Yvonne Georgina

For a time, there was an abandoned house down the street from my childhood home. I don’t know why it fell into such disrepair during its lifetime. Someone had neglected it enough that it exuded a pale and haunted quality on an otherwise green, benign cul-de-sac. My nineties-era parents excelled at promoting reasonable safety while encouraging curiosity and never told me to stay away from it, but if they had, I wouldn’t have listened. The possibility that something unspeakable might have happened there, a mystery that only I could uncover, tantalized me.

A particularly beckoning thing about it was the fact that it wasn’t a relic from an earlier time. It wasn’t a spooky old house. It was about the same age as the other one-story, noncommittally ranch-style houses in the neighborhood. In the near past, it once fit in, but was now sick, was now dying, whispering into the quiet suburban scene. Things aren’t what they seem. Pay attention.

Nothing felt so exciting to me.

I explored that house on hot summer afternoons, sweaty and florid, sure that there was something here for me in this place where few fourth-grade girls dared to go. I felt this especially when I brought a classmate along. She would hesitate to enter, or not enter at all, or give me a disconcerted look when I showed her the shattered bedroom window, the extra-large tree roach belly-up in the baby-blue porcelain tub, or the yellowed pages of the paperback scattered over the garage floor.

I went to this house when the sting of not-fitting-in felt like being let in on a secret, that my not-belonging was compensated for by the possibilities made by my solitude. Something like, if I was popular, if I was that kind of person, I wouldn’t be wandering through this house, becoming this kind of person who isn’t scared to wander through abandoned houses. I found it cozy that I might be receiving something from life in exchange for my loneliness.

I never did discover a mystery in that house. Nothing happened. Then one day, some men in a pickup arrived and wrapped the pine trees in the front yard with red tape, and a short time later, the house and the trees were gone. A two-story red brick house arose in its place. Death had come without a remark.

At a loss for abandoned houses, I sought new places for mystery and found them in the neighborhood landscaping. The underside of the overgrown wisteria across the street, the boxwood hedge two doors down that had the feel of a maze (if you really, really wanted it and didn’t mind wasps), and another neglected bush on the other side of the backyard, accessible only by scaling the fence, which felt to me like a very kidly and satisfying way to reach a place where mysteries could be procured and loneliness could be made cozy.

Nothing happened in these plants. School started, and the wisteria lost its leaves. I spent my days in overlit, over-air-conditioned rooms wishing for a place to put my longings. A place that would receive my fascination with death, with the things I couldn’t see and the worlds beyond this one. I developed an aggressive belief in fairies. I watched Twin Peaks with my dad and sister on Thursday nights. I believed in Santa Claus until I was thirteen. My teachers noted my daydreaming on report cards.

I never found the mystery I wanted. Soltitude did not meet its end of the bargain. I did not receive compensation. I learned that a person can be popular and enjoy exploring abandoned houses. They can also be unpopular without an interest in broken windows and dead roaches. They can be cozy without being lonely. I learned that, with time, things do happen, and some of these things will strip loneliness of all comfort, will rip us awake with pain in all its clarity. As it turns out, what comes forward next is the mystery, the mystery that we can survive it.

Marion Woodman wrote that “metaphors heal because they speak to the total person through the imagination, feelings, and mind. For this reason, Jung believed that the contemplation of dream images was the pathway to wholeness." The view here is that if we grip too hard on hurried or concrete interpretations, we may miss the riches that dreams have to offer. However, if we approach with open hands, with patience, the dream images have space to unfold, perhaps even to change alongside the associations. They are nurtured in the fertile ground of a psyche watered by curiosity.

This is all true. Some dreams do unfurl with time. Other dreams are instantly forgotten.

And also: there are dreams that reveal themselves with a thunderbolt.

The world of symbols can send us into a bewildering maze where everything is a stand-in for something else, and where meaning must be sought after through necessary depths. In therapy circles, this undertaking is generally considered a worthy signifier of consciousness. In my own view, the pursuit of this consciousness must be firmly staked to the ground. Dream images can lead us astray. Sometimes the trail of crumbs leads straight into the wolf’s mouth. I know this because it happened to me. I had a dream whose message was literal and urgent, even obvious, but I worked with it as a metaphor, one that justified the choices (I want to say mistakes) I was making at the time. But (lo and behold) I didn’t know that then.

I think it was Jung who said the psyche is like a child trying its best to communicate with the limited resources available to it. What may appear strange and garbled to us in waking life may to the psyche be a clear expression of need, integration, or warning. The psyche is not the surrealist that we think it is. Perhaps it’s more of an impressionist without formal training. The little girl crying in the corner may not be a symbol for lost time or a childhood wound or an orphan archetype. She may be having an emergency right now. Make room for that possibility in dreamwork.

Ram Dass told us that his pain brought him closer to God. I love my pain, he said.

To love pain. To make suffering so meaningful that it transforms into a source of peace, even delight.

When I love my pain, I become real. Both deep pain and true love tell the truth. So when I bring them together, I bring my innermost self, the place where I am most real, into relief against the backdrop of my own defenses and attachments.

My vitality is dependent on my ability to return to the meeting place of love and pain within my own being. And to stay there for a time with my losses. Infertility robbed me of motherhood. Stay there. I miss my grandmother. Stay there. I believed in a friend who betrayed me. Stay there.

