Wednesday's Child

Finding my way back from the past

The Magic Flower Game (1941, oil on canvas) by Dorothea Tanning

What I brought back from a two month journey into the depths — a deeply personal essay on inheriting and rewriting the stories that shape us, opening with a self-portrait poem birthed this Scorpio season, as told by a child of Wednesday.

Self-Portrait as Wednesday’s Child

On a Wednesday, I was born, 
and on a Wednesday, I was told – 
I would one day be turned 
from a girl into a swan
by the gale force of a witch’s spite

and after I was born, I bloomed 
into a bouquet of scars
seen by no one, yet if
you asked, I would say – 

my scars are like cascades
of a waterfall, born from 
an original hurt, 
engulfed

over time by a flood of tiny tyrannies 
that I drew close to me, 
picking each one up to swallow, 
whole, till I could feel myself,

engorged
with those tiny tyrannies
I mistook for my heart’s comfort
even as they exploded

everywhere, inside 
and I deepened myself into 
the yawning canyon, 
within
 
Wednesday came, and by
the gale force of a witch’s spite,
I was turned from a girl into a swan,
waiting

in silence for rescue by someone 
who could sew me a white dress 
out of stinging nettle, to break 
the spell, to win the race

against eternal time and 
invisible forces 
from the outside world –
I waited 

for someone to bring me the day 
I could return to being a girl –
I waited,
while

silence gaped,
the dark grew late,
and time washed 
the hours away

One Wednesday, I woke from 
a dream where I had seen 
that I was not only the swan,
but I was also the seamstress, 
and I was also the dress

I woke up one Wednesday
to find melancholic green
growing into a Valkyrie
of untamed wilderness

out of my body, 
and I looked down to see 
that the stinging nettle,
she, too, was me

---

☾₊ ⊹

This self-portrait poem draws upon symbolic elements from the stories, “The Wild Swans”, by Hans Christian Andersen and “The Six Swans” by the Brothers Grimm, while putting a spin on the traditional storylines of both.

I would recommend reading both these stories to access their full richness in metaphor, symbolism, and archetypes, but here’s a summary too —

In both stories, a stepmother turns the sons of her unsuspecting husband, the king, into swans, out of spite and jealousy. This act is observed by her stepdaughter, who is told that in order to save her brothers and turn them back into humans, she must spend years in complete silence, while gathering and crushing stinging nettles into flax, which she must then use to sew a shirt for each of her brothers to wear and break the spell.

In the years the girl spends in silence, crushing stinging nettle with her feet, spinning, weaving, and sewing, people around her grow suspicious of her silence. She is framed for committing crimes and arrested to be taken to the stake for burning.

Just before she is brought to the stake, she manages to finish sewing the shirts, all except for the sleeve of one shirt, and the swans arrive in time for her to put the shirts on for them. All her brothers turn back into humans, except for her youngest brother, who is left with a swan’s wing where his shirt sleeve was incomplete.

Free to speak again, she is able to prove her innocence of the crimes, and she goes on to live happily with her brothers (and a king from another kingdom, who she marries).

These stories, like many other fairytales and children’s stories, have been analyzed from different psychological and mythological perspectives, and in particular, the stinging nettles, the enforced period of silence, and the swans have rich symbolic and metaphorical significance.

The imagery in this poem was also inspired by the themes of transformation and metamorphosis explored in the Surrealist paintings of the painter, sculptor, and writer, Dorothea Tanning, whose painting, The Magic Flower Game (1941), is featured above.

This poem and the essay that follows, have been published with both intention and synchronicity on this day of the New Moon in Scorpio.

In astrology, Scorpio is the archetype of the magician and the alchemist, representing power, transformation, facing the shadows, and journeying into the underworld. Scorpio season is the month that the Sun spends travelling through the zodiac sign of Scorpio, from 22 October to 21 November.

New Moons, also known as dark moons (because they’re not visible from Earth), mark the start of a lunar cycle, when the Moon and the Sun sit next to each other.

New Moons signify new beginnings, renewal, rebirth, and a time to plant seeds for the future.

                                                                                                                                                ☾₊ ⊹                                                                                                                                                

Long Day’s Journey into Night

Back in September, a doorway opened for me into another world.

I didn’t realise it then, but looking back at the end of writing this piece, I know it now.

In mid-September, the central and northern regions of Portugal were engulfed by a week of devastating, widespread fires, which were set off by individual fires being started illegally in three different locations, amidst extremely dry conditions.

On Portugal’s digital fire map, we could see how quickly individual fires were spreading and joining together into much bigger fires. Our firefighting services were overwhelmed, even with aid and support being sent in from neighbouring countries.

