daughter did identify with the mother in all the deep down
and important ways and was well mothered in her young, joyful
mother’s land of milk and honey and she grew up secure in herself.
Her father was always there too as he worked hard with the sheep
and the whole outfit, as he would say, that kept them all going.
By the time Mother was ten she was secure in herself and
with others for her father was doing well and she was as proud
of him as he was of her and she was well protected from
the mere mother-daughter dyad that would never freely
and fully wean the child and give her security with others.
Without the mother-father-child triad the mother and child
can get locked into a bi-polar relation so that the child
feels like an abject throw-away rather than a strong subject.
If the mother is abandoned or abandons the father then
the child will identify with the mother’s abandonment and
go through life aggressive with mother and sullen with others.
In Levaur’s strong, traditional, Mormon community of Carey that
did not happen and the father would say: “She learns so quickly!”
And the father would love the mother in the daughter and the mother
would love the daughter in the father and all of his, and relationality
was built up and Joneva was relating independently at ten.
The triad by opening beyond the dyad became an open quadrad.
I.2.2 In the Logic of the Quadrad
By the time she was eleven mother and her family had moved
from their summer home up Iron Mine and their winter home
on the Fish Creek Flats into the town of Carey and into
their farm home on the Little Wood River Canal.
Mother’s youngest brother, Elwin, was born when she was ten
and the roles within the family were by then quite clearly worked out.
Mother was her mother’s helper and perfected her art of mothering
as she did much to care for her baby brother and she and he
bonded almost as mother and child as the first and last children.
Mid and Bob helped their father even as ten and twelve year
old children trailing sheep from Carey and Picaboo and the
railroad shipping station built by the Union Pacific for sheep.
So mother bonded in a dyadic relation with her mother
that never became monadic and self-centered because it was
quadratic when the new baby sister came and then the first
brother and six years later the second brother whom she babied.
Mother in the activity of her complex and passionate relations
was never the least bit bored for everyday was filled with
all kinds of tasks and it was difficult to find time for reading.
At the age of eleven the first signs of puberty started to show
and mother was reflecting on the many voices speaking
within her and to her and she was beginning to decide just how
she wanted to be as her exemplars picked her and she them.
The triadic and quadratic relations helped her through weanings.
And mother had identified with her mother’s terrible weaning.
And Johannes de Silentio wrote: “When the child has grown big
and is to be weaned, the mother virginally conceals her breast,
and then the child no longer has a mother. How fortunate
the child who has not lost his mother in some other way.”
And mother was fortunate as her own dear mother had not been.
With affectionate support mother was weaned through puberty.
I.2.3 In the Logic of Quadratic Weaning
Mother identified with the unlimited voices of her mother as
they chorused in her preconscious attitudes, moods, and feelings.
She identified with the unlimited voices of her father as
she knew them in his thoughts, words, and deeds, and as she
saw him in relation to his extended family in all their fun.
Mother was thus a very complicated mix of expanding relations.
She began to reflect on herself and to imitate certain teachers
and not to relate and identify with many around her who were
not in keeping with her taste, but even her taste was expanding.
In March her father brought her a black sheep bum-lamb.
She nursed it with the bottle and cared for it in the spirit of
the Good Shepherd story and picture in her Bible Story Book.
She played with it through the spring and summer and then
one day on about her twelfth birthday she went with her dad
to the barn yard and he took a sheep by the scruff of the neck
and cut its throat and hung it in the barn by its hind feet.
Then he grabbed a black lamb like hers and did the same.
She felt sick and thought that that lamb could have been her own.
Then he asked her to go to her mother and get a platter.
She brought it to him and he put the head of the first sheep
on the chopping block and split it open with the axe and then
he
