Becoming a mother: psychological initiation experience
“It’s hard to get through”
Give a hungry man a rod — not a fish!
Proverb
I received an email from Marina who was my client for three years:
— Rimma, I’m pregnant! I’m so grateful to you every day of my life!
I rejoiced when I read this: yay-yay-yay! At last! I knew it would happen! But then I remembered that Marina left her husband two weeks ago. I tapped on the keyboard excitedly:
— Marina, but who is the father? — and then I remembered I had forgotten to congratulate her, I wrote hurriedly: — I’m so happy for you anyway, congratulations!
— Thanks. It’s my husband. I try to keep it a secret. I had stopped myself from writing to you three times, but then I did it anyway.
Of course one wants to share their joy. I also feel tempted to boast that I was part of this miracle. My bad, I know this is not the right thing to do. We, psychotherapists, create conditions so that the client could increase the level of their consciousness, but nothing is guaranteed. It’s their work, their choice, their life, not ours. However, when my clients have breakthroughs like this — this is my reward for the contribution I made. I rejoice together with Marina and I recall what happened three years ago.
It was the first day of personal-growth workshop. Participants introduce themselves and told whatever they thought fit about themselves to the group. Marina was thirty-four, styled, red-headed, she told about her achievements and then she stopped abruptly when she came to the issue of being a mom, her face turned red. Her husband and her had been married for more than ten years, but couldn’t have a baby. To my question: “What stands in the way?” Marina snaped at me with her brown eyes wide open:
— Why? Should I go into medical stuff?!
I’m not surprised by this kind of reaction, it’s rather typical. Our people go in therapy when all traditional ways of solving the problem didn’t work. They wasted a lot of their time, felt a lot of pain and suffered a lot, spent a lot of money. My question takes them back to square one where they started, so it is viewed as being arrogant and they feel irritated and even angry.
Difference between patient and client
People are so dependent on doctors, medical research, vaccines, and their faith in pharmaceuticals; and so afraid to take responsibility for their own lives.
Tatyana Demidova
Why do I think the medical approach doesn’t always work? For starters, when dealing with doctors, a woman is called a patient. The word patient comes from Latin (patiens — one who has to be patient, to suffer) meaning a person undergoing medical observation or some kind of treatment because of some disease. Apart from the emotional component (suffering) the word patient has another one, and this is a person being passive, treated like an object. This way a person is supposed to wait while someone does something to change the situation.
Psychologists prefer calling the people they work with clients, not patients. In Ancient Rome a client (comes from Latin cliens, pl. clients) was a free citizen protected by their patron. Client is a general word for a person using some kind of service.
People have been taught by our mass-culture that someone will do something for their wellbeing. They expect that someone will solve their problems, give advice, sympathize with them, write a prescription or judge their offenders. However, if we agree that a person subconsciously created the situation they are in, there should be other ways to help them deal with the consequences of this situation. What would be helpful is activating their internal resources, so that they could deal with the situation all by themselves. This means giving them a rod, not a fish — that’s the way they can become mature, independent and self-sufficient.
When I ask my client a question on what the doctors said, I would like to hear her version of the story, so that I understand how she interacts with people. There is one and the same strategy underlying her interactions with people and interactions with her own body. If this strategy is not efficient, she could change it, and then — and only then — do both her interactions with people and her symptoms change.
“Don’t see any obstacles”
Take responsibility for the things that are coming to you from fate. You can find the principle and learn something, and you can do this in every aspect of your life.
Ruediger Dahlke
I explained this to Marina and the rest of the group as well as I could, and she agreed to investigate her symptom. I asked her to tell about it in her own words, not medical terms, or — still better — show. Marina told that an egg won’t come out of the ovary, that is why it cannot be fertilized and go down to the uterus. Marina asked all members of the group to stand in a circle representing an ovary, and she was an egg inside this circle. She easily broke through latched hands of the group members and came out. Then I asked her to show the rest. She just “jumped” to the uterus. I was surprised at how that was even possible. Then she remembered that she had to go through the tube first, so she arranged the people and went through. She took some group members to make a uterus, chose a midwife and “was born”. Nothing about that was difficult. I was surprised and told her:
— I don’t see any reasons why you cannot get pregnant. Look for yourself: the egg came out of the ovary, no problem after this either…
— Well, yes…
— Let’s play this again, what if we missed something?
