If you ever have the opportunity to see Mary Zimmerman's The White Snake, I highly recommend it. She plays off of a Chinese legend about a snake demon who learns to transform into a human, marries a lovely man, and then has to figure out how to be in that relationship. Zimmerman made it about a lot of things, but the message I took away was that we are all secretly scary snake demons and we want the person we love to love us, not in spite of that, but because of it.
The other thing this makes me think of is the opportunity for healing through parenthood. One of the things I took away from Bruno Bettelheim's A Good Enough Parent was the idea that as a parent we get to relive scenes from our own childhood, taking the other role this time, with the choice either to repeat the scene with a new understanding of the parent's position, or to change the script and give what we needed as a child. I find myself coming back to that again and again with my daughter, as I consciously react in ways that my mother never could have.
Rich thinking here.
If you ever have the opportunity to see Mary Zimmerman's The White Snake, I highly recommend it. She plays off of a Chinese legend about a snake demon who learns to transform into a human, marries a lovely man, and then has to figure out how to be in that relationship. Zimmerman made it about a lot of things, but the message I took away was that we are all secretly scary snake demons and we want the person we love to love us, not in spite of that, but because of it.
The other thing this makes me think of is the opportunity for healing through parenthood. One of the things I took away from Bruno Bettelheim's A Good Enough Parent was the idea that as a parent we get to relive scenes from our own childhood, taking the other role this time, with the choice either to repeat the scene with a new understanding of the parent's position, or to change the script and give what we needed as a child. I find myself coming back to that again and again with my daughter, as I consciously react in ways that my mother never could have.