Where my partner and I live in the city of Porto, we were encircled by fires from all directions. The skies turned apocalyptic orange, the sun looked like the red eye of Sauron on days we could even see it, and we found ourselves in the chokehold of thick whirling dervishes of ash, soot, and smoke.

We had to stay indoors and keep all doors and windows sealed shut for days, the oxygen levels plummeted, and parts of our apartment felt like being in a smoke storm.

Due to my personal history, being in situations where I feel trapped and unsafe in an environment I regard as home, activates an overwhelming trauma response in me. In the thick of the fires mid-week, when it looked like no end was in sight, I collapsed onto the sofa, filled with terror, and crying like a child.

Slowly, thanks to the care and co-regulation I received from people around me (from my partner, who constantly reassured me while taking it upon himself to venture out for groceries and to donate food and drinks to the firefighters, to our Portuguese neighbour, who came by to check in on us and gift us traditional Portuguese croissants he had cycled out quickly to buy from a local bakery that morning), my brain and nervous system were able to learn and understand that even though I was experiencing immense terror, I was still safe. I was still breathing, still alive.

At the end of the week, heavy rain arrived, extinguishing most of the fires.

And so, ultimately, it was nature herself who held the ability we did not have, to effectively meet and contain herself.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but that experience of the fires opened a doorway for me to get in touch with, and access, internal depths of terror that I had not fully felt or experienced with such clarity and consciousness before.

A few weeks later, I found myself plunged into similar depths again, this time in response to a different sort of fire — one that was invisibly burning away an expired version of safety and stability, which had taken the form of the material and psychological structures I had spent over 10 years building, during the life I had formerly lived, in London.

Because of my earlier encounter of the dark depths with the fires, I found that I could better understand the language of the deep this time, and I could even draw myself a map to navigate through this underworld.

In the past month, standing at the crater’s edge of a volcano erupting the vestiges of my former life into cinders, I have encountered inner landscapes of the self that led me to contemplate the stories that shape the self — the stories we are born into, the stories we are told, and the stories that we come to believe about ourselves.

One of my earliest memories of a story that was read to me as a description of self was the children’s nursery rhyme, Monday’s Child, about the fates and futures of children, depending on the day of the week on which they were born.

There have been several variations of the rhyme, with the predicted characteristics of children swapped for different days in different variations.

But it so happened that the version found by my mother in the book of children’s rhymes she read to me, was this one:

~

Monday's child is fair of face,

Tuesday's child is full of grace.

Wednesday's child is full of woe,

Thursday's child has far to go.

Friday's child is loving and giving,

Saturday's child works hard for a living.

But the child that is born on Sabbath day,

Is bonny and blithe, good and gay

~

I am Wednesday’s child.

I think it might be fair to recall both my mother and me being at least a little disappointed at this revelation about Wednesday’s child, when we were reading the rhyme together.

“Oh no,” said my mother.

I asked my mother which child she was. Sunday’s child (Sabbath day in the rhyme), she told me. I asked her which child my younger brother was. Thursday’s child, she said.

She seemed satisfied about Sunday’s child and Thursday’s child.

I think that shortly after, we turned to a different rhyme to change the subject. I don’t remember ever discussing this with my mother again.

〰️

But recently, this memory of my mother and me encountering this rhyme when I was a child, surfaced for me.

I was writing a poem (which turned into the one shared above) in response to a prompt about things I carry with me from a place I no longer live in.

I have lived in many different places that I no longer live in today. The first thought that came to me was that the one thing in common I carry with me from all these places are scars — specifically, invisible scars.

We were also prompted to think about something that could symbolise, or be a container for, these things that came to mind for us.

The symbol that came to me as the representation of my invisible scars, was stinging nettle.

As a child growing up in irretrievably urbanized Singapore, I had never come across stinging nettle in real life, but I learnt about stinging nettle from different children’s stories I read, which had come from Western cultures and civilizations.

In the stories I read, nettle was never just called “nettle”, it was always referred to as “stinging nettle”, with emphasis on how much they “burned like fire” when touched by the skin.

As a child, I found myself equipped with a keenly developed sensitivity and aversion to sensory pain, and reading these stories, I remember hoping that I would never come into contact with stinging nettle.

Yet, while I never did find myself getting to know the fire burning touch of stinging nettle on my skin, I did come to discover that being burned like fire can be experienced not just as a sensation, but also as an emotional state and a state of the psyche.

I was the firstborn grandchild in all of my extended family, both paternal and maternal.

And when I was born, my birth was, so I heard, seen as the frustration of an inter-generational wish.