We played the scene again — no problems this time either. Then I asked her to choose a stand-in for herself and watch the scene from outside. Marina, one hand on her hip and the other touching her chin, frowned at the scene as her stand-in broke through the vicious circle.
— Marina, what part of your life does this scene remind you of?
She pondered a while and then answered:
— This reminds me of my relationships with my mom. She overprotects me. It is difficult for me to get through my mother’s restrictions.
— Chose someone to play the role of your mother and tell her this.
We played a scene where Marina talks to her mother that she feels fear and anger, when she controls her grownup daughter, but her feelings weren’t expressed as eagerly as one might have expected. Obviously, this wasn’t anger. To intensify her feelings I offered to play a fantasy scene and chose someone to play the role of her own child. This was just it: her eyes watered immediately. Marina felt overwhelming bitterness when she projected her relationships with her mother to her future relationships with her unborn child. Marina said that the baby was a girl, so both scenes — her dialogue with her mother and with her daughter were the same.
Without even realizing it, the first thing Marina told her daughter that she would take care and protect her, so that she wouldn’t get hurt. The group laughed at this — it was amazing how the mother’s pattern of behavior that made Marina suffer was precisely mirrored in her relationships with her daughter, I suggested exchanging roles. When Marina felt like a little girl overprotected by her mother, she felt like protesting and rebelling: “I don’t want this!” — “And what do you want?” — “I just want to be loved!”
Marina barely moved when she was watching stands-in playing this same scene from outside. I asked her if she wanted to change something in the scene. She answered that she wanted mother and daughter to give each other a hug. Stands-in were relieved to do so, later they said that this was exactly what they wanted to do themselves.
— And now try on the roles of the mother and of the baby and experience how close they are.
At the end of the session Marina took all the roles off the group members. When she came back the next day, she shared a story. She was staying at some friends of hers who had a two-year-old daughter. Once, when the girl fell down, Marias startled so abruptly that she actually scared the girl whose parents were more relaxed about her falling down. So the girl avoided Marina. However, when Marina stayed at her friends after our psychodrama session, the girl suddenly changed her attitude towards her: she sat in her lap for the whole evening playing with her. I joked about it:
— See, if you can tempt other people’s children into coming to you now, one day you will “tempt” your own baby into coming to you!
“It’s hard to get through”: commentary
— Hi, mom, I’m coming home. Should I buy anything?
— Yes, buy your own apartment and move the hell away from my house!
Internet meme
So, what happened during marina’s session? I believe that subconsciously a person interacts both with people and inanimate things according to a pattern. This means that if Marina’s mother controlled her daughter, Marina learned that this was the way to interact with people, this is why she controls her close ones. And she does the same to her own body. If we take her phrase “An egg won’t come out of the ovary”, and replace the word egg with Marina’s name, we’ll get that Marina herself won’t come out of the boundaries once set by her mother.
Now, when the reason the interaction fails is clear, it’s time to do the hard thing — to change one’s behavior. In Marina’s case it is necessary for her to grow up, and cross the boundaries, cross the metaphorical threshold, and let her future children cross the threshold as well. There are several such “thresholds” in our lives: egg comes out of the ovary, embryo comes out of the uterus, child comes out of their parents’ care and out of their home, soul comes out of the body… These are the great transitions, and it is really difficult and scary to go beyond into the unknown. We will get back to that.
“It is hard to get through”: post scriptum
The disease represents your unfulfilled longing. So, above all else, use your illness to set yourself free to do what you have always wanted to do.
Barbara Ann Brennan
We had this session when Marina was thirty four. Now she is thirty-seven, and many things changed over the years. When I wrote this down it’s was just as if I knew that I would need these notes for this book. Now it’s funny to read the words about crossing the threshold. Step by step Marina came to be independent. A year ago she made her own workshop for participants of a psychotherapy retreat and when she came back she started her own business — her beloved brainchild.
Finally, her third bold step was to question her own marriage that lasted more than ten years, but still had not resulted in having children. Marina decided to leave — she rented an apartment and moved away from her husband — literary crossed the threshold! She said she wanted to live alone for a while and try to understand who she was, what it was that she wanted, what she could do. She found the apartment for just a penny after one phone call — some friends of hers were going away for a long period of time and asked her to watch over their two-bedroom fully furnished place. All of it was very easy to do. It is in the quiet emptiness of her friends’ apartment that she understood that she wanted to live with her husband and with her husband only. She chose him unconsciously back then, but now she knew: he was the one she chose all by herself.
