Hunting the Mother Bear

December 12th, 2007 · No comments

When my dad was a young man, he spent summers working in the canneries and crab traps in Alaska to pay for college.

One day he and a Norwegian gentleman, who was spending some time on the trap with him, rowed ashore for a break from the waves and the wide-open sea. They spied a group of mother bears relaxing in the river — splashing, bathing and lolling about on sunny rocks. One mother bear’s cubs kept tumbling down the hill and splashing into the water, only to be swatted away by their mother. They retreated back up the hill, waited until her back was turned, then tumbled down into the water again.

After three or four turns at this game, the mother bear got frustrated and charged her cubs, growling and scolding at them. She turned her back — and the cubs chased after her yet again. The Norwegian gentleman — apparently trying to help the mother bear — bent down, picked up a rock and, with no warning at all, hurled it at the cubs. My dad yelped a garbled protest and ran for his life, the Norwegian and the mother bear in hot pursuit. The humans barely made it to the boat and back out to sea.

Now, most people are aware of this basic life lesson, but just to be clear: You have to be very, very careful with other people’s children.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because of the effects of transiting Saturn in Virgo. It’s currently criss-crossing our two-year-old son’s natal Moon and my own progressed Saturn, both in the first house. In other words, the boy and I are being challenged right now to define, shore up and secure our identities vis-a-vis one another (Saturn: the mother; Moon: the child).

So there is a lot of jockeying for position, much back-and-forth of “I want,” “I need” and “You can’t have” — from both of us. Limits are being set. Lines are being drawn. Laws are being laid down. Tears are being shed. The sweet, snuggly oneness of infancy has dissolved into memory.

At the same time, it is thrilling to see his growth. He’s expressive and intentional. He identifies what he wants and sets out to get it. He’s learning, it seems, in leaps and bounds — puzzles, colors, shapes, numbers. Where things go. What words mean. How to use his body. How to control it.

Now, I banked on both these developments even before the boy was born. I knew about the so-called “terrible twos” and even felt excited to see how we would negotiate the terrain. And my husband is a wonderful parenting partner; we’ve fallen into a great tag-teaming system to make sure we can both give our best and avoid the overwhelm that can come easily with parenting.

What I didn’t bank on was the difficulty of bringing a third parent — a daycare provider — into the mix. Saturn is getting my ire up, bringing out the mother bear when I watch how his teachers (another aspect of Saturn) interact with their two-year-old charges. And I don’t always like what I see.

Saturn’s instinct is toward protection and safety; this can sometimes result in defensiveness and growling. Lately, these instincts in me have been directed toward the militant approach one of his teachers takes toward art.

I observe her over-directing the kids’ process, criticizing their methods and inhibiting their free expression. This morning she wouldn’t let them turn over the construction paper they were painting to look at the other side. She wouldn’t let them glue pieces of dried popcorn onto their paper one at a time because she “needed” (her word) them to drop a handful onto the glue all at once. This morning, she barked to one of them, “I didn’t tell you to explore. I told you to work.”

These are two-year-olds.

And as much as I might get on this child about eating his vegetables, wearing a jacket when it’s cold and going back to sleep when he wakes at three a.m., I would never presume to tell him how he should make art — express his feeling life in tangible, living, breathing form. Art is self-expression, any time of life, but especially at two years old. The Saturnine response to his core emotional needs he must be experiencing right now cannot only be coming from the limits set by me, the chief Saturn figure in his life, and his father. It is also coming from other teacher/mother figures.

And when it’s done poorly, when it’s done in a way that threatens his playfulness and expressiveness and sense of competence and sense of self, when it’s intrusive and know-it-all and demanding, that brings out the mother bear in me. It fuels a feeling of being hunted, of having my protective, nurturing, growth-encouraging approach stalked and choked by someone who is not comfortable with fluid limits, someone who must be in control all the time, someone who seems to fear play and spontaneity and self-expression — all those constricted, intolerant, shadowy aspects of Saturn — someone who would throw rocks at someone else’s bear cub when it’s engaged in play.

(Image credit)