Free the Anima!
Free the Anima!
Consciousness
In the fall of ’69, I was fully engaged with freshman year at the College of William & Mary, when my mother swooped in for a surprise visit. I considered it an intrusion and did not welcome her graciously. She was primed for warm reunion amid the historic charms of Colonial Williamsburg, while I was ready to get drunk Friday night with dorm friends after a hard week of study. But that wasn’t the reason I wasn’t happy about the visit.
My cold greeting was in keeping with the emotional tone that she, my dad, and I had lived in for most of the last three years, coinciding with the complete collapse of their marriage. College was escape and refuge, and a start toward independence, away from the domestic dysfunction 3,000 miles away in Arizona. I perceived the distance as a buffer between parents who had come to detest one another and me. The house had felt more like armed camp than warm family home. Few words were spoken, and those mostly toward immediate practical considerations, like dinner is ready, it’s time to get going, please take the garbage out, but very little about anything beyond bare status quo. And the tone was usually cold and clipped. Status quo wasn’t good.
I had spent the last year and a half researching prestigious eastern colleges to find one that I could get into and to which my dad, a notorious miser, would willingly pay the cost. William & Mary fit the bill because it was state supported and therefore charged lower out-of-state tuition than private schools. I did get in, and he grudgingly agreed to foot the bill.
My mother must have exerted effort on my behalf in that and wanted to see the place. She had even tried to intervene in the admissions process, as she had some acquaintance, or distant relative, who was retired from the college, upon whom she prevailed to look in on the status of my pending application. I met the guy once after I arrived there but don’t now remember what his relationship to her was or what his position at the college had been. But he did check on it and found they had already admitted me.
I had been so eager to get away that I left for summer school the day after high school graduation. I must still have been in a state of shock from the icy home environment when I arrived. I wanted only to succeed academically, and eventually go on to an Ivy League graduate school, en route to an academic career. I took first-semester botany that summer toward satisfying the science requirement.
This being the summer of ‘69, Woodstock happened while I was there. I put a poster of a fist on my dorm wall that read “The wall people are coming.” I didn’t really know what that meant (if anyone did), but I saw in it a rebellious sort of cool that I could well relate to. Those were the days of “don’t trust anyone over thirty.” I was eighteen.
I only made one friend there that summer, a sophomore in my botany class who played on the college basketball team. He wondered why I was such a hermit, but my entire purpose right then was to get an A in that class. I happily exchanged letters with both parents and thought that was the right and appropriate way of relating to them for the foreseeable future. And then in swoops mom, the white tornado, as I was coming to think of her. My ivy-draped haven had been breached.
After six weeks of botany and little else in this slightly anachronistic milieu, objective achieved, I had had enough of being away and alone and returned a bit homesick to Phoenix, only to find circumstances drastically changed. Without saying a word to me, my parents had separated and begun divorce proceedings. My dad was living in an apartment he owned two doors down the street from the old house; Mom was temporarily living in the house. I stayed with her briefly, then went to work on a survey crew in Payson, Arizona for the rest of the summer. It was then I began to realize how deeply the desert environment resonated in me.
I was offended that my parents hadn’t let me know about their final break-up, but I could see that it was for the best. Both seemed more at ease having some room to breathe, and mom seemed a little less grasping for approval and allegiance.
My dad took a terrible psychological beating through all of this. In his mental world, the man of the house was lord and master, but after twenty years my mother broke from this marital form of subjugation and aggressively put him on the defensive by charting her own independent path forward. That involved emphatically rejecting him and his sexist attitude (which, it must be said, was pretty normal at the time). I piled on him too with passive-aggressive responses to whatever homespun gems came out of him.
Mom’s boss at the Phoenix office of the U.S. Geological Survey encouraged her to learn to fly so she could pilot aerial remote sensing runs on their groundwater hydrology projects, and come hell or high water, she was going to do it. I imagine discussion of this between her and my father going something like this:
Dad: Over my dead body will you take flying lessons!
Mom: Okay, your terms are acceptable, See you later; I’m off to the airport!
