I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me                                   And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
 Robert Louis Stevenson

I remember memorizing “My Shadow” from my dog-earred green volume of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. The rhymes just rolled off my lips, and I thought little of shadows and much more about my recitation. In truth, like most children, I often thought of my shadow as a substitute playmate when no other could be found. My shadow was always with me, and this was a good thing.

Until it wasn’t. A good thing, that is. Until later in high school when I studied the works of Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung who wrote:

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.

The shadow as a moral problem, an awareness of the dark aspects of the personality? This shadow is not your childhood friend, the happy, little fellow that offers good company. A student of Jung’s and fellow psychologist, Erich Neumann, describes the shadow as All those qualities, capacities and tendencies which do not harmonize with the collective values – everything that shuns the light of public opinion, in fact – now come together to form the shadow, that dark region of the personality which is unknown and unrecognized by the ego. 

Anything that hides from the light of public opinion and which is unknown and unrecognized by the ego or conscious mind seems suspect, indeed. Suspect and frightening. As I matured and stowed my Child’s Garden of Verses in the back of my closet with my Barbies and a few beloved stuffed animals, I grew increasingly aware that my shadow was the sort of problem that would simply not go away. Coming to grips with it was, as Jung argued, going to take considerable moral effort.

From adolescence on, I worked diligently and with real conviction to maintain a public persona much like a face to meet the faces in T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This was a face whose attributes harmonized with the collective values of my world. This was a cheerful, optimistic, humble, and hard-working face. This was a face that largely kept its form regardless of the circumstances. This was a female face, a persona that was characterized by all those social mores and expectations for women. Looking back, I’m not proud to admit that I was darn good at keeping up this face. The failure to do so, I believed, was social death. The failure to do so was simply unacceptable. I could have been a poster child for Jung’s theories regarding repressing the shadow and over-identifying with the ego.

In Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, novelist Doris Lessing writes: There it lay, just out of sight, deadly and punishing, for its pulse was that of a cold heaviness, it had to be a counterweight to joy. This is the shadow, the dark aspects of one’s self that are just out of sight, those undesirable qualities, thoughts, and feelings that surely must be a counterweight to joy. At the forefront of my own list of undesirable qualities was shame. Just below the surface of all the joy and assurance I projected was a deep and abiding sense of shame. I was ashamed that I didn’t regard the needs of others before my own, that, too often, I compared myself to others, that I had failed to do something I should have, that I wasn’t more insightful, more empathetic, more encouraging, more giving. In short, I was ashamed of almost everything I was and would be.

For much of my life, my shame–like a good shadow–followed me into and out of relationships and experiences. And though I worked hard to ensure that others didn’t see it, its dark presence loomed and threatened to unmask me. Jung writes that shame is a soul eating emotion. Contemporary writer and sociologist Brené Brown claims that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change, that it derives its power from being unspeakable.

In his book Shame and Grace, writer and theologian Lewis B. Smedes writes that the difference between guilt and shame is very clear–in theory. We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. Shame is such a powerful shadow because it confidently pronounces what we are (and what we are not). And it becomes even more powerful when we feed it by encouraging it, repressing it, and refusing to speak about it with others. Too often, I was guilty of all of these, and so my shame grew. Like a shadow, I simply couldn’t shake it.

At the core of my shame has been a persistent preoccupation with self. Regrettably, I have spent too many hours of my life preoccupied with what I am not. And as this preoccupation increased, it devoured precious minutes and opportunities. As I have matured in my faith, I have discovered that this type of preoccupation is a universal impediment to living for Christ. When John is testifying about Jesus, he says: He must increase; I must decrease. [John 3:30] This is exactly it. I must decrease. My shadow must be outed and shrunken. If Christ is to increase in my life, if I am to be who I long to be, then I have to call forth my shame into the public light and name it what it is: a shadow of the worst sort.

In her best-selling book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead, Brené Brown writes: If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive. If Carl Jung were alive today, I would like to think that he would buy a ticket for one of Brown’s talks. And then, I’d really like for him to rise unabashedly from the audience and shout, Preach it, sister! I mean why not? One researcher affirming the work of another–it could happen. It should happen.

There are seasons in our lives when shadows darken our world. They emerge from their hiding places and blot out the sun. Jung knew that we all have these shadows and, that if we are to grow and mature, we must acknowledge and deal with them. The apostles understood that, dark as these shadows may be, our preoccupation with them–even if it is self-deprecatory preoccupation–must decrease. Seasons of shadows are universal impediments to seasons of light. The good news, however, is that light abounds and flows eternally from so many sources. We just have to step into it.

