OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Call Me Penelope

April 10th, 2008

Not that we are keeping score, but Raven’s been out of Portland 13 days out of the last 25, and I mostly function ok except for missing him and not having figured out how to get a good night’s sleep when he’s not here. Hence lots of keeping my hands busy, watching movies after the kids go to bed and knitting:

Please understand, I am not complaining. I appreciate that the interacting with people is the part of his job he’s good at, the part of his job he loves, despite the travel, and I appreciate being able to be at home with the kids because he’s good at it. Still, it’s different from how I grew up and it’s sometimes a little hard on all of us.

Anyway, too tired for a smooth segue, but I swear there’s a connection, I would like to mention having followed one of the Unreliable Narrator’s links to the wikibook Hearts and Minds: How Our Brains Are Hardwired for Relationships by Thomas David Kehoe and skipped straight to the section on archetypes of relationships where it was clear to me, that of all the types Kehoe describes, Raven best fits the Hermes model (for being in technology, he’s all Gemini, all communication) and how I am living very much the Hestia model. And you know, she’s just not the most glamorous of goddesses, and even if domesticity is the path I’ve chosen, it’s easy to wish for a slightly more exciting archetype.

So I have to confess, I love the power of stories thousands of years old to explain emotional truths. And I probably have been warped by my fascination with the Greeks, that I cannot tell if the emotional truth is there or I look at everything through the filter of the truth of these stories that have been part of my consciousness my whole reading life. I remember early on, my dad asking me for any of the mythology-referenced clues in crossword puzzles because I had them down young, graduating from D’Aulaire to Hamilton to Ovid. And it is surprising how the whole system has stuck with me, the clustering of certain qualities, the inevitable consequences of certain behaviors.

Thus, I know that as much as Hestia, I feel like this knitting me is a Penelope-like waiting spouse. Of course, knitting seems to strangely mirror the pages I fill in my journal, row after row, line after line, ravelling and unravelling, forgive me the glibness, text and textiles, fabrications and fabric. Going off on a different mythological tangent, I see following the yarn as Theseus using Ariadne’s spool to get out of the labyrinth. But lately, my very favorite myth/metaphor is Scylla and Charbydis, the sea monsters Odysseus had to sail between, one a rock-dwelling six-headed people eater, the other a whirlpool belching water sucker. The narrow strait between two treacherous places keeps applying to absolutely everything where I must find an unnatural-to-me middle way, tread between frustration and despair, the clashing and the sucking, the passive and the aggressive, even the nature of attachment, having to think of your children’s well-being all of the time without letting them become your whole world, having to have plans enough to get yourself moving, but flexibility enough to be open to new opportunities.

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