Introduction and Welcome
Britta: Hello folks, and welcome to Transformed by Birth, a podcast about the rite of passage of pregnancy, birth and new parenthood. I'm your host, Britta Bushnell, author, mythologist, childbirth educator and all around deep diver with a side of goofball. I'm so glad you're here.
Today's episode is about coming to know yourself in motherhood. So grab your cup of tea—mine today is a lemongrass ginger—or take us along for a walk as we explore the alchemical transformation that occurs for most women when they become moms.
Before we begin, we start the way we always do, by lighting a candle. If you'd like to join me, please do so or just take a breath as I light mine. I light today's candle as a blessing for all those in the vessel of transformation that is motherhood.
Host's Personal Connection to Storytelling
Britta: I love stories. Sitting on the couch with my head resting on my mom's breast, tucked under her arm, listening to her voice bringing characters to life from the pages of a beloved book of fairy tales is the setting of some of my most cherished childhood memories. I've listened to and read stories for as long as I can remember.
It was over 30 years ago that my mother-in-law gifted me the book Women Who Run with the Wolves and the path of understanding myself through beloved stories opened in front of me. That path now informs the map of my life and work.
So when today's guest Lisa Marchiano's book Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself landed in my inbox along with a request for a back cover blurb, I was instantly entranced. In it, I found the guidebook I wished I'd had 25 years ago while walking the trail of my own motherhood transformation. Since first reading it, Motherhood has become one of my go-to recommendations for new moms. Through storytelling, metaphor and tender unpacking, Motherhood wraps you up in a supportive embrace that holds you as you blossom over and over again into your authentic version of a mother.
Guest Introduction
So who is today's guest? Lisa Marchiano is a certified Jungian analyst and podcaster. She's the author of three books with my publisher Sounds True. Her books are Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself, as well as The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire, and Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams. She's the co-host and creator of the popular depth psychology podcast This Jungian Life, and is on the faculty of the C.G. Jung Institute of Philadelphia.
I couldn't be more pleased to welcome you, Lisa, to the podcast.
Lisa: Thank you so much for having me.
Britta: It's such a joy.
Reading from "Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself"
So I thought, if it isn't too bold of me, I want to read to you your own words and share with our audience one of the paragraphs that isn't even in the introduction. It isn't even a page number yet—it's in your preface. And I found it to be one of those that just captures so much. Here it is:
"Motherhood, with its intense physical and emotional extremes, is a crucible in which we are tested and altered. In the alchemical vessel of motherhood, the heat is turned up high, outdated parts of our personality are melted away and new structures are forged. Motherhood is a dizzying high wire act, a masquerade and a communion with mortality. It is a falling from and finding of grace, a falling in and out of love and heartache by the hour. Motherhood is the ultimate confrontation with yourself. Whatever is there to discover at the bottom of your soul, whether dross or treasure, motherhood will help you find it."
Oh, Lisa, tell me about motherhood as teacher, as alchemical vessel, as opportunity to learn and uncover yourself.
Motherhood as Alchemical Transformation
Lisa: The idea for this book came to me when my own children were very young—I had a two-year-old and an infant, and it was just so hard. There was this one day that was really hard, and I was thinking, "God, everything about this is just so hard." And then I thought, "Yeah, but I'm changing. I'm changing as a result of it." And I thought, "Well, that is an interesting idea."
I was in Jungian analytic training at the time, so I was thinking of it very much in terms of individuation, which is Jung's term for growing toward wholeness. I thought, "Okay, so this is an individuation opportunity." And one of the things that really struck me as I looked for who had written something about this before was that most things you find written about motherhood are about how to be a mother. I was interested in what was happening to me.
This is maybe a little silly, but I am old enough to remember a really memorable advertising campaign for the Peace Corps—"The Peace Corps: the toughest job you'll ever love." It's a great tagline because you don't fall in love with easy things. Easy things don't change you, don't test you, don't shape you, don't demand all of you.
Grief and Loss in Motherhood
Britta: There is the crucible, the vessel of transformation—that remaking of who you are. You don't get to come out the other side of motherhood intact as the person who went in. And sometimes that's hard. You speak in your book about the grief and loss, and I think that's an element that's not talked about enough. There's so much talking about the happiness of being a new parent, but talk to me about grief and loss. What is it that we're grieving?
Lisa: I think it might be very individual, but in general, we're certainly losing our youth. Even if we have kids when we're young, we're no longer carefree once we have kids. Our bodies change. You may be young and fit enough to fit right back into your skinny jeans a few months later, but even if that's the case, your body is never quite the same.
