In the Mommy Monster Castle
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In the Mommy Monster Castle By Carolyn Schuk When I began reading to my son I soon noticed how much we like to tell the same stories. I don't mean the exact repetition toddlers demand and parents dread the 1000th reading of The Cat in The Hat. I mean how we find ourselves telling ancient and eternal stories — stories that human beings have probably been telling in one form or another since we could speak spontaneously, in our own metaphors and symbols. When my son was little, he and I played a game we called Mommy Monster. I was the Mommy Monster who trapped him in Mommy Monster Castle where he would stay, variously, three, four, or five years old, forever. The only weapon that could immobilize the Mommy Monster was a kiss. A compulsive intellectualizer, it quickly became clear to me that Mommy Monster was a variant of the Sleeping Beauty story; so much so that I spent several weeks searching out variants of the story and its interpretations. The fourteenth century “Perceforest,” “The Ninth Captain's Tale” from 1001 Nights, the Grimm brothers' “Little Briar-Rose,” Giovanni Basile's 1630 version “The Sun and the Moon and Talia,” and, of course, Charles Perrault's 1695 re-telling of the story, I duly read and considered. Most of these stories include a cannibal ogress of a mother or wife — usually excised today by modern disneyfied taste — who seems to be the Mommy Monster’s dark side. In these stories — as sort of a coda to main action — the wife/mother, fired by jealousy, serves what she thinks is Sleeping Beauty and the Prince's children to her son. Of course, that fortuitous hunter who appears in Snow White, has conveniently arranged things so that Sleeping Beauty and her children are safely hidden and everything comes out satisfyingly in the end with the ogress herself falling into the dinner pot. The Mommy Monster is also a devourer, although she devours her little boy in order to keep him perpetually safe and innocent. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettleheim interprets the long sleep as an escape from change — everything stops the moment the princess falls asleep — and the princess cannot grow into an adult as long as she sleeps. An anonymous essay I found on the Internet, "Sleeping and Waking," draws the connection between Sleeping Beauty and the operas of Richard Wagner. While the most obvious reference is in The Ring where Siegfried wakes Brunnhilde with a kiss, Parsifal, too, is awakened by a kiss and with that kiss takes away Kundry's sins; this kiss lets its giver transcend the bounds of inexperienced youth to become a Hero and Christ-figure. We played Mommy Monster until my son grew big enough to injure me in our rough-housing. He is now 13, and is still affectionate in private, where none of his peers can witness my transgressions of love upon his person. But I will always remember with particular pleasure the Mommy Monster Castle, where little boys stay four or five forever, with smooth cheeks made for mothers to kiss, and where only such a kiss can release childhood’s magic hold. Carolyn Schuk is a freelance writer with multiple personalities. Her Dr. Jekyll persona writes regularly for technology trade publications, the Silicon Valley Biz Ink, and the Santa Clara Weekly. In her Mr. Hyde personality, she writes poetry exhibiting a distinctly morbid fin de siecle aesthetic, some of which has appeared in Glass Tesseract and VERSES Magazine. She keeps her alter- egos in check by writing humorous essays on eccentric subjects. Carolyn lives in Santa Clara with her husband, 13 year old son and their attack cat, Cheddar. Contact her at cschuk@earthlink.net © siliconmom
