myth and rhetoric

She was remembering a mythical time. It was her 25th birthday and she had treated herself to a dance workshop led by an old woman in the mountains. In the circular studio lined with windows looking out onto trees upon trees, they started a series of improvisations. It began to rain and, one by one, people began to dance their way outside onto an outdoor wooden deck. Some of them took off their clothes. She noticed all of this while maintaining her movement in the center of the studio, but slowly found herself standing on the edge of the room by a large wall of glass. She froze there, looking out at the people dancing naked in the rain. She could not move. She was locked with her face pressed against the glass, panting. Everything in her body became suddenly inaccessible to her. After standing there stiff and panicked, for what seemed like years, she noticed a presence moving out of the corner of her eye.

From behind her, a heavy wool blanket was lifted over her head. Instinctively, she sunk to the ground as the blanket draped over her body. She began to cry, urgently and persistently. Then, she began to feel pressure against her head. The blanket was heavy, thick, and scratchy. She began to sweat and drip mucous from her nose. The pressure on the top of her head became stronger and stronger. She felt the urge to push back. Her head and face were slick with sweat, tears, and snot. Slowly, and with great effort, the force against her head began to split in two, and her head slipped out from underneath the wool blanket, encountering two sturdy legs on either side of her neck. She felt a rush of the cold air against her face. The legs pushed against her shoulders now. She struggled to move her shoulders through the opening until her torso was released into the atmosphere. Now, she was stuck with two legs planted on either side of her waist. She looked up and saw the old woman standing above her. She sobbed again.

The old woman asked, Where are you?

She answered between gasps, My bed.

Who is with you?

My mother.

What does your mother to say to you?

Everything is going to be OK.

The old woman continued to push against her legs, and finally her whole body slithered out from underneath the heavy blanket and from the pressure of the old woman’s body against hers. The old woman stood there for a moment watching her, bare and sprawled out on the naked floor, then slowly picked up the blanket and walked away. She rolled out onto the studio floor wet and depleted, the other dancers, having returned from the rain, moved around her. The fear that had caught her at the glass wall dissipated. She began to learn how to crawl, walk, and skip again.

Today, she thinks about this myth, the myth of her re-birth, and she wonders if it ever happened. She knows it happened, but did it mean what it meant? Was she re-born? Suddenly, she is pulled back to a dream she had many years ago that has always haunted her. At the time, she had read somewhere that if you dreamed you were pregnant or giving birth it was because something unconscious was trying to make itself conscious. She had dreamt that she was swimming upstream in a beautiful crystal-clear river with lush forest on either side. There were many people swimming and enjoying the sunshine and the refreshing babbling current. She was naked and holding her newborn child to her chest with one arm as she paddled from the center of the deep river over to the shallow bank. In the shallows, she stood thigh deep in the translucent water and could see the bottom of the river covered with beautiful multi-colored pebbles. She placed her infant down under water and squeezed the child between her legs. Silently, she drowned the newborn with ease and composure, the sun’s heat beaming onto her skin, the ripple of the waves lapping around her pelvis. In the dream she says to herself, It must be done.

This is what she thinks about now when she remembers her rebirth myth. Because, really, if she is honest, she is still standing at the big glass wall looking out at people dancing naked in the rain, locked inside herself. She’s just looking out in a different way. Now, her body is slack and worn. Her forehead is pressed against the cold glass with resignation, arms dangling, palms open, knees lightly shaking.

When she sits with her clients, she holds this truth – there are some things that cannot come to consciousness. Psyche says: It must be done. And so, we drown parts of ourselves. These are dark moments when she wonders if she has grown at all, changed at all. Perhaps it’s all a big joke, this searching for self. Being a therapist feels like digging to the center of the earth with a spoon. She loses faith in everything; the old woman, the wool blanket, being reborn on her very own 25th birthday. She loses faith in her own pregnancy, her potential to become who she is supposed to be. She loses faith in her ability to compassionately hold the lies her clients tell themselves. She may be the biggest liar of them all. This is when she wades into the water like an Amazon woman, stoic, resigned, battle worn, killing parts of her soul.

Then she remembers that when her mother was ill with cancer, she refused to see a therapist or go to any support groups. A therapist herself, her mother was resolute when she said, I don’t ever want to talk about my feelings again. In her last days, her mother sat on the edge of her tall brass bed and asked, Do I need to die?

She responded, I don’t know, Mom. Do you?

Her mother clicked her tongue at her, Tch.

She heard that click from her mother’s lips as, That wasn’t a rhetorical question, stupid.