the cailleach saves the day.

what happens when you ask the sky to rescue you from this immovable moment.

So it’s 48 degrees and my six year old is sitting outside on a cold stone, eyebrows knitted together like a deep ravine, and nothing but a thin shirt on.  No pants, no socks or shoes - forget the jacket or hat - and absolutely no willingness to change his position.  He is miserable and cold, but can only spit out of his tense lips, “jus leave me alone!!!”  what he’s furious hardly matters against the fact that I can’t leave this willful child out to freeze, and I can’t drag him in cause he’s huge and I’m 5 feet and shrinking.

After trying all the tricks of every parenting book on “highly sensitive children” I’ve ever read, I cast my eyes up and plead with the trees, the sky, anybody to help me out.

Then I remember the Cailleach.

It’s pronounced kayak, an old Celtic word for the storm hag, bringer of the cold north winds and ruler over winter and cold water.  I loosen my hinges just a tad and tell him that it appears he’s been invaded by the menacing Cailleach - storm hag, and that I will not let her take my child from me.  There is an air of deep concern in my voice, and his eyebrows immediately shift from unibrow trying to crush his eyeballs to open question mark full of vulnerability.  I tell him I can’t say more until we are inside. 

While I make him a hot footbath and some chamomile lemon balm tea, I chatter on about this storm hag, and how, though she isn’t inherently evil, she can possess us when we are vulnerable and make us do crazy things, like go outside without pants on a cloudy spring day and refuse to come inside. 

“So what makes you vulnerable to the Cailleach?” he asks. 

“When we lose control of our temper we lose our minds a little and become more open to her influence.  The more she takes over, the more crazy stuff we end up doing.” 

I go on to tell him about how hypothermia can make people take all their clothes off in the snow, trying to keep a shred of ‘scientifically viable’ information involved for this kid who hates to be lied to.  But as he calms down, and warms up, he begins to add his own layers.  He asks about who rules the summer (Saulè), who the goddess of the earth is (Laimè), and how our cat is probably a goddess who protects him from this stormy cold Cailleach.  I totally agree, thinking about how often she chooses his chest to curl up on.

I speak about the battle of Spring, when the Cailleach and Saulè duke it out over who gets to preside over the weather.  I tell him about the dangers of every element, when it’s thrown out of balance, and the necessity of movement to keep the peace between these elemental beings.  I weave and weave, working the story of the seasons into this tactic that seems to be working better to regulate him than any amount of “stay listening” or empathizing or boundary making could.  And the regulation holds.  When the sun blasts into the kitchen just as he’s putting his legs in his pants, he smiles and says, “look! Saulé is winning!”  I silently tuck away her story of imbalance for another day, knowing that fire can be as dangerous as ice.

When I’m dropping him off to work with his dad – to buy the remote control car he desperately wants – the clouds return and he puts his own jacket on without prompt.   I try to keep my jaw from hitting the ground.  When we pass the vulture eating the rabbit in the road, he asks, “who deals with death, is it that bird you think?”

We continue to animate our landscape throughout the day, and when I need her, I let the Cailleach come in with her lessons.  I get to be on his side, shoulder to shoulder, and we don’t have to engage in a battle of wills, once.

This is a kid who doesn’t want to believe in the moon fairy, the tooth fairy, garden gnomes, or any amount of magical thinking where he sniffs a little white lie.  He wants the truth.  But these deities rooted in time and place, they animate his world in a way that weaves an even deeper truth than I could ever give him: the world is both terrible and beautiful, full of sun and warmth and cold and death, all at once.  Animacy is a direct experience of what’s happening, no dogma needed.  And that’s just right.

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