Since I could understand words, I had heard my mother telling and reminding me that the hope of my paternal extended family had been for the firstborn grandchild to be male, as my father had been within his generation, and as his father, my paternal grandfather, had been within his generation (for insight into the cultural beliefs behind this preference, see my earlier essay, If Loneliness Was A Flower).

Because of this, my mother told me, I had much to do to compensate for my inadvertent role in the frustration of this wish.

On the other hand, my father never said a word about this to me.

All the same, this seed grew into a sprawling narrative with a life of its own, that took over my mother’s perception of herself and of me, in relation to the rest of the family and to society.

Life became one long, never-ending journey of my mother’s dependence on me to prove — through academic and career achievement, in my case — that I was as good and worthy as if I had been born male, and therefore, that she was as good and worthy as if her firstborn child had been male.

For the most part, this story coloured my child’s view of the purpose of my existence and the shape of my potential in life.

But unknown to anyone in my family, initially not even to myself, there was another different seed that had been planted inside me, and was slowly being nurtured by myself, unseen by anyone.

〰️

Since I could understand words, I have loved them, and I have been reading stories, riding on the back of my imagination off to different worlds, where I lived different stories as different people.

As that different seed settled in the soil of my inner landscape and began sprouting, I created stories of my own worlds and characters through words and drawings. I fell in love with languages and literature, both in English and Chinese, which I studied at school. I chose to specialise in the study of literature and the humanities in the final two years of high school, instead of science and mathematics, greatly disappointing my father, who had always wished for me to be a doctor.

Out of “nowhere”, I developed a fascination with the Spanish language and signed myself up for Spanish classes at a tiny language school. I started dreaming of encountering and experiencing, in real life, the different worlds and places I had gotten to know through words.

In my final year of high school, I announced to my parents that my wish was to go to university abroad, and I would be going to the United States. I remember the arrival of the letter informing me that I had been admitted to my dream Ivy League university, together with an award of a substantial scholarship.

I have no memory of celebrations. I do have a strange, small memory of not feeling as happy as I had logically expected to be.

After graduating from that same university with a liberal arts degree (which included two years of intensive study of Spanish), while my friends from high school in Singapore were busy climbing the ladders of careers in medicine and law, I was working for a nonprofit cultural and policy organization in New York City.

Over half my salary every month was spent on rent for an East Village apartment I shared with two flatmates who changed from time to time, but who always earned quite a bit more than I did. The rest of my salary I spent on — what else but — experiencing life in the Big Apple.

I had no savings, except for the surprise tax refunds I received at the end of each year for having overpaid in taxes earlier in the year. And yet, I felt I was living at the centre of the universe in Manhattan, and I rejoiced at getting paid to travel abroad to Asia several times for work, including twice to one of my favourite countries, Japan.

From the other side of the world, my parents’ distress at my life path had been steadily snowballing and soon began spilling over — “We don’t understand what you are doing, we don’t know what to tell people about what you are doing.”

The story I was writing was unintelligible to them, and they seemed to really have a distaste for it.

〰️

Two years into my New Yorker life, somewhere in the middle of all this, I returned to Singapore for an internship with the civil service and was offered a job at the end of it. The ultimate offer of stability, security, and predictability.

As I looked at the job offer in my hand, I could see in my mind exactly how my life would be like in 10 years, down to every detail.

It would look exactly like how it looked on the first day of my internship.

That thought terrified me. If I was living out a story where the plot was already known, would I really be living?

I turned down the job offer. I could read in my parents’ faces the story they were writing about me in their heads.

I ran away from their disappointment and found myself on a new continent, in London, determined to build a life for myself where I couldn’t see where I would be in 10 years. That was what mattered most to me, I decided. That was what being free meant to me.

I also decided that this time, I needed to give myself a foundation that was financially secure, stable, and independent over the long term.

Back then, with the imagination that I had, the one viable path I could see involved entering a legal career in the UK, where my postgraduate education, process of qualifying as a lawyer, and right to live and work in a new country would all be sponsored by my employer.

In addition, I knew that my legal qualification would ultimately give me the ability to work in numerous countries all over the world, with the sponsorship of my employer, which had a global presence.

That had all also represented freedom, then, to me.

In the process of walking an uncertain path far away from my first home, to realize for myself a life that represented freedom to me, I faced a prolonged period of battling against torrential lashings of doubt, disappointment, impatience, and scepticism being continuously cast onto me by people who I most needed to believe in me.

In the years I spent abroad on my own, I lost my beloved maternal grandparents, one after the other, to death, and felt myself crushed eternally by my inability to be with them at the time of their passing.