You're losing that sense of unlimited possibility going forward. You've been nailed down in time and space to a particular fate. Once you become a mother, it means there are other things you certainly can't be. It's not that you have a kid and your life is over, but it does mean that there will be things that don't happen as a result of it.
Britta: And there are things that, even if you get back to those skinny jeans or back to a career or academic pursuit or spiritual or creative pursuit, there is a period when that is fallow. It is a field that goes fallow, and that can be surprising for many of us.
Connection to Mortality and Ancestral Time
Lisa: And I do think that idea of confrontation with mortality is there too, because I think you don't really understand how we're connected to the web of time until we have a child, and we can feel our connection with the past stretching back through the ancestors, and we can also imagine it going forward. It's an awe-inspiring thought, but it does make us feel small and remind us that we only have a limited time here.
Chronos and Kairos Time in Parenthood
Britta: You talk about Chronos and Kairos time in the book as being different types of time according to the Greeks, and how those show up in parenthood. Can you talk about those a little bit?
Lisa: Chronos is sort of clock time—it's what we think of as time. Kairos is more of the time of the gods. It's the right moment, but it's also timeless time. When you're parenting, you're so aware of Chronos—"You got to get your shoes on because we got to get in the car because we got to get to daycare so I can make that meeting." There's so much of managing time.
Britta: You don't even realize ahead of time how much the clock is going to become your guide.
Lisa: Before you have kids, you're only managing your own time. If you have to get ready for that meeting, that's just you. But now all of a sudden, you've got to manage these little people who don't understand time.
Britta: They live in a different type of time altogether.
Lisa: They live in Kairos. That's why, if we're lucky enough to not be too rushed, we might share a very special moment when our child notices something—"Look Mommy, look at the moon"—and we look up, and they're just in full presence. They'll notice all kinds of things if you're just out on a walk with them in the park. They'll be entranced by something that you just walk right by. But they're in that kind of timeless time.
We have an impulse, especially if we're in a hurry and there are demands we have to meet as adults, to sort of shoo them along. But if we can take just a minute to drop into Kairos with them, that's a magical moment. That's one of the beautiful things—we do have a different relationship with time once we become a parent.
Understanding Archetypes
Britta: You unpack so much of motherhood through story and symbols and archetypes. How do you describe an archetype to somebody who doesn't understand what we're meaning when we say archetype?
Lisa: It's a psychic universal. It's an elemental pattern that's part of what we're gifted as a result of being human. Archetypes have a tendency to appear in similar forms across culture, but they themselves don't have a particular form.
Jung uses this wonderful metaphor of salt crystals dissolved in water. When salt is in solution, it doesn't have a shape, but it's in there. When it gets crystallized out, if you allow it to evaporate, you'll find salt crystals. Salt crystals look exactly the same—they have the same structure, no matter where or when they are evaporated out. That's a little bit like the archetype.
The archetype kind of lives in us in solution, and then when we meet a particular situation in the outer world, the archetype gets constellated. You could say that we're all born with an archetype for mother, and then we have our own mother that we have an experience of. And then when we become mother, that's another moment when the archetype gets constellated and becomes active in our life. It has its own amount of energy and influence on us.
The Archetypal Journey of Descent
Britta: You speak about archetypal mother stories as often not being a journey like Hero journeys that are out and questing, but as a dropping in and down. The story that I use in my work is Inanna's descent to the underworld—that's a down story. You also use the valley and well. Talk to us about the importance for this motherhood journey, archetypally speaking, in terms of the going down. Why down?
Lisa: When this mother archetype gets constellated in our life, one of the things that happens is we have access to something deep and much bigger than our ego. That's the nature of finding an archetype in your life—it enlarges you.
I think that the descent means going in, going into our depths, getting curious about the inner life, finding and forging a relationship with something inner. I also mean descent in the way that parts of it are really hard. There may not be formal, diagnosable postpartum depression, but I think most women have periods of struggle in new motherhood. It's not all joy. There may be a lot of joy, but there's bound to be something that's difficult or hard or sad or scary that maybe you didn't have to deal with anything like that before.
Britta: Even if you've experienced difficulty before, there's something that can be really unique about the difficult in parenthood, because it means so much.
Lisa: Yes, it feels so important in a way that just blows other kinds of things of importance to smithereens, because it's like, "Oh, I thought that was important before." Right now, my soul is existing outside of my body, in the body of my child, and suddenly it re-maps our brain.
