aches to be accepted. Even when she is firm, she is gentle with our innocence and our vulnerability. She holds our hand, compassionately guiding us into play.

It is more than a physical gesture. Intuitively, we can sense when the mother is at the fore of a woman’s soul. Our reaction is instinctive, revealing our own experience of mother energy. It can evoke in us a sense of sweet relief, or it can provoke real fear, for what she gives is very specific.

The mother offers her sanctuary for another to use. It’s a unique gift: setting aside her own creativity, she devotes her cauldron of creativity to someone else’s venture. Deriving her strength and pleasure from the holding, caring and nurturing required, this extraordinary, very ordinary behaviour is what defines her as mother.

As a parent, such apparently selfless caring may come naturally. Most often, a woman finds the mother within her invoked as a response to the presence of that primal force of creativity; it can take a while, but it comes. A foetus grows into a baby held within that physical manifestation of the sacred cauldron, the womb, and when the infant emerges, it is the mother within that continues to hold that child within her nemeton, bathing it in the vibrant energy of her spirit, suckling body and soul.

Pondering potential pregnancy, we might imagine, consciously or subconsciously, that having a baby is in some way a product of our own creativity, but it doesn’t take long to realise such a notion is delusion. Even in the first months after conception, throwing up and exhausted, our bodies know that what is growing inside us is alien. At some point, usually just into the second trimester, it is as if there is a truce, an holistic acceptance that we are in fact not the artist. We are the carer, the nurse, cook, cleaner, teacher. We are the home maker: the one who offers that safe space in which another human being can grow.

It isn’t only her own children that the mother holds. She offers her sanctuary to anyone who might need a protective and nurturing environment, whether that be a friend, a colleague or a partner. They may need it for healing, for a moment’s dissolution into tears, a place to find confidence and affirmation or courage; there she enfolds them in warmth, giving absolutely the certainty of her embrace.

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