One week after she came back to her husband, she found out she was six weeks pregnant. It seems like the decision to be independent was already there, so, when it happened, the woman was able to be fully creative.
When the first emotions went away, I asked her a question:
— So, now what?
— What do you mean “what” — I came back. I understood that people do to me exactly what I was doing to people. I did not value my husband, the efforts he made trying to keep our relationships together. When I moved, we talked for two hours on the phone per day. When I realized I did not value him, I cried all day, and then all this happened… It’s amazing how things turned out, I’m shocked both with what happened and with myself.
— Does your husband know?
— Of course! He COULDN’T be happier, he asks what he should do to take care of me and to support me.
— Marina, I think it’s great!
— Rimma, it’s a MIRACLE, I cry when I think about it. I tried like 154 times and nothing. And now it happened just like this, it’s wonderful! My business, my pregnancy! I wanted to share this news with you. I thought you will be happy too.
— I am! But I don’t agree that it all happened just like that. You made it happened, you pushed your limits — you changed the way you think!!!
— I believe I should change it more in the future, but this is the whole other story. Thank you for helping me.
By the way, try and guess the sex of the baby Marina is expecting. Of course it’s a girl!
Infertility reasons: psychological and medical points of view
The obstetricians say that menstruation is the weeping of a disappointed uterus.
Eric Bern
As mentioned above, psychologists and health professionals view the reasons for infertility differently. Health professionals imply a more materialistic approach approaching conception as a result of biochemical factors and seeing uterus as a lab with good conditions for the fetus to live in. They take childbearing under control (and preferably, the conception as well) as soon as possible to prevent any malfunctions in baby-making process.
Those malfunctions are accounted and pigeonholed just as well. Medically speaking, there are seven physiological reasons why women could be infertile: blockage in or lack of both fallopian tubes, adhesion process in the pelvis, endocrine disorders, pathology or lack of uterus, endometriosis, antibodies to sperm, chromosomal abnormality. This is the text I took from Wikipedia shortened by the factor of one hundred.
However, I copied the eighth reason carefully: “Psychological reasons for infertility could include both conscious and subconscious wish not to have a baby. Sometimes it’s fear of pregnancy and giving birth, sometimes it’s the man the woman does not want to see as the father of her children, sometimes it’s resistance to bodily changes pregnancy could lead to, etc.” I’m glad that they do not discount the eighth — psychological — reason, although they make it sound overly simplistic and thus nonessential. However, if there was no this psychological component in creating new live, women could long be relieved of pregnancy and its side-effects and replaced by mechanical uteruses.
I had a lot of thoughts in this regard that strived to be written down for a long time. I noticed that even though health professionals are aware of psychological reasons for infertility, generally they do not account for them, still treating it in medical and not psychological ways. For instance, even if a woman is healthy, but does not get pregnant within a year or two, health professionals prescribe pharmacological treatment or a surgery. It is not entirely fair, because they take the bread out of our mouths. I’m not offended, however, because women who have some of the seven reasons mentioned above do get pregnant and do give birth after psychological sessions. And sometimes even after huge medical interventions, which I would personally put as a whole separate reason for infertility: medical control on its own might make conception and childbearing problematic.
This same Marina I mentioned above is a great example. When she came to one of the groups twenty weeks pregnant, the members of the group were excited to hear her story, Marina told her “medical history” in her own words:
— I always had troubles with my periods. Ever since I was nineteen I took hormones to keep them going. However, as soon as I started my own business it magically came about all on its own!
I smiled as I was listening to Marina. This is so obvious that now Marina is the mistress of her own business and her own life. She does not work for an employee as she used to, she creates according to her life task.
Speaking about the hormones, to be honest I’m really concerned about hormonal therapy. The word “hormone” itself kind of sounds like the word “harmony”. I know that etymologically they are different, however, the right hemisphere of our brain does not think logically, it uses images and associations: so, hormones regulate certain processes in different organs of our body to sustain the homeostasis, i.e. harmony. When a woman stops counting on her own system in sustaining homeostasis and turns to external ways to sustain the homeostasis, she gives up her responsibility for her own harmony and becomes dependable. I believe that the healing process should be about taking back the responsibility for one’s own body and environment. Organizing her own business was for Marina her way of sustaining homeostasis — it was her brainchild causing her a number of feelings, both negative (anxiety, fear, anger, sadness) and positive (joy, pride, believing in herself).
