Motherhood by Lisa Marchiano

Author:Lisa Marchiano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True
Published: 2021-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

The tale begins with a childless royal couple. The ruling principle is a sterile one, from which no new life can come. The twins in the story are foreshadowed and doubled by the stranger lassie and her beggar friend. Although the stranger lassie plays with a golden apple—a symbol, perhaps, of fertility, immortality, or wholeness—there is no change to the status quo until the beggar girl enters the tale, and the two girls toss the apple between them.

COMMITMENT TO GROWTH

Doubling in fairy tales or dreams can refer to something that is getting closer to conscious integration. In this story, there are two sets of twin girls. The queen in the tale indeed seems to be struggling mightily with bringing something to fruition. She adopts the “stranger lassie” so that she can have the experience of motherhood, and when she hears that the beggar woman can help her become pregnant, she overcomes the dictates of propriety to speak with her.

I have seen this unswerving commitment and resultant willingness to overstep collective conventions with patients or friends who have difficulty conceiving, and in response, become totally committed to doing whatever it takes to become a mother. Many women who have trouble getting pregnant will go to heroic lengths—assisted fertility or adoption—to have the desired child. While their single-minded drive sometimes invites judgment on the part of friends or society, they are following an inner injunction with passion and commitment.

So, too, some patients exhibit this same degree of single-minded commitment to their individuation journey. They faithfully record their dreams and come in week after week even though the work is difficult and often painful. The queen wants a child and will defy convention to have one. Already, we see that this queen has the potential to be open to the dark side. She is not so bound up in her queenly persona that she won’t talk to the beggar woman.

As in the West African fairy tale explored in the previous chapter, the adoption of a child precedes a pregnancy. This appears to be the case frequently in actuality, as the following quote from a medical journal points out.

There would seem to be a longstanding belief, bordering on myth, that adoption or even the decision to adopt increases conceptive capacity in infertile women. A number of infertile women state that they intend to adopt in order that they might conceive. The author has even been consulted professionally by a patient who considered that her period of infertility was ended when her pet dog had a litter of puppies!1

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