 

My Shadow

 An hour after dawn,
 my shadow stretches proprietarily along the road
 blackening the sunny mounds of trefoil
 and the burnished wings of finches.
 Its legs are dark trunks.
 Across the seas of first light,
 its torso spreads like a continent of shame,
 while its head, a hapless tectonic plate,
 settles over a mantle of shoulder. 
  
 Its appetite knows no end:
 bridal heads of Queen Anne’s Lace
 scarlet crests of cardinals,
 dew-glazed grass, maple saplings—
 it stuffs them all into its burgeoning belly.
  
 Now as the sun streaks through the trees
 and lights up the orchid petals of cone flowers,
 it blunders forward—leaden, determined,
 the worst of me.
  
 Even as morning christens the world,
 it holds the road
 and will not move aside. 

Find a heart that will love you at your worst, and arms that will hold you at your weakest.
Anonymous

All the way into town, Griffin cried. “I don’t want to go, Grandma. I really don’t want to go.” We were making the 9-mile journey into town to meet his mother who would take him to the dentist. His upper lip was swollen, and through the rearview mirror, I cringed at his duck-like profile. Though he had not complained, the fact that he’d eaten only two bites of pancake and his forehead felt warm to the touch gave him away. Something was wrong.

“But I don’t want to go. I really, really, really don’t want to go,” he insisted. Over and over again, like a mantra, he pleaded. As we pulled into the parking lot where we would meet his mom, he crawled from the backseat over the console into my lap. I wrapped my arms around him and let him cry. I had exhausted any words of comfort. There was nothing more I could say. Words were cheap; arms were better.

We rely on words for comfort, particularly with boys. Big boys don’t cry. Big boys are brave. Big boys muscle through. Personally, I like words and have relied heavily on them to carry me through most situations. I suppose I have believed that if I just kept talking, if I could find the right words, I could fix things, heal hurts, and solve problems. Yet the older I get, the more I have become painfully aware that, too often, words fall short.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood writes:

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings . . . but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.

I, too, want a real body to put my arms around. Sitting there in my car with my arms wrapped as tightly as I dared around Griffin, I was embodied, weighted with purpose, tethered to someone and something so much greater than myself. Arms are better–for those being held and for those doing the holding. Arms provide tangible means of comforting and of being comforted. Words may be good, but arms are so much better.

In his novel, Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin writes:

She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.

There have been so many times when I have held a friend or family member’s baby and felt the poignant absence of my own babies whom I held long after they had fallen asleep. In the middle of the night when the moon shone through the window, a sleeping baby in my arms, peace washed over and through me. When we fit someone into our arms, it’s often this way. We relish the gush of love and peace, while we simultaneously feel an emptiness born from absence. Still, who would trade those exquisite moments when we meld with another, when our arms pull another into the sanctuary of love.

As a young college instructor, I once took a coed to my home over the lunch hour. In her essay, she had confessed that she had been sexually abused by her father and her brothers for much of her adolescence. Anguished, I reread her words, honest, clear words that reeked with fear and pain. How could I bring her into the cubicle of the office I shared with four others? How could we talk about her experiences in such a public place where only a bulletin board provided us with some sense of privacy? Naively, but with the best intentions, I offered to make lunch for her in my home. My children would be at school, and my husband was at work. We would be alone and free to talk–and to cry. There, I would be free to put my arms around her as she wept.

When I returned to school, a colleague asked where I had gone during lunch. Without revealing much, I admitted that I had taken a student to my home to discuss some private issues she had painfully revealed in her latest essay. You took her to your house? And you were alone with her? Taken aback, I could only affirm that I had done just that. As a seasoned educator who was legally savvy, she warned: You don’t want to be alone with students. You don’t know what they might accuse you of later, and you have to protect yourself at all times.

I understand that some educators, coaches, employers, and others in power abuse the healing nature of appropriate touch. Their arms are not safe refuges; their intent is not to comfort. Regrettably, because of their abuse, it is now too risky to put your hand on another’s shoulder or your arm around them. Arms may be the right remedy–perhaps the only remedy–but they must remain passively at our sides while we offer what words of comfort and assurance we can muster. The world we now live in is not always arms-friendly.