When Marina came to my psychological retreat this summer, her periods stopped again. She was shocked, but it did not occur to her that this could be pregnancy. The group was amazed at this:
— But why? This is so natural: no periods, you go buy a pregnancy test!
— Well, yeah… It is natural for you. When I don’t get my period for me this means my hormones are failing me yet again, and this means hospitals, doctors, yet again. I cannot tell you how frustrated I was. I tried everything for the 14 years! I even had laparoscopic ovarian surgery, but it didn’t do me much good.
— Having perfectly healthy ovaries cut?
— They say, it helps some women to get pregnant.
I have to say I am suspicious about messing with nature’s way with the help of surgery as well as about hormonal therapy. Today’s medicine enabled people to live dozens of years longer and surgeries saved many, let’s be thankful for that. However, in Marina’s case it was not live-or-die situation. How strongly a woman must want to have a baby to go into surgery with anesthesia which, if successful, will give a chance to have a baby, if unsuccessful, however, will severely damage her health!
Here is the list of side effects for laparoscopic ovarian wedge resection (and any other surgery for that matter): anesthesia side effects; internal injuries due to trocars being inserted; blood vessel injuries; influence of gas; complications due to infections; hematoma and seroma; transitory fever; pelvic adhesions; incisional hernia.
Still, women just go for it. On the one hand, their belief in traditional methods is so strong they refuse acknowledging the damaging consequences and ineffectiveness, and do not look for other ways to overcome the issue. On the other hand, women do not believe in themselves, do not believe that getting their mind in order is a reliable and effective way to do this! Sometimes women spend years trying this and that until they finally find what works.
Marina wrote to me, among other things: “I remembered your word during the session ‘I don’t see why you cannot get pregnant’. That’s because the problem was in my head. I clung for those words when trying to get through!”
Women’s bodies, women’s wisdom
We learn to see our female bodies as sacred vessels for the journey of our souls, our health improves on all levels.
Christiane Northrup
Woman’s body is wise in its own way and it acts in spite of any beliefs or conscious control. Its wisdom consists in listening to its nature and do as it says. Here are the views of midwifery and gynecology professionals who adopted holistic approach to childbirth.
Harry van der Zee cites Chamberlain and draws a conclusion that pregnancy and birth are controlled by the unborn child. It is he who produces hormones that change mother’s body. He takes care of keeping the pregnancy, defines how long it will be, decides on the time to start labor and signals to start it with the help of hormones.
Robert Mendelsohn, US health professional, the author of the controversial Confessions of a Medical Heretic points out that when many a woman come to hospital their otherwise active contractions become weak and cease altogether. According to him, even if they had to break the speed limit to reach the hospital, because contractions were strong and frequent, the contractions slow down and even cease as soon as the woman steps into the hospital. This reaction is so common they have a name for it — powerless labor. Those who studied the question think its main reason is fear.
I’m not surprised, because i also gave birth in this medical system and I felt like a victim of this heartless and callous medical machine. I guess it is not by chance that I chose psychology, because for me it was a painless, human, and, mainly, effective way of helping myself and others. Instead of invasive surgical procedures, non-medical psychotherapy encourages us to study nature’s ways, understand it, see what this or that symptom is to say to us. Infertility does not happen for no reason — it is always a state of mind. And the problem with medical interventions is that this is the way to devalue the discrepancy between a symptom and a person’s inner state.
Medical professionals refer to 17—20% of women who do have babies as a result of medical interventions. I agree that we can force a woman to give birth as a result of hormonal therapy, then what? We are not able tell what would be psychological consequences of such birth yet. However, we can guess that these women will still have to match their external and external state. The success of each intervention depends on how it is taken from the point of view of the soul.
Milton Erikson tells a story of his sister who desperately tried to get pregnant for thirteen years. She nursed newborns who lost their parents until someone adopted them. At last, she asked her brother whom she did not take seriously as a professional for advice. And his advice was: “You have been to get pregnant for a long time. It doesn’t work for you. Once you adopt a child and feel that he/she is all yours, belongs to you in some special way, I mean physically, spiritually — I don’t know how to express it — you will get pregnant in three months”. She followed her brother’s advice and adopted a child in March and got pregnant in June. She gave birth to several children after that. This story is a perfect example of what was said above. Psychotherapists understand the symbolic meaning of these actions.