In those years, in different and devastating ways, I also came to realize and experience the full force of the transactional lens through which I was viewed and evaluated, in one of the most fundamental relationships of my childhood and adult life.

A memory comes to me of my 26 year old self crying in the shower, telling myself that if I ever had a child (which I didn’t think I wanted to, and still don’t), I would do anything I could to make sure they never felt the pain of experiencing conditionality in a parent’s love.

And so it was that I came to live many years of my life unconsciously steered by this gale force of transactional and conditional love.

It watched me crashing myself — sometimes violently — against myself, and against others, as I was unknowingly shaped and scraped by my growing collection of invisible scars.

And along the way, on my path of defying the people who I needed, but were unable, to believe in me, I ended up embarking on a career in London that was outwardly associated with prestige and success, but that inwardly hollowed me out and wrung me dry.

On the day I left my first job as a lawyer, where I had spent 6 years, two of my managers at work came over to tell me how much they had respected my work and my contributions to the firm. They both told me, in different ways, how proud they were of me, and how proud I should be of myself.

I burst into tears in front of them. They must have thought I was very sad to leave.

What I couldn’t tell them was that, at the age of 35, they were the first people in my life I had ever heard tell me they were proud of me.

〰️

Just the other day, while confronted with the overwhelming sense of grief and loss at formally letting go of one of the final pieces of life that represented my attachment to the security of my former career and identity, I wondered why and how releasing something I knew for sure I did not even want anymore, could surface a grief and loss that felt so overwhelming and so profound.

I sat with my grief, and I realized that the career and life I had built for myself in London over 10 years had represented much, much more than material stability to me.

It had represented my ability to somehow believe in myself when the people I longed for to believe in me, strongly did not.

It had represented my ability to give myself what everyone in my family (except for my younger brother, who has always been my light in the dark) had expressly doubted I could.

In a way, it provided me with a highly tangible, external source of validation and approval that substituted, always imperfectly, for what I had always sought from my parents, but never received.

It had served for many years as a type of armour and self-protection for me, in the psychological, emotional, and material sense.

From that perspective, the tears I cried, and the terror I felt, at shedding that armour — they made sense.

〰️

Since leaving my legal career to let myself pursue and live a creative life based on no one else’s permission, the words that have poured out of me as a writer started piecing themselves together to reveal to me a story I have been living, without being aware of it before.

All these years, I have been on a journey with an uncertain, possibly non-existent destination.

It is perhaps that same journey that the writer, Annie Ernaux, recognizes as the one where, “I have searched for my mother’s love in all the corners of the world”.

And so I realized that, through my inner world, I had become intimately acquainted with the fire burn of stinging nettle all this time, after all.

Perhaps the freedom I had been chasing, had in fact, been an escape, an unconscious avoidance of facing up to this story that was part of me.

Perhaps real freedom is the day I am able to acknowledge that this story has been, is, and will always be a part of me, and yet know that it is not all of me.

How does your garden grow

In my personal experience of psychotherapy, I found that the focus was always on asking and answering the questions — What happened to you? Where did things go wrong? Why did you become who you are?

But what happens after we understand what happened to us, why / where things went wrong, why we became who we are?

What are we left with, after that?

What about the more important questions — who am I, despite what happened to me? What things can still go right, despite all the things that went wrong? Who do I want to be, if I am not told who to be?

These questions, I believe, can only be answered through the imagination.

It is in the realm of the imaginal, where we look for and find the new seeds we want to plant, after clearing the fields of the debris from the storm.

It is in the realm of the imaginal, through the primordial language of nature, symbols and metaphors, that we envision how to unearth, mix and match new and different seeds in new and different ways.

It is in the realm of the imaginal, that we find our freedom to grow our own garden, in just the way we want it to be. And it is here that we learn to love our garden, however it turns out.

It is in the realm of the imaginal, that we develop our capacity to hold the paradox of the human condition and the human experience — where I can hold the paradox that I do in fact need my parents to be proud of me, and at the same time, I don’t.

Where I can hold the paradox that I am my parents, and at the same time, I am not.

Where I can hold the paradox that for the most part, I love my parents, and for the most part, I don’t speak to them, and I guess, the same goes for them with me (leaving aside the debate of what love means to each of us).

Much like the paradox embodied by nature. Like the ocean, which gives, as well as takes. Like nettle, whose juice contains the ability to heal the sting it inflicts.

It is in the realm of the imaginal, that we make meaning of what has happened to us, and can stand back to see how what has happened to us is simply one part of the journey.

It is the realm of the imaginal, that offers us the magic of expanding the context and the perspective beyond the limitations of what happened to us, to imagine what we want to personally make happen next.

