When Jonathan
Tenney and I got pregnant with Aaron Eagle in
our mid-thirties, we were newlyweds living in a
big dome house in the Santa Cruz hills with a
lesbian couple and my fourteen-year-old daughter
Brooke. We had married in Mexico on a romantic
impulse, and decided on the spot to have a
child. A year later, I conceived Aaron Eagle. It
was like this:
Every afternoon Jonathan
went jogging on the country roads near our
house; sometimes I would take a walk while he
ran. One day in the late afternoon I was
strolling along in a meditative, contented sort
of way, when something caught my attention, a
flash I saw out of the corner of my eye. I
looked into the dense forest off to the left
side of the road, and as clear as the leaves on
the trees, I saw a green man. He was thin, like
the stem of a young tree, and he was looking
straight at me.
I stopped and stared at
him. I transmitted to him as clearly as I knew
how, "I see you." We held each other's gaze for
a few minutes, and then he disappeared. I didn't
really think about the green man again after
that event faded like a dream from my
consciousness. Within a month, I was pregnant
with Aaron Eagle, but I didn't connect these two
events until much later.
At the same time that
summer we moved to Arizona, where nine months
later we gave birth to Aaron Eagle at home in
the desert, with my daughter Brooke, two
midwives, and two close women friends. It was a
lovely birth which I have described in other
books,* and we were the world's happiest
parents, pleased beyond measure with our little
special son whose eyes were almond-shaped and
whose ears were slightly pointed, like an elf. I
described Aaron as "looking like he came from
under a flower." He didn't cry, and he seemed in
an other-worldly state most of the time. When he
was only one day old, he rocked in my arms to
the soft rhythm of my favorite music.
I don't know when I
first remembered the incident in the Santa Cruz
mountains where I had seen the green man. As we
came to know Aaron, and especially after we
learned of his "condition" -- Aaron Eagle has
Down Syndrome -- we observed many ways that he
was different from other children. Clearly, he
would never be "normal." I have written
elsewhere that Jonathan and I expected a child
of ours to be "special," but that it simply
hadn't occurred to us he might have a
"disability." Our response to this information
(rudely given to us by a doctor who examined
Aaron when he was six days old) was one of
immediate unqualified acceptance, with very
little of the grief that so many parents of
children with Down Syndrome express. I attribute
this lack of upset to our genuine immersion in
the earth-based religion of the Great
Goddess.
After Aaron Eagle
arrived in all his quiet glory, I went into a
bliss state for six months in symbiosis with
him. The deep peace of the breastfeeding
experience (once Aaron caught on) was ecstatic
for me, and our long walks in the desert made me
feel complete in an earthy, instinctual way.
After two months, when I felt rejected because
he hadn't yet smiled at me, I simply "sent" that
request to him telepathically, and within thirty
seconds, he smiled up at me like it was no big
deal -- like why didn't I ask before?
Rather than a
"handicap," Aaron has been an incredible gift to
me and his father. And even though our marriage
was not able to withstand the years of ceaseless
heterosexual struggle between the two of us, we
have remained very close and bonded around the
ongoing task of raising Aaron. He is a living
demonstration of the values that both Jonathan
and I hold dear, an embodiment of what we
believe in. He is natural and direct, totally
himself without subterfuge or artifice, and his
heart is open. And although some of the
consequences of Aaron's disability surely weigh
on us, such as the labor-intensive quality of
physical care required to deal with toilet
training for ten years, his bright spirit more
than makes up for it.
Aaron Eagle is a pagan
at heart; he just wants to celebrate life. He
likes to dance and sing, to play musical
instruments, and to be the center of attention
like a clown or jokester. He hates conflict and
competition. He's a good runner, plays
basketball and golf (!), swims like a fish, and
draws beautiful pictures with his felt pens. He
is a goat uphill, and recently hiked up into
Boynton Canyon (Sedona, Arizona, near his
birthplace) with his dad. He has a hearty
appetite, and a belly laugh that won't
quit.
It has been easy to
relate to Aaron through the channels of ritual
and magic, easier sometimes than the more
"normal" routes for communication between
parents and children. Although he can't
generally discuss his feelings or experiences
that well, he is accessible through direct
psychic contact. I usually receive important
information about him through my dreams, and he
has occasionally contacted me in dreams by long
distance when I'm traveling away from home. I
have written about one experience where I
"healed" him from England, by taking on his
strep throat in a dream, and then coming down
with it myself the same day and healing it. When
I called home to see how he was, they told me he
had stayed home from school the day before with
a sore throat, but had awakened just fine that
morning and gone back to school.
