Motherline Re-Membering
Amber R Balk, Ph.D.
Incarnating into a home devoid of goddess, I was born in 1982 into a fundamentalist Christian family in rural Tennessee to a Native American mother and a father of English, Irish, and Welsh descent. Not only was there was no goddess at home but none in the entire town, except perhaps a brief glimpse of her in the Catholic church, a fact my Pentecostal mother considered repulsive and heretical. I was not allowed to go near the Catholic church, not that I felt particularly called to visit.
Both parents were disconnected in various ways from ancestral roots, but it was more explicit and malicious on my mother’s end. Her dark skin, obsidian eyes, and raven-blue-black hair she regarded as an abomination, a curse. Ever strategic, she chose my father for his pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. Being Native American was taboo in our household. Right up there with the goddess. Right up there with pagan (generally pronounced with a spat). Right up there with The Devil. These things were bad and would earn you a nonstop, one-way ticket to eternity in hell.
“Mama, what should I put on the tests for race? White? Native American? Other?” Truly perplexed, I asked this after my first day of standardized testing in elementary school.
Spontaneous combustion. “YOU ARE WHITE!!!” she growled.
“Oh. Hmmm… [glances at brown arm, looks at mother’s obvious non-whiteness] Okay, but…”
“But nothing.” End of conversation.
Thankfully, I have always been rebellious and headstrong. I knew something was terribly off in her words and actions, but it would take many years to gain understanding. Re-membering would be largely a solo journey. I tried to find answers everywhere but ran into endless locked doors. I did not realize this lack of external answers was habitually turning me to look inward instead. I did not think I had any answers. With time, I realized this inherent self-mistrust was inaccurate and unnecessary. Like internalized racism, internalized disempowerment serves to break one down from the inside out. When the weapon is seeded as a self- activating force through generations of oppression, hatred, and abuse, it is particularly insidious. Challenging to see, much less root out. But it is possible. Dismemberment helps, but re- membering is essential.
The following story is told in bits and pieces of lived experience, woven together through blood, breath, prayer, and ritual. The demanding journey required much: 20+ years of Jungian analysis, countless hours weeping and screaming in Holotropic Breathwork sessions, lots of dreamwork, late night conversations with wonderful friends, notebook after notebook of journaling, a degree in women’s spirituality, another degree in transpersonal psychology, and countless prayers and ceremonies. I share my story with the hope and intention that it will serve others on parallel paths of re-membering.
2006. Dismemberment commences. I cut myself out of my parents’ home. The choice clear, either become a submissive housewife like my mother or shape myself into an accomplished professional. A westward call whispered its beckoning since I was about eight years old. With heaves of daring determination and a willingness to sever ties and leave all my friends and family, I finally arrive in California. Initially, it is an ecstatic self- homecoming. I enter doctoral studies as a perfectionistic, driven 24-year-old. Focused. Ambitious. Competitive. And perhaps narrow-minded, which I translate as hyper-fixated on lofty goals. With certainty, I am confident this is an ideal approach to life. A good girl, I swallow my patriarchal lessons whole.
Dismemberment continues as aspirations and drive are stripped away. In my first year of graduate studies, it creeps in slowly and overtakes me in a disorienting fog that I never saw coming. Nothing works. My research ideas are rejected (however, I am offered the option of pursuing a male professor’s research ideas instead, which I politely decline and then find myself increasingly ostracized and unsupported). My spark fades. Before long, I am struggling for direction, frantically treading water. This quickly develops into a full-blown attempt to keep my head above tumultuous waves, and when this fails, I sink to the bottom, swallowed by the depths of a dark night of the soul. These clichéd metaphors are intended to sidestep the boring and mundane details of daily lackluster life. For a feisty, ambitious young woman under the impression that she is fierce, independent, and on a mission, this layer of dismemberment is probably the most painful. Before this point in my development, I thought I had escaped patriarchal trauma, but it slowly begins to reveal itself through the stripping.
In desperation I sign up for a Lakota-style vision quest in Mt. Shasta, hoping for clarity but also longing for a taste of Native American perspective, so lacking from my Native American life. My ancestors are Choctaw and likely of other southeastern tribal affiliations—we do not really know. I usually identify myself as “a descendant of the southeastern peoples of the Mighty Mississippi River Valley.” The Mississippi is my mother goddess. Lakota culture is quite different, in background, cosmology, and region, but the teachings I receive are much better than the nothing my mother dishes out.
After months of preparation, both physically and spiritually, I spend four days and three nights camped on Mt. Shasta beneath tall pines with little more than prayer ties and courage. On the third day, I am meditating in a pleasantly receptive state of mind. A hummingbird hovers overhead, and ripples of iridescent energy course through my body. I ask questions in my mind and hear immediate responses. After playing around with this newfound entertaining ability, I summon my most important query: “Will I be a good psychologist? I mean, will I make a difference in the world?” Instead of an immediate response, there is a long pause. Wind snakes through the trees. A squirrel barks. I am about to give up waiting when the words come: “You… will be a wonderful mother.” I roll my eyes and huff. This is the last thing I want to hear.