Something from the outside should be literary taken in by the body. Childbirth is a lifelong act of taking in and letting go. I call these kind of act transitions or initiations.
Childbirth as initiation
If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Initiations (lat. initiato — sacrament) are rituals that come along and consolidate changes in status as well as the transitions from one state to another. Psychologically speaking, initiation happens when a person lets go of his habit of living unconsciously and finds a way of living consciously.
Initiation is not about knowledge, it’s about mystery. Initiation ritual is always a “mysteria”, a “sacrament”. By the end of its rituals neophyte’s existence changes drastically, he becomes a part of both human society and the world of spiritual, sacred.
There are many initiations-transitions during people’s lives, both small and big — from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to youth, from youth to maturity, from maturity to senility.
As for female initiations, the first one comes when a girl has her first period and, thus, enters childbearing age, which creates many problems for her parents. What is the problem? The problem is that she has a mature body and a childish mind, that’s why the girl becomes prey to adult morally bankrupt men.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the author of women’s “Bible” Women Who Run With The Wolves says that when she works with older teenage girls who are convinced that the world is good if they only work it right, compares herself with an old gray-haired dog: “I want to put my paws over my eyes and groan, for I see what they do not see, and I know, especially if they’re willful and feisty, that they’re going to insist on becoming involved with the predator at least once before they are shocked awake. At the beginning of our lives our feminine viewpoint is very naive, meaning that emotional understanding of the covert is very faint. But this is where we all begin as females. We are naive and we talk ourselves into some very confusing situations. To be uninitiated in the ways of these matters means that we are in a time of our life when we are vulnerable to seeing only the overt”.
However, there is no way one could become conscious and grown-up except to have one’s own experience and make mistakes. The ability to use one’s woman power and chose suitable partners will reward all the hardships of the way.
Another important female initiation is making a union with a man, which opens up new horizons for her. At first this relationship is immature, and the woman is forced to live as if two lives — inner hidden life and outer apparent life. This is very similar to the life of Tsarevna The Frog from Russian fairy-tale who is forced to appear in the form of a frog by day, and shed her frog skin by night to become Vasilisa the Beautiful who could do magic: bake bread, weave carpets and mesmerize by her perfection. It takes power and courage to be true to oneself whenever and wherever possible. To make this happen your male partner should not be ashamed to reveal you to others and go to get you on a magic steed far-far away to defeat Koschei The Deathless himself. In the fairy tale this man is Ivan Tsarevich, but psychologically speaking, it is not about a man, it is about animus archetype. To put it simply, from the very beginning of her life a woman should accept her masculine side — bravery, courage, vigor, strength, self-sufficiency and independence of authorities to become whole.
Childbirth is the third big initiation for a woman. It means discovering her creative power to make, produce, and I don’t mean just literally, but also figuratively. Everything we make: things, ideas, projects, books, children, even ourselves, our life-story are products of our creativity. If we can’t find our purpose in life at this point, we risk becoming infertile, because for our body this means betraying oneself. Infertility is a message that a woman lost her way in life, lost her purpose, cannot hear the voice of her soul.
Finally, the third big initiation is going from childbearing age to late maturity. Milton Erickson said that with the first period a girl becomes a mother — it’s joy; with the last period she becomes a grandmother — it’s happiness. Now the goal is to cultivate powerful qualities valued by people in the young generation. Now she is the person who initiates others, she has the power to punish and pardon depending on whether they succeed or not. In fairy-tales such a person is the one who gives the gifts — Old Mother Frost, Baba Yaga — they reward the hero and punish the anti-hero. In real life this is a wise mentor who feels “like an old grey dog” when looking at cocky young people. The main challenge of this stage for a woman is to leave the territory where she felt valued, respected and in demand by our unconscious society when she was young.
Unfortunately, we as a culture are not any more mature and conscious than teenages. Carl Young noted in despair that for the most part our old people try to compete with the young. In the United States it is almost an ideal for the father to be the brother of his sons, and for the mother if possible to be the younger sister of her daughter. Clinging to one’s youth as well as an adolescent clings to his childhood could become the main issue at this stage. This means a person is unable to leave the previous stage. The aging Queen from Pushkin’s fairy-tale of The Dead Princess And Seven Knights asked her magic mirror if she was the prettiest woman in the kingdom jealousy comparing herself to her step-daughter. And this is the question every woman asks herself when the time for this initiation comes.
