Red Shoes and Gilded Carriages

Women Who Run With the Wolves is one of the most profound books I've ever read--though it reads better in parts than if read in one big gulp. For me, it was a life-changing book when I read it twenty years ago, yet it's even more amazing on this second reading.  Each chapter is a long (yes, wordy) analysis of a folk tale or fairy tale in which the author analyzes the components of the female psyche as expressed in that story.

It means more to me now because I now have a little wild girl in my life--and I mean that in the most positive way.

When I was a parent of young children, I was--as my children are now--too busy with the nuts and bolts of parenting to sit back and gaze at them for hours.  I was too busy with groceries and meals and school clothes to  fully observe the instinctual freedom and joy of childhood: spontaneity, emotionally honesty, moving from this to that as they feel inclined to, knowing what they want and claiming it with confidence.  As I read this book, I see that the loved and cared-for child is the essence of the "wild woman" Clarissa Pinkola Estes encourages us to find again in ourselves.

If you're lucky enough to have a two-year-old in your life, you see how fiercely she expresses what she wants and you see how innately kind she is.  I've never seen a "terrible two" in my life. At two, the child gives as much affection as she receives from the big people in her life--and usually in the form she receives it.  From the time she was a baby, Elena has always hugged whole-heartedly, patting the holder on the back--just as her big people pat her on the back.  She's grateful for every little thing.  She wants to touch, taste, do, ride everything around her.

In the chapter on Red Shoes--which is enough to meditate on for months before going to another chapter--Estes tells the tale of the motherless child who loves her handmade shoes.  In her red cloth shoes, she can dance her own way and she is full of joy.   But she is "adopted by" an old woman in a gilded carriage and offered "better" things.  The old woman takes away her old red shoes and teaches the girl to adapt to luxury.

It would take me too long to summarize the full story here--but it's a psychological reading of the pattern of creative and free females who fall into various kinds of traps.  They marry the wrong people, or marry too soon, or join the wrong tribes; they allow someone else to take away their red shoes--and it's a long road back to finding them again and saying: no no, never again, can you take away the shoes I made for myself. Your carriage and your fancy house may be fine for you, but not for me.

Wiser older people don't take away the red shoes; they guide the child and love the child while she's wearing them.  But what if there are no wise women (or men) to protect the girl child?  What if the big people in the child's world are too wounded themselves to allow the child to be free to be who she is?

I remember my daughter listening to the record, Free To Be, You and Me, over and over.  I remember the ways she made clothes out of scraps of this and that, including green felt elf shoes.  She'd ask me what to wear to school and I'd give her my suggestions--usually pairing things that more or less "matched"--so as to send her off to school looking like she had a mother in the house.  But no!  Day was inclined to wear what she decided to wear.  The more outlandish the better.  The more original the better. She didn't care what people thought.

If we watch little girls being little girls, we remember what it is to be wild and free--in the best possible ways.  To Re-member is to reclaim the "members"--or parts of ourselves--that we've let someone else, something in the culture, take away: Thanks for the gilded carriage (the ill-fitting marriage, job, house), but it's too small, all wrong, not friendly to my wild and creative self. 

To be like wolves (who are loyal pack animals with intact and healthy instincts), we get to know the woods we live in and we know how to spot the traps. We may fall into the traps again (like wolf cubs)--but we don't stay in them. Many of the years of our lives are spent finding our instincts all over again, claiming them, and living by them.