The schism. Where did this disdain for mother originate? I trace it to my first birthday, thanks to the video my father takes that day. My mother had disappeared for days. She returns on my birthday looking pained and exhausted and brandishing a colicky newborn. I am disheveled and confused. In need of reassurance, I desperately reach toward her and attempt to crawl into her lap. I hit an electric fence, unknowingly pushing against a fresh wound, concealed beneath her clothing, a long vertical line spanning her abdomen. Reacting to the intense pain, she pushes me away. Reacting to the intense pain, I push her away. The blueprint of our dynamic is cast, repeated endlessly in the years to come.
I vehemently reject my mother—everything about her. She is weak. Afraid of my father, she timidly caters to his demands. She does not pursue a career but instead labors on housework and recruits my sister and I to do the same (but not my brothers). She watches soap operas and binges potato chips. Preachy and insisting on reading the Bible aloud, she fills the space with yucky feelings that I later understand are shame and guilt, but they are not mine. Terrified of natural childbirth, she has four c-sections. By choice. She finds breastfeeding vulgar and emphasizes that sex is sinful. She has gifts and can see auras, but the topic is especially taboo. She fears being inherently evil, a message conveyed by her father and the church patriarchs of her childhood.
The interesting thing—also off the table for discussion—is that my mother is given away at birth in 1952 and spends her first six months in an orphanage in Oklahoma. The social climate of that time and place is decidedly racist, dominated by white, god- fearing, Christian men. The US government and various religious groups actively try weeding out remaining natives in numerous ways—forced sterilization, assimilation, Christianization, outlawing spiritual practices, banning languages, enforcing boarding schools, and coercing adoption into white families, just to name a few. We do not know the specifics of my mother’s birth, but after years of re-membering, I am certain these circumstances shape what happened. She is adopted into a white Christian household.
Just as I reject my mother, she rejects her mother, who had rejected her at birth.
2008. Vera Cruz. Hugely pregnant, a dream rolls through one night. I know I am in Veracruz (a place I have never visited in the waking world), walking along a coastline. I see something at the water’s edge and run to get a closer look. A beautiful gigantic snake! As I realize this, a big wave comes in, mixing water over my legs and the snake. I try not to panic. The wave recedes as another comes in. I am caught between the two waves, tugged by earthshaking forces pulling in opposite directions.
This dream comes back to me weeks later as I lie strapped to a cross-shaped surgery table. My worst nightmare comes true as I am forced to have an emergency c-section after laboring at home with a midwife for 36 hours without progression. Womb horizontally sliced; my daughter is pulled from my protective body. I have no choice but to surrender. This layer of dismemberment brings immense physical pain, but it serves as an important catalyst. Although I continue to view her fear of vaginal birth as tragic and revealing, it becomes impossible to view my mother as weak for choosing four c-sections. Only a warrior could willingly agree to such a thing.
This realization softens the hardness I harbor towards my mother. We become friends. I wear my daughter against my body for six months, attempting to remedy the amount of time my mother spent orphaned and un-held. My mother is the wave going out, my daughter the incoming wave. I did not know it when I had the dream, but Vera Cruz means True Cross, a significant detail in my process of re-membering. I always disliked the cross symbol in Christianity, but as a universal symbol reflecting the union of opposites and a convergence of the four directions into sacred center, I can resonate and navigate by that. True Cross turns out to be a place of surrender and reckoning, of immanence and transcendence, of paradox meeting and merging. True Cross brings me home to my feminine power as I heal the scars of cuts drawn across multidimensional layers of my being.
Vera Cruz is a goddess who helps me re-member during a time of literal, figurative, and extreme emotional dismemberment. The goddess comes through my fiery motherline warrior spirit. She speaks in dream, in song, in love and aversion, in intuition, and sometimes in poetry. She speaks in my daughter’s fiercely independent voice. She speaks in prayers for my mother, who has now passed. She is the Mighty Mississippi. She is everywhere. She was always there.
My story is one version of reclaiming the feminine power that has been stifled, shoved into nooks and crannies, hidden, denied, feared, violated, and desecrated across the planet and across a long span of time. We are living in an age when such power can be excavated, revived, renewed, and enlivened. I am part of that. My mother and daughter are part of that unfolding, as are you. And when I think of it like that, the fire of warrior women across the ages ignites in my blood. I feel the drumbeat pulsing, and I know the pain and suffering are not in vain. Though the journey at times seems solitary and daunting, we are interconnected. I have deep faith in what is unfolding on a bigger, collective scale. Individual re-membering is a doorway to healing the fractures of patriarchal trauma. We find it in our mothers and daughters. We find it swirling within our sacred places of Vera Cruz.
(To be continued)