And it is in the realm of the imaginal, where we, as the conscious witness to, and participant in, our imagination, understand that we are not only the story, but also the storyteller.

Where we see that what happened to us is far from being the whole story. It is only the beginning of the story.

And the rest of the story gets to be written by us, by ourselves.

In starting to learn Spanish when I was 16, I soon encountered the Spanish word for Wednesday – “miércoles”.

But it wasn’t until more than 20 years later, that I got curious about the word “miércoles”, and I looked it up to learn that it has its roots in the Latin for “Mercury Day”, named after the Roman god, Mercury (Hermes in Greek mythology, and Odin in Norse mythology).

(Later, in studying astrology, I came to understand the special significance that the planet, Mercury, has always had for me — but more on this in a future piece).

Going further down the rabbit hole, I discovered that the English word “Wednesday”, similar to the word in other Germanic languages, is named for “Woden’s Day”, with Woden being another name for Odin.

Mercury / Hermes / Odin are the gods associated with magic, words, language, knowledge, trickery, shapeshifting, the crossroads, and transformation. They are also regarded as messengers and guides between worlds.

Odin, in particular, rules poets and storytellers. He has two ravens, named “Thought” (Huginn) and “Memory” (Muninn), which he sends out across the worlds each day to observe what goes on, and bring information back to him.

In the Poetic Edda, a source collection of ancient Norse mythology, we are told, from Odin’s perspective —

“Thought and Memory

every day fly over the earth.

I fear for Thought,

that he may not return

Yet still more I fear

the loss of Memory.”

As the storyteller and evolutionary astrologer, Steven Forrest, puts it, Thought and Memory represent “alertness to the present moment, with full knowledge of the past”.

---

                                                                        
                                                                        𑁍

In the quiet heart of the night sometimes, as I read or write, or through the washing machine rumble of autumn afternoons, memories I had unknowingly lost, find their way back to me without me consciously reaching for them.

In those times, I remember other stories my mother created to tell me when I was much younger, before she stopped — stories that accompanied and entertained me as she brushed my teeth, and we laughed together at the toothpaste that fell out of my mouth.

Stories that belonged to a different her, to a different me, and to a different time.

Stories that are reawakened through my remembering, and will go back to sleep until they are remembered again, perhaps by my mother, perhaps only by me.

                                                                        𑁍

Another story, belonging to a different person, to a different time.

I remember how on my last visit home eight months ago, I learnt that following the recent passing of my paternal grandfather, among his possessions had been found a handwritten letter written by him for me.

It dated back almost exactly 20 years ago, around the time I was leaving for university in the US. No one had ever known about the letter, and no one knew why he had never given it to me.

I read the letter 20 years late(r). He had written, in his Chinese handwriting that I had never seen before —

“Dear Su Yin,

You are the first in our family to be going abroad to study. It is not easy to go and be so far away from your family. May you work hard and make a big success of yourself, and more importantly, return home soon to your family.

Your Grandfather”

That unsent letter contained the most words my grandfather had ever communicated to me in my entire life.

Throughout the years, including the years he had dementia before his passing, he had never spoken to me, beyond acknowledging my greetings to him when I saw him once or twice a year.

I wondered if I would have made different decisions in life, had I read this letter when it was written.

I wondered what my grandfather thought about me, knowing what he did about my life choices, in all those years when he said nothing to me (that I could hear, at least).

I wonder.

                                                                          𑁍

---

I see Thought and Memory, too, as the two torches that spark the imagination.

In writing my self-portrait poem as Wednesday’s Child, the word “Valkyrie” came to me from out of the swirls of my imagination.

I knew from something I had read somewhere, sometime, that the Valkyrie is feminine in nature, and associated with battle, but I didn’t know exactly what she was.

After writing my poem, I looked up the Valkyries, and discovered that in Norse mythology, they were female beings who could fly, and wearing helmets and shields, they were sent by Odin into battlefields to choose the slain warriors who would join Odin in the blissful palace of Valhalla after their death.

The name “Valkyrie” means “chooser of the slain”, and the Valkyries were associated with brightness, fairness, gold, and bloodshed.

Life after death after life.

It felt like the closing of a circle.

And in the end, here I am, happy to have been, and to always be, Wednesday’s Child.

                                                                        
                                                                        ⟢

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𓇢 The seed for the opening self-portrait poem was a set of writing prompts offered by Trivarna Hariharan in the Wildflowers are Prayers writing community.

♫⋆｡ The incredible album, O, by Damien Rice (which I could swear was written to accompany me in writing this — thank you, Damien) was released in my childhood in 2003, and it was the soundtrack that accompanied the flowering of this piece into the form you see here.

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