Imagine all the wondrous things your arms might embrace if they weren’t wrapped so tightly around your struggles, writes author Sheila M. Burke. Sadly, I confess to having lived too much of my life with my arms wrapped tightly around my own struggles. Even my body language often gives me away. My arms encircle my frame, as if to hold myself together, as if to keep my struggles from showing their ugly faces. There are certainly so many wondrous things that I might have embraced. But I didn’t. My arms were too full of myself to take in anything or anyone else. There were other willing arms to take in all my pain, doubt, and fear. I turned inward, though, sadly proud of my willingness to tough it out on my own. When I might have stepped into God’s loving arms, I rationalized that such comfort was for others but not for me. If I had not had my arms wrapped so tightly around my own pain, I might have walked blessedly into the arms of mercy.

In her book of poetry, Turquoise Silence, Indian poet and freelance writer, Sanober Khan writes of the refuge that is found in a mother’s arms:

i want to
stay curled and cosied
and chocolated….forever
in my mother’s arms.

Curled and cosied and chocolated in your mother’s arms? Yes, please! In foxholes, at work and at rest, in board rooms and bedrooms, there is probably not one of us who has longed to curl into our mother’s arms. If only for a moment, we dream of the comfort that only these arms can bring us. If just for a second, we project our wearied souls into arms that offer–as Robert Frost once described poetry–a momentary stay against confusion.

As I held my grandson in the car that day, I realized that I was but a substitute for his mother who would soon scoop him into her arms and who would, without saying a word, bring solace to his weary six-year old soul. Though the dentist would later pull his three front teeth and Griffin would arch in fear against any attempts to administer the “happy gas,” even in the midst of such trauma, he understood that his mom was there with open arms that would take him home.

There is sanctuary, indeed, in arms that will hold you at your weakest. As I find myself increasingly at a loss for words, I plan to use my arms more–to love, to comfort, to offer a momentary stay against confusion. And I know one boy who fits into them perfectly, and always will.

What if there were truly opportunities to learn? For its own sake, for the sheer joy of it, for something other than for earning a score, a win, or for performing or promoting something. What if you could send your daughter to learn ballet for its own glorious sake? The arabesques, pliés, grande jetés—all danced in a simple black leotard with others who marvel that their arms and legs can take on such exquisite lives of their own. What if you could send your son to learn football for the joy of playing it? Running, kicking, carrying the ball—or not—all amidst teammates who fall into breathless, spent heaps at the end of each play.

What if your daughter didn’t have to buy multiple (expensive) costumes for the end-of-year recital, the recital which is the driving force behind every practice from the very first day, the recital which is the be-all- and-end-all? What if your son didn’t have to worry about the game in which some would show off what they’d learned and could do, while others (many others) would sit the bench, their hands in their laps, their dreams on hold?

Don’t get me wrong: there is surely a time and place for performance and competition. And clearly there are those who take lessons or attend practices because they want to take the stage or the field. But there are also those who do not. They would like nothing more than to learn for the sake of learning. To revel in the process. To purely enjoy the experience and the people sharing it.

When I was in elementary school, I wanted to learn to play the piano, so that I could sit by myself and play the songs I loved. I could think of nothing better than holing up in our music/sewing room where I could sing and play the entire Sound of Music repertoire to my heart’s end.  When I learned that there would be a recital—gasp—at the end of the school year, my dream began to wither. During weeks to come, I agonized over every practice piece as if it could be the piece, the recital piece. At night, I had previously imagined my fingers floating over the keys as if they knew instinctively where to go to make beautiful music. But now, I could only see visions of recital disasters to come: I would trip as I made my way to the piano; I would forget the very first note and would sit in dumb fear as the audience awkwardly looked on; I would fly through my piece, my fingers congealing in a tangled, sweaty mess of disharmony. When I realized that performance was the end goal, things sadly changed for me.

As I watch my grandchildren navigate their way through childhood, I am even more painfully aware that there are few—if any—opportunities to learn for the sake of learning. The performance is the thing. The game is the real goal. I have found myself thinking about where a child could go to learn to dance, to play music or sports without the expectation of performing or competing? Is there such a place? Are there such people who offer these opportunities? Perhaps not. Sadly, most parents want to see the finished product, to get something for their time and money. They want a public showing with costumes and uniforms, accolades and talk of artistic and athletic futures. Many want to live vicariously through their children who may or may not want what their parents so desperately want for them.

If someone were to advertise lessons or practices during which kids could learn new skills, practice them for an hour with other like-minded peers, then pack up and go home, would this “sell”? Or would people scoff and declare these people crazy for thinking such programs would actually succeed?

And what about academic learning? It, too, is largely geared with the end in mind: the test, the final paper or project. After all, educators must measure student learning, must evaluate who has learned what and when. If I had a dollar for every student who said, “will this be on the test?” I would be a very, very rich woman today.  Because in their eyes, the test is all that matters. For the most part, learning is superfluous. And they have come by this belief naturally, for to a great degree, we have instilled it into them since they first entered the school doors.

