Mortified

Being loved 'anyway'. Thoughts on the Hanged Man-with a side of the Enneagram

On the last morning of my mother’s life, I sat next to her hospital bed, stroking the thin, bruised skin of her arm. She wasn’t speaking much beyond single words at this point, because it was so hard for her to breathe. She was disoriented, too, losing her sense of time, though she still knew all of her friends and family. I had one of her favorite bands, The Mavericks, playing on my phone. Her skin was turning waxy and the color was strange. Her jaw hung open and white film grew on the inside of her lower lip, which I would gently wipe away. All she’d eaten for the last few weeks were random bites of vanilla ice cream; her cheek bones were sharp and her teeth seemed enormous.

I told her that her sister-in-law, my father’s sister from California, was flying in that afternoon to see her. She rolled her head over to look at me and gasped out: MORTIFIED.

My mother wasn’t a vain woman in the traditional sense. She never wore makeup, kept her hair short so she wouldn’t have to fuss with it. Her skincare routine consisted of witch hazel scented with rosewater, and that’s literally it. She wasn’t mortified because of how she looked here at the end–which was objectively very bad. She was mortified because she was so helpless. She had nothing to offer.

My mother grew up on a farm in Iowa, with no indoor plumbing. You earned your place in that world, through labor. She said that her parents, immigrants from Sweden, never told her that they loved her.

My mother could say those words to me, but mostly she wanted to clean my house. Service was her love language. She was still earning her place.

And now, unable to make conversation or offer iced tea to her visitors- reduced, in fact, to absolute dependence-there was no way to earn anything. She could not prove herself worthy of love.

Mortified. I cried when she said that, though I tried to hide it from her. There is nothing to be embarrassed about, I said. People just want to love you, and no one is judging you at all.

I know it’s ok, she managed to say. It was her last complete sentence.

I mentioned in my last piece on my mother’s dying that I’m in a Hanged Man year. I wrote about it as ‘death’s waiting room’ and the weird liminal space of it–waiting for someone to die, having to surrender to a process you have no control over.

And this is another lesson in Hanged Man energy that my mother has given me: the mortification of it. And ultimately, the grace of it. She didn’t want to be seen so fully exposed, helpless. Hanged Man is an unflattering position to find yourself in. You can’t hide. And worst of all, people are going to see you like that and then love you anyway. It’s hard work to receive that sort of love–the love you didn’t ‘earn’.

Hanged Man connects to the Empress (12 reduces to 3). We can connect the Empress, card 3, to the type 3 on the Enneagram. Type 3s are sometimes called ‘chameleons’. They are image-makers and success seekers, driven to exceed expectations and get that shiny gold star of approval. Essentially, they are always working to earn love.

You’ve likely read somewhere in Tarot literature that the shadow of the Empress is deception, from that old misogynist accusation that women deceive through beauty- and the enhancement of their beauty- in order to bend men to their will. Interestingly, the ‘vice’ of the Enneagram type 3 is deception, but it’s a subtle and unconscious thing. It’s an intuitive shape-shifting, allowing them to perform for any audience–not in order to manipulate, but so that they can earn their place in the circle of belonging.

Of course, this tendency isn’t just a 3 thing. Many of us do this to varying degrees, because deep down, we don’t believe in our essential worth. We can’t conceive of love that is given to us simply because we exist. We have to prove our worthiness. We have to be beautiful, we have to be degreed and decorated, we have to be charming–we have to meet whatever metric that we learned early on would make us lovable.

And it’s funny that the Empress is the archetype that is most connected to motherhood. Babies are loved by their mothers unconditionally (ideally, anyway), and certainly babies have not earned that love. It is love that is freely given. Babies are loved for the mere fact of their existence. The Empress mirrors to us the efforts we’re making to be ‘lovable’, and then reminds us that they’re unnecessary. We are inherently worthy.

Hanged Man is a place where we really put that idea to the test. In the Empress, we can arrange ourselves in the most flattering light, but in the Hanged Man, there is no way to adjust our position. We are on display, helpless to hide or posture. It’s all out there.

The ‘virtue’ of type 3 is ‘Veracity’--in other words, honesty or authenticity. And when I think about that in the context of the Hanged Man, it’s not that we are our ‘most true selves’ in this energy (what does that even mean anyway?), but that all our efforts at ‘deception’ fail us.

Like my mother in that hospital bed, receiving her visitors. She had no choice but for people to see her helpless, her hair plastered to her forehead, her teeth gone gray, head lolling. She couldn’t pretend to be ‘fine’. She was stripped of her ability to ‘deceive’. The raw and naked and ugly truth of the moment was all there was.

It was mortifying. And it was also okay. She finally, in the end, had no choice but to receive love and care. That’s what the Hanged Man gave her. Her dying strung her up, helpless, and said: let them. Let them see you and love you, and may you finally understand that you don’t have to earn it. It will be freely given.

For a Tarot exercise, pull a card for these 3 statements:

I do not have to earn love or approval

There is a love that is freely given

I allow myself to receive it

And I would just notice any dissonance in the cards you pull; it will show you where you have resistance. For instance, for ‘there is a love that is freely given’, I drew 5 of Swords and the Devil (had to see if the first time was a fluke!). Clearly, I do not believe that statement. So, if something similar happens for you, and you want to read further, I recommend 2 more cards: Why am I resistant to this truth/statement? and How can I open to it?