A Mother's Bond and a Son's Journey

Pakyon Falls in Kaesong, known as one of Korea’s three great waterfalls, is associated with an old legend.

In the early years of the Goryeo dynasty, there lived near the foot of Mount Cheonma in Kaesong a devoted bachelor known as Scholar Park. He cared faithfully for his widowed mother, who was over seventy years old.

One day, while he was playing a bamboo flute in the mountains, a woman of extraordinary beauty appeared before him. Enchanted, Scholar Park followed her. She was a thousand-year-old dragon maiden who guarded the sacred mountain. In the end, he followed her into the deep pool beneath the waterfall and never returned.

His mother waited for him at home. When he did not come back, she climbed the mountain in search of him. There she saw his flute floating on the surface of the pool and assumed that her son had died. Overcome with grief, she thought, “What reason is there for me to go on living in a world without my son?” She then threw herself into the water.

Later generations are said to have named the waterfall Pakyon Falls after the pool into which Scholar Park disappeared.

Traditionally, this legend has been understood as a story about a devoted son and a mother’s profound love for her child. Young people today, however, may interpret it somewhat differently. Could it also be read as a parable about Scholar Park’s conflict between filial duty and independence, and about a mother’s pain in being unable to loosen the powerful bond of attachment to her son?

In an American survey I once read, participants were asked, “When did you feel that your parents finally let you go?” Most answered that it happened when they left home—after graduating from high school or college and moving to another state. One person said, “At twenty-six, when I decided to live independently, without my parents’ help or interference.” Another recalled, “I was thirty-eight when my strict mother suffered a stroke and began to need my help. Only then did she gradually begin to loosen her hold on me.”

American society generally prepares children for independence at a relatively early age and recognizes the need for psychological distance between parents and their adult children. Yet when we look around us, the matter is rarely so simple.

In my neighborhood, there is a widowed mother nearing sixty who lives with her youngest son, now well into his thirties. Whenever I see her, she says with concern, “My son really needs to get married soon.” She also says that once he marries, she plans to live alone, some distance away. She appears to be preparing herself in advance to prevent conflict with a future daughter-in-law. Ironically, however, her son’s marriage continues to be postponed.

When I was younger, I studied the psychological theory of individuation and taught my students that parents must recognize their children as separate individuals. Now, in my nineties, I am learning that theory all over again—not from books, but from the lives of people around me.

Even in the community where I live, I often see mothers who cannot let go of their sons, and sons who cannot free themselves from their mothers’ expectations. They remain bound to one another and grow old together.

When a child is born, a doctor cuts the umbilical cord. But the psychological bond formed over ten or twenty years of raising that child must gradually be loosened by the parents themselves.

Because this bond is not physical, it cannot be severed all at once, nor can it ever be entirely cut away. Over the course of time, parents pull once and release twice, slowly allowing the bond to loosen.

We must learn not to hold on simply because we love, but to let go little by little because we love. Perhaps letting go does not mean ending a relationship. Perhaps it means allowing love to become more mature.

Parents do not fail to let go because they love too little. More often, it is because they love too much. Yet love is not the only force at work. Hidden behind that love is often fear.

“What if my child fails?”
“Will my daughter-in-law take good care of my son?”
“Will I be able to endure the loneliness of being left alone?”

In the end, letting go of a child means trusting that child. At the same time, it requires the courage to release one’s own fears.

When we think about it, perhaps the legend of Pakyon Falls is not so much the tragedy of a son as it is the sorrow of a mother who could never fully let him go.

A child grows within the shelter of a parent’s embrace, but must eventually leave that embrace in order to live a life of his own. Parental love follows the same path. It begins as the love that holds and protects, but it is completed in the love that lets go.