The Well and Underground Wisdom
Britta: What about the well symbolism?
Lisa: I was using this story called "The Two Caskets," and the heroine winds up falling down the well. That's an image of descent—descent to source as well, because what's at the bottom of a well usually is water. But in these stories, what the heroine finds at the bottom of the well is a strange land full of talking stoves and loaves of bread and trees that drop their apples and any number of strange things. We're not in normal waking consciousness anymore. We have been drawn into our depths, into the archetypal world where we're experiencing that which is non-rational.
I think this can be a very striking transition for women who may have a kind of strong Apollonian consciousness, who maybe have been in the business world, and then all of a sudden they're dropped into this other realm that they're not used to navigating. It can be very frightening, and some number of those people will want to just get right back to work and get the baby with a nanny as soon as possible. I feel empathy for that.
But if you can tolerate it, the experience is teaching you about a different order of experience that is in you that you can have access to. What the heroine inevitably meets down there is the wise old woman, the great mother, and that is a powerful wisdom archetype. The story tells us that if you have the right attitude toward the unconscious, you can return with the boon.
Navigating the Strange Inner Landscape
Britta: In the story you share of "The Two Caskets," the heroine is meeting this wise being as well as various different characters, and what matters is how she is treating them—AKA, those parts of herself along the way—and that's what allows her to bring that boon back.
Lisa: If you're open, if you're curious, if you have some acceptance, then it becomes a creative transformation. If you reject it or laugh at it or dismiss it, then that doesn't go so well. These stories always follow this pattern—there's one sister who's kind and who has the right, open-hearted approach to the unconscious, and she's the one who's gifted these wonderful things, usually jewels of some kind. Then her stepsister sees what she gets, and she goes back and she does it all wrong—she laughs at the thing, she's lazy and not interested, and she winds up often getting punished terribly.
But what's important to remember about these tales is that one day, depending on how we're doing, we're the open-hearted heroine. Some days, some moments, we're going to be the lazy sister—she's part of us too. But the fairy tale is a reminder that if we can meet what comes up in an open-hearted way, then it's transformational.
If you think about applying that to motherhood, there are going to be parts of it that are difficult. There are going to be times that you feel ashamed, times that you feel enraged, times that you feel despair, times that you feel empty. And if you can meet all of that with some curiosity and maybe some self-compassion, then that's when the magic happens. That's when there's transformation.
Jung's "Other Within"
Britta: You quote Jung in your book: "In each of us, there is another whom we do not know." Can you add to that?
Lisa: "In each of us, there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves." And then he goes on to say that when we're stuck, it could be that that mysterious other within knows how to get unstuck.
The mysterious other within—when we're stuck, the mysterious other within knows how to get us unstuck. That's because when we get stuck, it's because we're navigating life according to the dominant values of consciousness, but the other within knows something different than we do. It has a different perspective. It's the unconscious, or if you like, it's the Self.
Britta: Or the inner guide, for some people who want to speak in less psychological terms.
Lisa: Right, it's some inner knowing—an inner guide, but it is different than ego consciousness. It's not the same. It's going to offer you an alternative.
Exploring a Personal Dream
Britta: All of this is making me think about a dream I had. Can we play with a dream? Dreams, to me, are very similar to how I work with fairy tales and myths—looking at symbols and associating to the symbols.
[Britta shares her dream about her son being very sick and dying while she was hosting a circle of mom friends. One friend offers to tell the others and says "we will make a circle for your grief."]
Understanding Ongoing Motherhood Transformations
Lisa: First of all, what an incredibly poignant dream. One of the things that comes up for me is that the process of being changed by motherhood never stops. There are all these challenges and new horizons when we're pregnant and when we have the baby and when they're young, but it keeps going.
Here is another crossroads, and of course, your son wasn't literally dying—that's not what the dream is about—but your son as your son, as your baby, is dying. What's beautiful about the dream is your friend says, "We will make a circle for your grief." In a way, the dream made a circle for your grief, because when an adult child goes off into their own life, especially in a lovely way, we do feel tremendous grief, but we don't really feel like we can feel it, because part of us is thrilled, but everyone expects us to be happy.
Britta: I love all of these people. I love who my son is becoming. I love the woman he's marrying. I love the life they're creating, and there is something dying for me, and there is grief.
Lisa: And they're going off into a life that will at some point not include you, because it's that wonderful Khalil Gibran—they're of the future. We are bows from which their arrows are cast.