Consider the eager kindergartener who has nervously but excitedly anticipated the start of school. During the second week, she is tested and found “behind” already. The phone call goes home offering (actually requesting permission for) special services for a child who has been determined at-risk. Before she could even begin to learn how to read, she has been tested and found wanting. She performed poorly, and the test verifies this. And so it begins: years of learning measured by tests.

Again, I understand the necessity of measuring learning. Having taught for 41 years, I spent more hours than I care to remember with a red pen in hand, head bent over a stack of student essays. There were so many occasions, however, when I desperately wished that I could put down the pen, push the writing rubric aside, and simply read for the sake of reading what another had written. I couldn’t help but wondering how my student writers felt. Were their essays truly the products of all they had learned or were they merely attempts to produce what they believed was expected? I knew the answer, but it wasn’t the one I wanted it to be.

In my years as an educator, I read and heard professionals and peers mourn the passing of curiosity, the death of any genuine desire to learn. Truthfully, most of my students had held funeral services for such things long before they left elementary school. Since then, they were merely complying. Learning for its own sake was a luxury they simply couldn’t afford. They set their sights, as they must, on accruing credits, maintaining or raising GPAs, and making acceptable (or in some cases, exceptional) scores on standardized tests.

Years ago when one of my daughters was a preschooler, I stood behind a one-way mirror and watched her learning in her Montessori classroom. For days when I quizzed her about what she had learned at preschool, she answered matter-of-factly, “I washed the baby.” Really, I thought. No tracing letters on worksheets? No counting to 20? But there in front of me was living proof of her claims. She walked to a shelf and removed a tray that held a small plastic tub, a baby doll, a pitcher, and a sponge. As other children chose their own activities, she carried the tray to a table, took the pitcher to a small sink, filled it to the designated line, carried it back to the table, poured it into the tub, and submerged the baby into the water. Then she proceeded to wash the baby. I stood amazed as she washed and washed and washed, fully intent upon scrubbing until she was satisfied that the baby was clean. Wholly absorbed in her work, she took no notice of her peers who were busily sorting colored beads, building towers, and pouring navy beans from one container to another. And then she was done. She carried the tub to the sink, poured out the bath water, placed the tub on the tray, and returned everything to its rightful spot on the shelf.

Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian physician, opened her first school, Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House) in 1907. She was a passionate advocate of child-led, hands-on learning, much of which took place during long, uninterrupted periods of time. This “freedom within limits” is a trademark of the Montessori method. Dr. Montessori argued that children could sustain their focus on learning and practicing a task if they were given choices, relevant tasks, and time. Even as I write this, I cringe as I think of many teachers and coaches who are now rolling their eyes and muttering, “Yeah, right. If your kid washes the baby for days, this will really teach her how to read and do math. And get into a good college? Forget it.”

I am acutely aware that our current educational systems, as well as our athletic and artistic programs, are designed to reflect what we believe is most efficient, practical, and necessary for success in today’s world. Kids must get a leg-up before kindergarten, so they enter with an early skill set, so they’ve mastered letter and number recognition, can write their name, sit and listen without disrupting others, and generally function as good classmates. If they are interested in sports or the arts, they must learn to practice and perform, to take criticism early, to be selected—or not. And all of this training, testing, and performing on stages, athletic fields, and tests goes on and on and on. A seemingly endless progression of proving oneself before a jury of their peers, their teachers and coaches.

We do it this way because we believe it works. We believe that it produces the best dancers and football players, the best readers and problem-solvers. What if we were to seriously rethink our systems? What if there were ways to authentically differentiate learning by offering better and more choices? What if competition and performance were choices, not expectations for all? I understand that most teachers and coaches are doing their very best within the systems and programs they’ve inherited and are expected to use. But common-sense dictates that no one—and I mean NO ONE—can meet the intellectual, emotional, and physical needs of every child in a one-size-fits-all system with one-size-fits-all expectations. Almost every school or program has a mission statement that reads something like, Meeting the needs of every child, every day. Nice words that are often sadly nothing more than lipstick on a pig.

I wish that I lived in a world in which 6-year-olds could choose to participate in a flag football program that allows them to learn the skills and rules of the game without expecting them to already know them and without expecting them to compete. These types of programs would not be for everybody, I know. Still, they would be wonderful alternatives for those who dream of learning to play for its own sake. And if their parents wanted to see if they were getting their money’s worth? Well then, they could sit on the sidelines with a good cup of coffee and watch their kids learn–running and falling and giggling as they go.