As a pagan, my
aspirations for my children have always been for
their happiness and health, rather than wishing
for them to climb the corporate ladder or
achieve some particular outer vestige of
success. I have to admit, I was relieved that my
daughters didn't dye their hair green or pierce
their eyebrows as teenagers, but since I raised
them in the seventies --not the nineties --
their little rebellions were in keeping with the
times and tolerable to my sensibilities. When
Robyn decided not to go to law school as
planned, I celebrated her choice; when Brooke
decided to dance half-naked in the Carnival
parade, I stretched to make myself more
flexible. I refused to judge them.
In Shakti Woman,
I called my chapter on raising children,
"Artemis and Her Cubs," highlighting the
independence and wildness I intend to nourish in
all my children. Artemis was the Goddess of the
Wild Things, the Mistress of the Animals, Lady
of the Beasts, and the original Goddess on the
Mountain from ancient Anatolia (Turkey) where
western civilization has much of its roots. She
has to do with our untamed animal nature, the
Amazon warrior queens and priestesses who
founded ancient cities, and she is connected to
midwifery and natural birthing as well. She
values independence and uniqueness, rather than
"normalcy" and the routine, and she is
woman-identified in the extreme.
In all my courses and
workshops with women, I teach the art of
"empowerment" or becoming oneself, through
deconstructing our conditioning process,
un-learning our knee-jerk reflexes (to be nice
and good and well-socialized), and learning
techniques for stating our needs and standing
our ground. Because Aaron is so much his own
person, he often challenges my determination to
be authentic, and to nurture this authenticity
in my students and my children. Paradoxically,
when he isn't "nice" to someone, I have caught
myself trying to get him to be more "polite" or
to modify the behavior I have judged as
unfriendly or "not pleasant." Fortunately, he
can't be bought off, and I have to stretch,
breathe, and let go of my need for him to behave
in a way that would get more approval. He's nice
when he feels like it.
On the other hand, he's
such a "good boy," it's shocking. Like a Taoist
monk, he never does anything to hurt or harm
anyone else. He's naturally kind, authentically
open-hearted, and innately good-natured. Yet his
personal will is strong, and he will argue with
me to the point of winning at those times when
the stakes are high in his estimation. His
fourth-grade teacher wrote in his report card
that although he is doing well in most areas,
"Aaron will need to learn that he can't have
everything his way." I wonder. So far life seems
to favor his way, and I can't help but feel that
this is connected to the naturalness of it. I
imagine that partly she is concerned that he
doesn't take school that seriously. We're late
at least half the time, because he won't get out
of bed.
I wonder sometimes about
the pressures we put on our children, and even
the expectations and drives that parents put on
children with mental disabilities like Aaron's.
Should we push him to excel, drive him toward
traditional modes of learning, as if it matters
for him to be as much like "normal" children as
possible? Or shall we keep a gentle eye on his
development, noticing where he seems to be drawn
and what he seems to be especially good at, and
then trying to provide the support for those
organic directions? The culture would tend in
the direction of normalizing Aaron, so that --
at best -- he can grow up and maybe pack
groceries at Safeway or flip hamburgers at a
MacDonald's somewhere.
I have a more relaxed
approach, stemming from my attraction to the few
remaining tribal cultures where people seem to
"take it easy" a little more than the rest of
us.
|
|
The African
Bush people, for instance, only work
about four hours a day, leaving the
rest of the time for making music and
having community together. And
certainly the evidence from the ancient
cultures of the Goddess in Old Europe
and Anatolia suggests that people spent
large blocks of time making ritual and
art, working together at agriculture
and artistic production of utilitarian
objects (rugs, pots, baskets, jewelry,
clothing), and generally celebrating
being alive. This ancient, earth-based
pagan tradition seems to be the one
whose values Aaron Eagle -- with his
green man roots -- aligns with, and
keeps the rest of us in touch with.
Like Ferdinand the Bull, Aaron Eagle
just wants to smell the
flowers.
|
* I have written two
books in which I tell many stories of Aaron
Eagle's birth and development, as well as some
anecdotes about his older sisters whom I raised
mostly before he was born. One is Shakti
Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World (The
New Female Shamanism) published by Harper SF
in 1990; see especially Chapter 9: "Shaman
Mother: Artemis and Her Cubs." The other is
Down Is Up For Aaron Eagle: A Mother's
Spiritual Journey with Down Syndrome,
published by Harper SF in 1994; the whole book
is about Aaron Eagle coming into our lives, and
our complex approaches to his upbringing. That
book, which is out of print, is available to
Awakened Woman readers at a special price of
$7.50 plus $3.00 for postage and handling.
Contact me at vnoble@earthlink.com or you can
mail a check to me at PO BOX 1558, FREEDOM, CA
95019-1558
Order Shakti Woman and Vicki's other
books from Powell's
Independent Bookstore.
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