Shadow Work in Motherhood
Britta: One of the other things you talk about is Shadow Work. Can you talk about the role of what is the shadow, and how does it show up in motherhood?
Lisa: Shadow is a term coined by Jung to refer to the parts of the personality that were left undeveloped. He speaks of them as kind of glowing coals left on the lumber room floor. It's something that maybe you had a penchant for or a passion for or a talent for in childhood that wasn't valued by your parents or the culture, and so you just set it aside. Maybe it's also some potential in you that was disallowed—for example, the potential to be greedy, and you were taught not to be greedy. So you took all your greediness and you pushed it aside. You didn't get rid of it—it went into the shadow where you have less of a relationship with it.
Jung once said, "The shadow is everything you don't wish to be." So then your kid comes along, and there's a couple things that can happen. First of all, your kid is doing really cringy, awful things that you do too, that you don't want to know that you do. Maybe your kid's being really greedy, and you're like, "Oh my God"—it challenges you because you're confronted with your own shadow qualities when your children act them out.
I think the other way that shadow comes up is—and the novelist Fay Weldon said this brilliantly—"The best part about not having kids is you can go on believing that you're a good person." So you're going to meet your witchiest self. You're gonna have homicidal thoughts about your own beloved child at some point. You're gonna meet the ogre of your inner psyche in the process.
Integrating the Shadow
Britta: I can think immediately to a time when I met that part of myself and how even now to this day, I can bristle a little bit as I reflect on that moment—I yelled at my kid with a ferocity that I didn't even know where it came from.
Lisa: Exactly. So there's shadow you didn't know that you could be that. You didn't know you had an inner ogre. But then there you are being an ogre. So it is a real confrontation with shadow.
But the thing about meeting shadow—the point is not to banish those parts, that doesn't work. The point is to integrate them to the extent that we can, or at least have a relationship with them—sit down at the table with them. What I mean by integrate might mean something like, "All right, so I have a greedy side. Well, you know what? Sometimes it works to be greedy. There are situations in which being greedy might be just the right thing." It takes some discernment to figure out when that is, but there are times when being greedy might be in service to the higher thing, and being very demure and not asking for much is actually not in service of the higher thing. So it's good to know how to be greedy.
Where to Connect with Lisa
Britta: Where can people connect with you and your work?
Lisa: There's definitely my podcast, which I do with my two colleagues—it's called This Jungian Life, and you can find us wherever you get podcasts, and also at thisjungianlife.com. If you go to our website, there's a lot of good stuff there, including our 12-month online dream course called Dream School.
My author website is lisamarchiano.com, and one of the things you might learn about if you go to my website is I have an online fairy tale group for women called Spinning Straw, and we talk about a different story every month.
You can find me on Instagram at Lisa Marchiano, and I'm on X, although I'm not very active there.
Final Wisdom for New Parents
Britta: What's one thing that you feel passionately about that you would want new or expectant parents to see, hear, feel, or know during this profound period?
Lisa: I have a lot of people come in—a lot of my analysands are parents—and they may worry that they're doing it wrong. One of the things I'll always say is, "Do you enjoy it at least some of the time?" And if they say yes, I say, "Then you're doing it right."
Because working with people, I've been an analyst now for a number of years, and I can tell you that people come in and you can tell that they were loved, but that's different than having been enjoyed. Our parents love us when they make sure there's food on the table, but being enjoyed is something different altogether. It's the way that someone lights up when we come in the room. It's the way that we make someone laugh. It's delight, it's fun.
Hopefully parenting is fun at least some of the time. It's not going to be fun all of the time, but if you enjoy your child, that is everything they need and more. You can tell adults that come in who've been enjoyed versus those that haven't. So know that you're doing it right and enjoy it.
Closing
Britta: Thank you so much, Lisa, for being a part of this and joining me in this conversation, and for your work. Thank you listeners for sharing this time with us. If something shared today impacted, supported or moved you, please share this episode with a friend. I produce this podcast myself and your support makes it possible.
To show a little love for the podcast and these conversations, please follow, rate and review. If you'd like to continue the conversation, please join us on Instagram at @transformedbybirth. I look forward to being with you again on the next episode of Transformed by Birth.
Now let's take a breath. We're going to blow out our candle, but before we do, let's draw inside with the inhale everything we want to take away from this conversation, this time we've shared together, and on an exhale, we blow out the candle. Until next time, bye friends!
