Motherhood: A Hero’s Journey
Everyone always says moms are true heroes, but is it true? Big surprise, I think motherhood is the quintessential hero’s journey. This episode explores the idea of the adventure of motherhood, dragon-slaying and all.
Transcript
Moms are the real heros—yadda yadda yadda. Especially on mother’s day, everybody says this. But then they don’t put their money where their mouth is. Where are the movies, books, and even video games to prove it?
Not only do we rarely get starring roles—movies often prove that our kids turn out better without us: Belle, Cinderella, and Ariel? Dead moms. Harry Potter, Batman, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Dead mom, dead mom, dead mom.
I guess we should be flattered that “lack of mom” is perceived as the ultimate hardship, but if the end result of not even being present is all these amazing heroes, why are we out here working so hard?
Welcome to the Family Lab Podcast, where we embrace the fact that parenting and home management are one big experiment. I’m Whitney Archibald.
It’s Mother’s Day this weekend, and I have been thinking about motherhood and the hero’s journey. It feels sappy and clichéd, but I really feel like motherhood is not just a hero’s journey, but actually the original blueprint for a hero’s journey. In this week’s episode we’ll talk about that hero’s journey and what that actually means for each of us, beyond the idea of putting us on a pedestal and holding us to impossible standards we could never meet. This is a podcast about imperfect people trying to figure this parenting thing out, not a list of things we have to do to be good moms.
Then I’ll release another episode next week about a specific element of the hero’s journey—the mentor. I’ll talk about some of my early motherhood mentors and what they taught me. I’m hoping this will be the start of another episode or even a series with stories from you listeners about your own parenting mentors. For now, I’d love for you to send me your stories with either a quick video or audio clip or a text message to whitney@howshemoms.com or as a dm on Instagram. Or you could message me for a link to set up a time to tell me your story in my online studio. Big moments, small moments, lessons they’ve taught you, weird ideas that actually worked—whatever.
Ok. Back to the hero’s journey. I became obsessed with mythology for a bit in high school, which is where I first encountered the father of classic hero’s journey theory: Joseph Campbell, who wrote the book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. He studied heroic stories from folklore and mythology from all over the world and mapped out an archetypal story arc—the hero’s journey.
Now because folklore is notoriously male-centered, the classic hero is usually a man whose mother and wife stay home while he goes on adventures. There are notable exceptions, and many women have written about how the female version of the hero’s journey is different—more centered on relationships and community, but still epically heroic--which I think is a nice distinction.
But for a long time I’ve been thinking about how motherhood itself is the quintessential hero’s journey. I did some googling because surely I wasn’t the first person to think of this. Sure enough, I found some great essays about it and even bought a book with one of those essays, I’ll Show Myself Out, by Jessi Klein. In her essay “The Hero’s Journey,” she says: “Cambell’s conception of the journey begins..
She talks about how reading this description stopped her in her tracks. And then I’m going to quote again, because her description of early motherhood is just so good. “For the first time since my son was born
A Swiffer on legs, I mean, come on. So good. So the first part of the hero’s journey is called the Departure: The hero gets a call to adventure. He refuses the call. He meets a mentor, either human or supernatural, then as Campbell puts it, he crosses a magical threshold into the unknown, what he describes as “the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale.”.
So the hero’s journey has an actual womb in it. Think of this first part in terms of the actual act of becoming a mother. We get a call to adventure: the pregnancy test, or the call from the adoption agency or the social worker. We’re off into the unknown. We’ve seen moms before, but we have no idea what it’s like to actually be one.
The next step is to refuse the call: “What am I doing, I’m not ready to be a mom!” Ideally, we have a mentor along for the ride with us, either our own mom, a good friend, or a midwife. Then a very supernatural threshold where we become a literal portal for human life and then the actual birth, where again to quote Campbell the hero is “swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died.”
Giving birth is a very dramatic threshold crossing--literally at the threshold of life and death. The turmoil of the adoption, surrogacy, and foster systems are similarly dramatic ways for a child to enter our worlds.
And now suddenly we are no longer Whitney, Michelle, Mary Ann. We are mom.
We’re on to the next stage: Initiation. Campbell’s version of this is very complicated so we’ll go with a simplified version by the writer Christopher Vogler:
Tests, allies, and enemies
The inmost cave
the ordeal, and
the reward.
