In the early days of my divorce, I was the primary caregiver for my children, then just three and five years old.
At first, I approached parenting as I had always approached life—through structure, discipline, and accountability.
I made sure routines were followed, meals were ready, responsibilities were met.
But one morning at daycare, my daughter clung to me, crying, and asked a question that pierced through all my order and predictability:
“Daddy, will you come back?”
She wasn’t asking for rules—she was asking for reassurance. My structure had built stability, but not presence.
In that moment I realized that being “Dad” wasn’t enough.
A Personal Reweaving
I needed to embody the feminine energies of nurture, creativity, and care.
It wasn’t about abandoning discipline but balancing it, so my children felt held, not just managed.
I began to practice tenderness: lingering in a hug instead of rushing, listening before correcting, creating small rituals of care that softened the edges of structure.
Ten years later, I marked that journey with a Sri Yantra tattoo—a sacred geometry where upward and downward triangles interlock to form a mandala of wholeness.
It reminds me daily that balance is not splitting myself in two, but weaving together all the energies of being: chaos and order, ascent and descent, strength and softness.
It reminds me: I am whole.
From Personal to Universal
My daughter’s question was not only about me—it echoed a much older story.
Across time and tradition, humanity has told its stories through the language of archetypes.
Masculine and feminine. Sky and earth. Hunter and gatherer. Father and mother.
These were never just descriptions of roles—they were metaphors, attempts to hold in words the rhythms of the cosmos itself.
But somewhere along the way, metaphor hardened into mandate.
Masculine and feminine stopped being energies available to all and became boxes assigned at birth.
- Men were told to be rational, conquering, ascendant.
- Women were told to be nurturing, receptive, enduring.
- Each was asked to live only half a soul.
And yet, beneath the weight of history, the world has always carried other ways of knowing.
- Among Indigenous nations of the Americas, Two-Spirit people embodied both feminine and masculine, holding sacred roles as healers and visionaries.
- In South Asia, Ardhanārīśvara, the fused form of Shiva and Shakti, revealed that divine wholeness is inseparable from union of male and female.
- In Oceania, fa’afāfine, māhū, takatāpui and others lived openly as gender-fluid identities long before colonial laws imposed binaries.
These stories remind us: human spirit was never meant to be split in two.
The Moment of Re-Weaving
Modernity has exposed the costs of binary archetypes—emotional repression, gendered violence, systemic exclusion.
And the burden isn’t equal. Archetypes intersect with class, race, caste, and sexuality:
- Care work feminized and underpaid.
- Leadership masculinized and overvalued.
- Whole communities forced into binaries that never fit their spirits.
But we are in a moment of re-weaving. Archetypes are not disappearing—they are being reimagined.
- Media now tells stories of non-binary heroes, warrior mothers, tender fathers.
- Faith traditions are rediscovering sacred feminine and masculine as energies, not cages.
- Communities are reclaiming ancient roles once erased by colonization.
To live beyond binary spirit is not to erase masculinity or femininity.
It is to see them as threads, not walls.
To remember that we each carry both order and chaos, reason and feeling, seed and soil.
It is to live whole.
And though I am still a work in progress, I no longer live inside the walls we built around ourselves.
Closing Reflection
- What archetype has shaped you most—and what did it cost you?
- What energy do you feel called to reclaim in yourself now?
- What wholeness might be waiting for you beyond the binary?
➡️ Further reading: The Gendered American — a nation still dressed in costumes of man and woman, even as the seams begin to tear.