Learning the lessons of freedom

A year ago—or gosh, it's been longer than that—I wrote a post about how numerology calculates your "birth number." According to John Michael Greer (magician, occultist, and former archdruid), this number "represents the fixed framework of your personality and your life, and it sums up the things about you that won’t change no matter what. It defines the lesson you have come into this incarnation to learn." 

At the time I explained that Brother has a birth number of 4 ("the challenge you face in this incarnation is to learn self-discipline and build solid foundations") and I have 22 (basically the same as 4 but with a rich inner life).

Wife and Marie are both 8's ("the challenge this incarnation sets before you is that of worldly accomplishment"). Son 1 and Son 2 are both 6's ("the challenge you face in this incarnation is learning how to accept responsibility for others").

But I wasn't quite sure what to make of Mother. Her birth number comes out to 5, an unstable number about which Greer says "you are impatient with routine …. you do unexpected things and are constantly heading for new places, and when you get into trouble – which happens fairly often! – you are good at finding a way out." But when I look at her today (in her 80's, admittedly) she is a respected professional in a field that demands a certain level of routine; her recent travel has all been to visit her siblings and their families; and when Father was acting so fecklessly as a businessman, she kept things grounded and running. Somehow none of this fits well with the almost-chaotic temperament I just described.

But I've been thinking about it, and I believe I see the connection. Greer's first statement about the birth number 5 is, "the challenge you face in this incarnation is learning the lessons of freedom, for you will spend this life in restless seeking and you will always choose your own path." Learning the lessons of freedom. I think the point is precisely that Mother has learned those lessons, and so she knows she can't just light out for the Territory any time she feels like it.

I drove down to Big City last weekend to visit her, and we talked about this and that. And she told a story about when she was a little girl, and her family lived more or less on an Army base. (I say "more or less" because her father was a civilian doing scientific work for the military in the years just after World War II, and there was actually a little community of civilian families attached to this base as a result.) Anyway, she loved it. The selective nature of the community and the presence of Military Police everywhere meant that she and her older brother had enormous freedom. Of course they had to go to school, and they had to be home by suppertime. But other than that they could go pretty much anywhere, because it was all safe. And if they got lost, they could ask literally any adult and be put on the right path for home. Yes, in many ways the environment was strictly constrained from an adult perspective. But her view as a little girl was that she had enormous freedom, and she loved it.

Her desire for freedom played itself out in other ways too. Looking only at stories I know, … well, when she went to college she met Father. They started dating, and then they started fucking. This was in the late 1950's, so her parents were shocked—shocked!—to learn that their little girl was having sex. After her freshman year was over they pulled her out of that school, demanded that she come live at home, ordered her never to see Father again, and made plans for her to get her degree at a local college. (Her parents were 100% behind her getting a degree, because they were both scholars of one sort or another. But sex was a bridge too far!)

Mother's answer to this ultimatum was to shout back at them, "You can't force me never to see him again. I'll just marry him! Then you'll have to let me see him, and you'll have to put up with him at family dinners. So there!"

It is only fair to add that her parents answered that by saying, "Oh, you're going to get married? In that case our financial obligation to you is all over, on the day you take your vows. Good luck paying for tuition by yourself." Yes, they found a state school where tuition was almost nominal, at which point she and my dad both transferred there. I was born a couple of years later, apparently after one single night when my dad was in too much of a hurry to bother with a condom. And once they had a baby in the house, their lives started on a trajectory that neither of them ever anticipated. 

But the point is that she did all this out of a desire for freedom. She was not going to let her parents' tired, antiquated, fossilized opinions get in the way of her getting what she wanted. And while obviously I never knew her when she was a rebellious teenager, nor even in her role as a fiery twenty-something—yes, I knew her while she was still in her twenties, but to me she was always Mommy—I've heard her allude to other stories that are consistent with this picture. I think she really did spend her youth as a rebel against the constraints built into the established order, and I want to find a way to ask about this while she is still here to answer.

An interesting side note. I met Wife a year before we married, and we were together for nearly all of that time. To be clear, "we were together" means: I moved into her apartment, we fucked, and we didn't bother to hide any of this. At that point Wife was less offensive than she later became, but for those with eyes to see it was already clear that she was going to be a very difficult daughter-in-law and a far more difficult wife. I refused to see this because of … well, reasons, I guess. Anyway, when we told my parents that we were planning to get married (after about six months together). I remember Mother pulling me aside to say, "Are you marrying her just to make some kind of point? Because if so, let me tell you straight up that's not a good enough reason, and we can talk about this more if you want." I did not take her up on the offer to discuss it more. But I assumed then (and still believe now) that what she meant was that she found marriage to involve far more effort and commitment than she had ever imagined at the time.

In any event, it's important to understand that "learning the lessons of freedom" doesn't just mean All Rebellion, All the Time. It means learning (among other things) that rebellion has a cost, and that every choice (no matter how free it looks while it is still open) nonetheless cuts off all the possibilities tied to the option you choose to forgo. Every choice also brings with it new and unanticipated obligations. When Mother chose to keep fucking Father by marrying him, she accepted the obligation of children. I was born after she got her B.A., but I surely delayed her M.A. Brother was born after she got her M.A., but he was ten years old (and I was almost fifteen) before she got her Ph.D. In the interim, we had spent six years living in another country; Father had been unceremoniously ejected from academic life (by failing his tenure review the first time it came up); and the two of them jointly had acquired the legal responsibility for a family business that neither of them cared about or even understood very well.

Choices have consequences. 

Freedom has consequences.

And I think this is why now, in her eighties, Mother no longer looks like a wild-eyed rebel. She's had the experience of rebellion, and knows what comes next. She was indeed attached to freedom, and desired it with the same intensity that she desired air to breathe. But she found that—in a certain sense—there is no such thing. There are choices, but each choice cuts off far more options than it opens up. So she is in the interesting position of having once desperately desired freedom, and having them learned exactly how much it costs. When I think of Greer's explanations of "birth numbers" compared to the people I know personally, I don't believe that most of us have learned any of the important lessons Greer says we are here to learn. But I think Mother did. 

Good for her. I have sometimes joked that Mother is actually a saint in disguise, but maybe that notion isn't too far from the truth.