I probably don’t need to enumerate all the tests and trials involved with motherhood: physical, emotional mental health. Juggling career and kids, Keeping children from running with scissors or into the street, Making sure they don’t harm each other. Not to mention things like navigating stormy waters of disabilities, neurodivergence, education, and just generally crazy behavior. Endless rivers to cross and dragons to slay. Some of my big dragons have been infertility and kids’ behavioral issues, where I had no idea what to do or if they would ever resolve.
The next step is the Approach to the inmost cave, which I appreciate, because seldom do our greatest challenges just appear out of nowhere. They usually build to a climax gradually, like a divorce, or a mental health crisis, infertility, a career explosion, even a move. Some of us will have a bunch of small crises, but many of us will have a big crisis or two that dwarf the others.
Which brings us to the next stage “the Ordeal” where the hero faces the greatest challenge yet and experiences death and rebirth. Am I saying that everyone with have a huge, overarching ordeal in their life, no. But I feel like most people have something or several somethings. It’s just life. If you’ve been around a bit, you know that I had a pretty sudden and huge ordeal when I literally fell off a 30-foot cliff while rock climbing and broke all my bones. I sure hope that was my big ordeal, because I’m not sure I can survive a bigger one. But just because your cliff wasn’t a physical cliff like mine, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t super hard and significant. Maybe you haven’t met your cliff yet, but life is hard, accidents happen and the people you love can’t live forever.
Our road of trials, as Cambell calls it, has been preparing us for our big ordeal, and as hard as it is, motherhood has been preparing you for it all along. This ordeal brings us to the brink of death, we’re not sure we’re going to survive the heartbreak or the pain, but we do, because we’re strong. We’re mothers.
Perhaps, as Jessi Klein suggests, there doesn’t have to be one big ordeal. The ordeal of motherhood is “the shock of how completely she must annihilate herself to keep her child alive.” She says, “The sword that hangs over you is a sword
And then comes the sweet spot. The reward, or what Campbell calls the Ultimate Boon. Achieving our quest. This is a bit trickier to apply to motherhood, and maybe where this analogy falls apart. Because even when our kids graduate move out—if they move out-- we’re not done with motherhood. There’s no finish line on this quest. There are still tests, trials, and ordeals, hard work, and side quests. But there are rewards and glimpses of the ultimate boon along the way. For one, there are a lot of joyful parts of mothering. From baby snuggles and smiles to the hilarious things they say when they’re toddlers, to their unbridled curiosity, to the moment when you realize they actually have a sense of humor. The sheer delight of watching a human unfold before your eyes. That moment when your child sees you as an actual human being and thanks you for your service. The times they realize you were right after all. The times they choose to spend time with you.
The final stage is called the return, and the first part of that stage is the “refusal to return.” Denial. For me this hit hard with high school graduations. Where you realize that your child is an adult and your relationship is different now and you just can’t stop looking at all the baby pictures and videos and wondering how your little boy could now pick you up and carry you around if he wanted to. You wonder if you’ve prepared them well enough, taught them what they needed to learn.
And then you have to confront the denial and remember that most of us will get to a point where the main day-to-day work of mothering is over. We, the heroes, must return, transformed.
Maybe this is the return to a more individual life, after doing so much for so many for so long. Returning to hobbies and interests we didn’t have time for in the thick of motherhood. Digging deeper into our careers or finding a new one. It’s a time where we can reflect on how motherhood has stretched and transformed us to be stronger, more loving, more capable, more patient—more, more, more. It’s a weird time, because a lot of the skills we’ve spent so long honing now seem obsolete—things like how to get a baby to burp without fail, balancing equations, planning large meals, making homecoming corsages. Maybe we can still use some of these skills in a mentoring role. But we can also embrace new skills and interests. In Campbell’s model, the final elements of the returning stage is becoming the master of two worlds and gaining the freedom to live.
I’ll end with another quote from Jessi Klein’s essay, “The truth is that motherhood is a hero’s journey.”
To last line.
Ok, that was going to be the ending, but I want to reiterate that even if you’re not feeling heroic right now, you are a hero. You’re doing amazing things, and if you’re trying to be a good mother you are a good mother.
Thank you for joining us for the Family Lab Podcast. Thanks to my assistant Kimberly and to my new assistant producer and editor Miriam Brantley. And as always, a special thank you to my mom Susan Singley for playing the theme music to this podcast. She used to play it all the time when I was growing up and to me it’s the soundtrack of motherhood.