If I can learn to welcome this pain, I receive the medicine of reality. I’m free in a way I wouldn’t be if I had become a mother, if my grandmother could have lived forever, if my friend had been kinder. There’s nothing I have to outrun or escape. When I find my way to this place it’s very quiet, and in the hush it becomes clear to me just how deafening fear is. I don’t have to do anything here except “learn to bear the beams of love,” as William Blake wrote long ago. Contained in these beams of love is every moment I’ve lived and every feeling I’ve allowed. All my despair, joy, rage, longing, all of it is illuminated and held by these beams, my whole life a gathering of particles dancing in a warm blade of light.

In a culture that equated womanhood with motherhood, Edith Wharton imagined women who stood outside or openly resisted the script. Lily Bart in The House of Mirth refused the marriages that would have offered her a future as a mother. Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence accepted her exile from the conventional path with dignity. Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country treated motherhood as an obstacle to ambition, and Kate Clephane in The Mother’s Recompense left her daughter behind in order to escape a suffocating marriage. Rather than casting these women as tragic or deviant, Wharton made them complex, desirable, and disruptive.

At the same time, Wharton’s personal writings, especially The Life Apart (her love diary), present us with a countercurrent. A longing to be chosen, desired, and securely loved by a man, to express herself in love and be sustained there, “like other women,” she wrote. Her fiction over and over reflects this tension: the pull toward autonomy alongside the ache for recognition and the sanctuary of an intimate, domestic bond.

Wharton’s autobiography and diary are silent on motherhood. Her archive cannot tell us whether, in the kind of loving and fulfilling marriage she longed for but never found with Teddy Wharton, she might have had children. Without knowing whether Wharton’s childlessness was a choice, we risk reading her silences as statements she never made. The possibility that Wharton’s experience was shaped by circumstances such as infertility or sexual incompatibility matters because it prevents us from treating Wharton, or her heroines, as oversimplified emblems of childfreedom or reducing her feminism to a rejection of motherhood.

Wharton’s life and fiction illuminate the lived spectrum of non-motherhood, from the private grief of involuntary childlessness, which she may have experienced, to the complicated freedom of deliberate refusals of motherhood. Women without children live within the intricacy of that spectrum.

Wharton’s treatment of the subject is radical because it is ambivalent. She breaks with the assumption that childlessness equals failure without reducing women’s desires to a binary. Wharton died a long time ago, but her heroines, and her own heart, still speak with urgency. They remind us that the experience of choosing, refusing, or losing motherhood is profoundly complex, and that defiance, desire, and loss can and do coexist.

Simone Weil wrote that “the beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change.” What happens when love is given to a child without a desire or need for change? This is the love that sees what is beautiful and recognizes it as already whole, and cherishes it for that reason.

I’m thinking about Christ as an image of wholeness. I often walk through the nearby Stations of the Cross garden and stop to leave a flower at the fourteenth and final station. The fourteenth station is the paradox at the heart of the mystery of Christ. Whole because broken. Sacred because human. Wholeness not as perfection, or the absence of fragmentation, but as the mirroring of love without a wish for change—not simply out of a lack of desire for change, but because of a love which cannot wish for anything other than ourselves exactly as we are.

Ann Ulanov wrote that “the Christian doctrine of atonement points to our finding the mystery of our being reflected back to us in the figure of Jesus Christ. He reaches across our broken-apart-being into our counterfeit lives to reestablish us at the core where we find God’s being-at-one with us.” Can psychotherapy do this? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it can show us the way there, even if it cannot, ultimately, see us through to the end.

In his old age Jung said that he knew less and less than ever before. If tolerance for uncertainty is indicative of psychological health, as I believe it is, then perhaps Paul’s words to the Colossians point us in a generative direction: “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” We are hidden, even to ourselves. And in the same moment we are not. Not if we gaze at God as Henry Miller described the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur—“Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of eternity”—and receive the reflection of our own wholeness, hidden in the center of our brokenness.

According to Melanie Klein, our ability to mourn well, to experience grief without becoming captive to depressive and paranoid defenses, without freezing our capacity to feel, depends on the tenor of the inner objects, that cast of characters—primarily the mother—which inhabit our psyches and guide our testing of reality in the midst of loss. So much depends on how we envision the inner smile of the mother object, particularly how we as infants and children took in and formed that smile in response to and alongside of the reality of our external mothers.

Kafka wrote that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” We could take a similar view here and say that the good internal object is the axe for the frozen sea within us.

As a little girl, I developed an image of a web of love covering the whole earth, a web that never stops recreating itself and which invisibly supports everything. And in my own heart, a bottomless well, a spring of love, that could be tapped at any time and would never expire. If only they knew about the bottomless spring of love in their own hearts! (Then they wouldn’t hurt me.) If only they knew about the web of love connecting everything! (Then they would understand what they’re doing wrong.)

We must pay attention to formulations of love that unilaterally embrace the idyllic. When love becomes a defense, it ceases to be love and becomes a weapon we wield in order to prevent pain. Not only can we attribute any hurt we receive from others to their failure to love, most importantly we can remain innocent. We can be the little girls who are only capable of love, who only know love, who are injured because other people don’t know how to love. But the truth is we are all capable of inflicting pain, of betraying love. As Harry Gunthrip put it, we fear to part with our bad internal objects — those people who have hurt us — because as long as they are hurting us, we are still the innocents. We can still hope to be saved.

When we let these objects go, we become our own rescuers. In this surrender, we find our real freedom to love, be loved, and know love.