Women experience each transition as internal and external transformation. Internal transformation is a near-death experience when old non-adaptive patterns of behaviormust die-away to give place to new ones. This “destruction-transformation-reconstruction” cycle causes suffering, pain, a range of negative feelings, nightmares on the subject of death. Externally these transitions were accompanied by different cultural rituals. Finally, as a result of each initiations a person become more and more conscious.
Initiation in fairy-tales
Fairytales teach us so many great things: don’t take apples from strangers, best men look like beasts, and a girl needs to sleep around to find her true love.
Internet meme
Fairy-tales reflect at least two thousand years of initiations experience. However, it is important to keep in mind that fairy-tales were not made to entertain, their true purpose was to pass on important philosophical, spiritual and psychological notions in such a form that even a baby could get it. For example, the most common fairy-tales tell a story of transition from childhood to adulthood. It is at this stage that a person causes many problems to society. This is why the society made special rituals for them to go through the crisis and become independent, i.e. stop being a burden on others.
Sometimes it happens, sometimes it does not. In fairy-tales hero and false-heroes show examples of successful and unsuccessful initiations. For example, in Russian fairy-tale Old Father Frost there are both a hero — the step-daughter, and a false-hero — her step-sister. The step-mother forces her step-daughter out of the house to the winter forest where she would die, and she sits in the snow under a tree waiting for anything to happen.
This is typical for fairy-tale heroes — go somewhere unknown, bring something unknown. Psychologically speaking, a person should experience adult life to become self-confident and self-sufficient as a result. They blindly move into the unknown and the only thing they can rely upon is believing in miracles. Eric Erikson brilliantly defined the uncertainty of initiation process when he said that, just like a trapeze artist, a young man should in one powerful move let go of his childhood, jump and seize his maturity. He should make all this in a short period of time, while counting on those of whom he should let go of, and on those who are to catch him on the other side. This way E. Ericson states that this transition is both unreal, impossible and necessary.
When Old Father Frost meets half-frozen girl in the midst of winter forest, he asks her: “Are you warm enough, beautiful?” — the step-daughter says the only right thing to say: “I am warm, Father”. Although, trivially speaking, she tells a lie, still her answer is correct. It is correct, because in this way she says she agrees to go through with the challenge. Mind you, that she asks for no guarantees in return, she agrees with either outcome, otherwise it wouldn’t have been a challenge. This is what we call a near-death experience, and this kind of experience is necessary to be initiated. Old Father Frost rewards the girl for this by giving her rich dowry, as well as a decent fiancé. When she returns home, her step-mother feels disgraced and jealous that her own daughter did not receive any gifts from Old Father Frost.
Old Farther Frost plays a role of gift-giver in this fairy-tale. Baba Yaga, Old Mother Frost are also gift-givers from other fairy-tales. There was a time when this function was performed by shamans, the elderly of the a tribe, witch-men. Nowadays it is not defined, but it was, is and will be there as long as the mankind exists. Presently, this role was adopted by non-medical psychotherapists who work to “bring to order” the minds of their clients. As mentioned above, cultivating humane values among the youth is the main task of the older generation, one of these values being psychological separation of grown-up children from their parents and their ability to live their own lives.
Old Farther Frost fairy-tale does not end with the initiation of the heroine. It shows yet another pattern of behavior inherent in people, not a few people for that matter. Those characters who demonstrate non-adaptive strategies of behavior are usually called false-heroes. In this fairytale it is the step-mother’s own daughter who follows her step-sister. This is already wrong as it is, because going by well-trodden road is not the same as going to terra incognita. But the girl makes another mistake — she mistreats Old Farther Frost by demanding to give her a fiancé and dowry. The forthcoming punishment is that she dies in one version of the fairy-tale, and in the other she goes back disgraced and she stays unnoticed by potential suitors, because she is still a girl, not a grown-up woman.
All grown-ups were once children, so we all know this and other similar fairy-tales, so we all have both ways — right and wrong — imprinted in our minds. However, it does not guarantee that we chose to be heroes when it comes to making existential choices. When it comes to motherhood initiation we are scared to death, because even today, despite all medical advances, there is a risk of dying in labor. And if there is a risk of death, there are feeling accompanying the near-death experience: fear, panic, frustration, anger towards the “guilty”, bitterness, self-pity, desperation. We do not really have much choice, it’s either be scared and do it, or be scared and not to do it. In the first case we are heroes, in the second one we are false-heroes.
