Tension of Opposites, Family Style

Another recycled post by Kathy from an earlier blog of ours. I think these are too good to leave fallow there so I brought it over here. From April 2007.

Although it was only two years ago, my Master’s degree in depth psychology now seems like a foggy lifetime ago. But one phrase from those days keeps tracking me – quick, elusive, grainy, like wolves in shadow.

Tension of opposites.

There was a time when I could have told you what exactly Carl Jung meant by this delicious phrase and expounded on the nuances of psychological thought that have spun out from the extreme truth of those three small words.

But now, instead, we are living it, Alan and I and the little dragon.

It has something to do with the intolerability of having two contradictory feelings or drives at the same time, for example needing to be financially responsible while wanting to be lazy and selfish and spendy, or needing to be socially normal while wanting to rip your clothes off and dance in your front yard during a thunderstorm. These seemed like reasonable examples of tension at the time.

I had no idea.

It seems our entire life since the little dragon came is one colossal Tension of Opposites – not those fleeting id moments when you know you should be heeding the call of the superego, but pervasive, insidious opposites you learn to live with long-term.

The most obvious is the tension between working and parenting. We traipse off to work every day in a tall building with windows that don’t open and interact with adults who stand upright and don’t cry when it’s naptime (though they might want to) – but we both long with all our bones and blood to be spending the day instead with our toddling, blabbering, chortling boy, draped in sunshine and mud and oatmeal and even, yes, as today, poop gushing up out the backside of his diaper. What we do clashes so violently with what we wish to be doing that we find ourselves trapped in the prison of opposites.

Another such tension is our persistent effort to balance the sudden triangle of need we are faced with: to be together as a family, to be together as a couple, to be alone. How very much we love the little dragon and want to spend time with him; how very much we love our marriage and want to spend time with each other; and how very much we long for time to ourselves, to attend to that elusive I who seems so neglected now. Time has become such a precious commodity that I sometimes feel ashamed that I’m looking forward to the dragon’s naptime, or hoping Alan will have other plans so I can just be with myself for a while.

But Alison McGhee, author of the children’s book Someday, hit the bullseye about the Tension of Opposites, Family Style, in an interview with NPR (March 13, 2007):

Once you have a baby, you’re filled with … overwhelming love and you’re also filled with fear, all the time, because you love something so much. And maybe [writing the book] was a way for me to understand what John Keats called “negative capability” – that ability to hold contradictory thoughts in your mind simultaneously. You know: I love this child more than anything, I want to keep this child safe. In order to keep this child safe, this child needs the strength to go live her own life fearlessly.

Aah, McGhee hit on the most frightening tension of opposites for parents – the real tension at the core of being a mama or a daddy: the constant, excruciating coexistence of unfathomable love on one hand and unbridled fear on the other.

Because from the moment of conception, your primary energy changes. Suddenly every breath is laced with The Big Question: What if something happens to him? Followed immediately by the obvious: And how can I stop it? Followed immediately by the much less obvious: I can’t.

This is the Tension of Opposites, Family Style.

I can’t stop the course of the little dragon’s life. He is here, subject to this world. Already, at 19 months, his life is his own, not mine. Most decisively not mine. And yes, I can plug electrical sockets with little plastic thingies and lock the front gate when we’re playing outside and cut his hot dogs so small he could inhale them through his nose if he wanted to (and believe me, he sometimes appears to want to). But wanting desperately to control what happens to him runs right up against the reality of the naked opposite, which is that I can’t. I can’t control, and that is heartbreaking and frustrating and scary.

And yet ultimately it tempers the I that I think is getting neglected but, I realize, is really just being run through the wringer in a way that therapy could never hope to do in 50 minutes a week.