In aviation she found her true love and calling. In 1971, she flew the aerial remote sensing runs for the Alaska Pipeline in a T-33 government jet. I’m not as familiar as I wish I were with her many other flying exploits, but she became a significant pioneer of women’s aviation. She never claimed any such credit, but she was very proud of her achievements and in later years delighted in flying her circle of church friends to see her beloved Alaska from the cabin of her Cessna 182.
Her decision should have put an end to the household right then, as any and all harmony had long since turned to discord. But they let it drag on another three years, under the pathetic guise of a stable, happy family. They did it for my sake, but it was a bad call – no one was fooled, and the effect on me was damaging and disorienting.
A silent revolt was underway. For my mother, it was against the closed-minded sexism and denial of her talent and ambition. I applauded it to some degree and was privately dazzled by her moxie and prowess. But subconsciously I also felt my own stable world shaking and crumbling. By having grown up as my father’s little buddy and work mate, I subconsciously felt the revolt as an existential challenge to rightful norms and my own understandings of the world, even though I did not feel at all close or well-disposed toward him at the time. I spent most of my time at home in my room, reading, dreaming, listening to music, and trying to minimize contact with them.
I subconsciously felt my very identity at stake. My mother took me flying with her, let me work the cockpit controls, took me with her out looking for an apartment, and otherwise enriched my experience, and courted my favor. The unspoken message was something like “I’m the future, come with me. Your father’s a loser. You’re right to reject him” There was some appeal in that, but a mysterious defensive presence inside me established a boundary that I couldn’t let her penetrate. I was flying blind (so to speak), but a primal voice from out of my blood told me I couldn’t reject my father without also losing myself in the bargain. Better to be clear of both of them, I thought, and off to Virginia I went.
Around the house, my dad went silent, awaiting release from the untenable situation. Evolving circumstances did not bring him around to appreciating any part of my mother’s perspective. As an elementary school principal, he may already have been starting to flirt with the kindergarten teacher who a few years later would become my beloved stepmother. (She turned out to be completely accepting, at least outwardly, of his attitude and behavior, although he treated her more and more like his chattel property as they aged. It was very hard on her too, but she never showed it or complained, as she was at least as old school as he was.)
It was four or five decades later wben I learned how Jung had so compellingly suggested that the male psyche invariably includes a female component, the anima, which is strongly associated with the mother. That part of my psyche, I inferred, had shaken my adolescent identity, beliefs, and values. I couldn’t reject my father without also rejecting much of what I had come to know and believe. I just wanted to get out of there with what I could salvage, to mature on my own, far away. I was confident I could succeed academically and was exhilarated to be in Williamsburg at this prestigious college.
I felt my mother’s surprise visit as an unwarranted intrusion, drawing me back into the psychological struggle from which I believed I had finally escaped. It felt it like a violation of my independence, and it occurred to me that she might just do this any time. I lacked either the moxie or insight to have a forthright conversation with her about it and instead behaved passive-aggressively toward her then, and to a lesser degree for years afterwards. It took me decades to get comfortable with her visits. In my deep subconscious, the anima was negative, like a powerful witch who crashes your party. As Jung asserts, a negative anima can have a profound effect.
Impressed as I was by my mother’s aerial exploits, I saw her first and foremost just as mom. I had a hard time forgiving her for breaking up the family and causing this adolescent identity crisis. It’s only now that I have been able to lay the resentment and defensive boundary completely down; I was not able to do this during her lifetime, though I did love her and she knew it. We spent many warm times together, at her house in Tempe and elsewhere. She had to do what she did, to become herself and make her formidable contribution to the world. In breaking up the family, she refused to be bound by backward-looking, inhumane values and rejected them emphatically, moving on to live an extraordinary life replete with extraordinary contributions. She became her full-fledged glorious self and wore it proudly, yet always graciously and modestly.
Only now do I see how I perceived the destruction caused by her breaking free as an existential threat that caused me to keep her at a distance. It’s too late now to ask her mortal forgiveness, but I do see this all in a new light. I visualize the dysfunctional parts of my ego, that I worked so hard to protect, crumbling, replaced by more adaptive ones from my feminine-side counselor, the anima. The underlying male identity remains vibrant, improved by conscious awareness of a wise and good anima, like an old warrior queen, aged gracious and mellow. Destruction often paves the way for new growth. Thank you, Mom (and Dr. Jung). You will always be a part of me!
