Daemons at Christmas: Pullman and the stories of childhood

I am deep in the summer haze and feel very far from this blog. I’m reading and listening to music and playing card games and swimming and talking. I’m not doing a lot of thinking, and SOTM requires thought. It has been a relief to have a break from the necessity of using my brain. I’m not required to get further than “what’s for dinner?” or “how many days since I’ve showered?” But still, it doesn’t take long to miss it.

I’m at my family’s bach (holiday house) beside a lake. A place I’ve been coming to since I was a baby. A place my dad came to every summer from the age of 9. It is such a privilege to have a place like this in my history and in my heart. It’s fundamentally grounding. So many of my origin stories are bound up in this place.

There’s the “wimpy” child who was too scared to jump into the water from the tree on the island across the bay from our house. Who stood there almost leaping — then hesitating — for what seemed like hours while my brother and sister shouted at me to “just do it” from the dinghy below. I couldn’t climb down the tree again, too precarious. The only option was to jump. It was about a 3 metre drop. I don’t remember how old I was, 7? 8? I do remember standing up there crying with frustration and fear, hating myself. I remember my siblings deciding they needed to head back across the bay to get parental assistance. They started the little outboard motor, turned the dinghy around and left me there. That was my trigger. The moment their backs were turned I leapt. All I felt was relief.

There’s the stubborn girl who wept while waterskiing. I cried all the way around the bay on principle because my parents forced me to do it. They practically threw me into the water each day, chucked the skis at me and told me to enjoy it. I submitted to the skiing, but not to the enjoyment. My childhood was filled with little inner rebellions like this. I imagined myself as a Braveheart-like character: they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom! I was too young to understand that my refusal to appreciate the moment — the wind on my face, the water gliding beneath my feet, the bush-clad hills all around — was not a point scored against my parents but an opportunity lost for myself.

There’s the dreamer who used to clutch a little pounamu dolphin pendant in my fist whenever I leapt off the jetty at the hot pools, convinced if I imagined hard enough I’d turn into a dolphin and swim away.

I’ve spent the past week with my family here. Not just my kids and husband but my sister, her family and both our parents. They know all these stories. For them (and for me), these are the building blocks of who they understand me to be. It’s this deep context that affords me an instant sense of peace when I arrive here, as if this little house by the lake is where my edges come into focus. My sister and I tell each other there’s no other place in the world we feel truly calm.

In keeping with my general theory of adulthood — that it’s about learning to hold opposing truths in balance — this holiday has also reminded me that spending time with family as an adult can be trying because you often feel constrained by the rigidity of their beliefs about who you are. There is this sense of safety, yes, but also of regression. It’s like the selves I’ve welcomed in the decades since leaving home fade into obscurity when faced with the inescapable narrative of my childhood.

As an adult I’ve overcome my fear of taking the plunge, literally and figuratively. I’ve learned who suffers when stands are taken. I’ve realised that magic in this world does not come from wishes — it’s an act of creation brought to life by perspective and sheer force of will. My family don’t know these stories so well, and neither does this place.

So my current self, my hard-fought self, she is somewhat absent here, and I miss her.

I’m re-reading the first two novels in Phillip Pullman’s Book of Dust series because I’m about to get the third and final book for Christmas. In the 2nd book, The Secret Commonwealth, our heroine from His Dark Materials, Lyra Silvertongue, is now 20 years old, a student studying at Oxford (Pullman’s version). She’s changed from the precocious, daring, morally absolute child of the first trilogy. Her daemon, Pantalaimon, doesn’t like the change.

If you haven’t read Pullman before, know that in his alternate version of our reality, humans house a segment of their souls outside of their bodies in the form of a creature companion called a daemon. Humans and daemons are strongly bonded, unable to be more than a few metres apart without causing unendurable pain to both. Children before they hit puberty have daemon’s that can change shape, when they grow into adults their daemon’s settle into one form.

Pan in The Book of Dust is a pine marten. The Lyra-Pan dichotomy has settled into adulthood, but Pan, one part of her ‘self’, longs for the Lyra of their childhoods. The narrative-bound identity he holds for her no longer fits the person she’s become.

Pullman uses his human-daemon device to articulate precisely the common tension felt between family members in adulthood. We change so much across weeks, let alone years. As we spend more and more time apart from our family members and build our own lives, it’s natural that our story changes, while their ‘story of us’ stays the same. Lyra and Pan spend more time apart after the events of His Dark Materials (no spoilers), they stop growing together and start growing apart. A death knell for intimacy.

It seems to me that guiding your human story to grow alongside another’s is a work of continual effort and no small amount of luck.  I’ve said before that truly knowing someone is the work of a lifetime, and that’s not just because we all contain multitudes, but because those multitudes are not static. Committing to knowing someone is committing to being a lifelong student of their ways. Walking alongside them as they change (and you do, too). Loving them at every step.

That’s why marriage is such a beautiful thing, because it’s a publicly held commitment to doing just that. And everyone agrees marriage is hard.

With that in mind, it seems unfair to expect family members to be able to achieve this level of insight over 3 days each Christmas. I spend around 3 weeks a year with my sister (and approximately 52 hours on the phone). We are close, and yet even we sometimes struggle to shake off the stickiness of our past visions and really see each other in the present moment.

I was talking to my mum and sister about the tree jumping story just a few days ago, and I told them that in the end I wasn’t motivated to jump because I really wanted to. I don’t enjoy the feeling of falling, the hard slap of the water, bubbles up my nose, the pressure popping in my ears. I told them I did it because I didn’t want to be the only one in the family that didn’t. The wimpy one. I wanted to fit in.

My sister gave me this little squeeze and said, “Oh Court, that’s so sad, why couldn’t we have just loved who you were?” My mum laughed, not meanly, just in a *shrugged shoulders* kind of way. It was a fleeting, throw away comment, but it has stayed with me. It’s as if my sister’s compassion has enabled me to let go of some of my derision for the ‘wimpy kid’ in my past. It’s a feeling I’m reflecting on as I watch my kids at the lake. They aren’t ready to jump yet and maybe they never will be. Do I push them? Or do I let them grow and change at their own pace, and just love them?