your doll smells like pee (paleolithic mythology and the young mother)

Z spent the weekend with grandma, and arrived home from candy land with her typical booty, including a doll manufactured by Mattel in 1971, thrift store fare.  The doll which comes with its own set of cotton panties (about which Z said, “Lucky!”), a ratty blond ponytail (“that I can style myself”), and seems to  have been capable of speaking at one time (“we already tried the batteries”), also smells like pee.  Thus my less than gracious response when forced to kiss the doll, “Your doll smells like pee.”  This did not go over well with the young mother.  

Such role play leads to mythology, the young mother in our house a symbol of the eternal mother.

This week I’m reading Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth.  This handbook of nonfiction kicks off the 2005 series of well-known authors offering modern day twists on classic myths.  (My favorite being Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, the story of Penelope, wife of Odysseus and her side of the travails as The Iliad unfolds.) 

My brain smarts with goddesses of war.  Images of women devouring their sacrifice, women birthing.  The cycle of death and life.   Pictures of birthing goddesses surrounded by animals denote the fierce sense of a woman’s role, their vital work as mother, while men become front line sacrificial soldiers in the struggle to survive.  

How do I explain the goddess to our young mother?  How do I see the necessity of my nurturing these two as goddess-like?

I’ll post a short list of mythology for the wee ones soon.

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