My mother had always told me to finish my Ph.D., no matter what. When Lucia was born, I was in the middle of my graduate studies, with coursework, a looming dissertation, and an unfinished novel hanging in the balance. Now a mother myself, I could more fully imagine my own mother’s heartache as she became Demeter, the grieving mother, who had to let her daughter go every week, forever.īut my mother’s devotion to herself, and to her own professional and spiritual path, also primed me to not abandon my own years of study and work. I was always highly aware of my own distress over my living arrangements. The persistent cycle of rupture and reunification put me on familiar terms with the pain of maternal separation. On Sunday nights, I would pack up my duffle to be reunited with my mother after a week apart, or to leave her again. My parents divorced when I was 7, and afterward, I ping-ponged back and forth between their houses. Having Lucia made me more aware of how the myth of Demeter and Persephone had informed my relationship with my own mother. ![]() But who knew, she might even shun everything that I had taught her. It seemed impossible that Lucia would grow up and separate from me, leading a life that didn’t necessarily include me, the Persephone to my Demeter. I thought about her words as I soaked up listless afternoons singing to my baby, pacing the bedroom and rocking her in my arms while I stared out at the palm trees and the flat blue line of ocean, the amniotic feeling of oneness coursing between us, as if we were still intertwined by blood and fluid, multiplying cells and placental tissue. Hold her with the knowledge of future flight.” Not close enough and she flies away too soon, unprotected. “It’s like holding a baby bird,” she told me. Our children are only guests in our houses. ![]() This, my friend argued, is the true work of motherhood. We need to prepare ourselves to let them go, she said, so they can leave and forge their own paths. You could argue this process begins the second a child is born, as being born is the first real separation from the mother, the first rupture that informs the many ruptures and subsequent repairs in the mother-child relationship.Ī wise friend reminded me of this soon after I gave birth to my daughter, Lucia. But the story is also about motherhood and the necessary pain of letting a child go so that she can fully become herself. Fall and winter each year is understood to be the time when Persephone descends into the underworld, and the emergence of spring and summer signals her return to her mother and the world of the living. The story of Persephone is used to explain the cycle of the seasons. But because Persephone mistakenly ate four pomegranate seeds while she was in the underworld, she must return to Hades for a third of every year, forever. Zeus, ultimately realizing that the world will perish if Demeter doesn’t get her daughter back, eventually returns Persephone to her mother. Raging across the Earth in her search of her daughter, the goddess brings the first winter to mankind as punishment for Persephone’s disappearance. She only finds scattered petals floating on the lake’s surface. Sensing something amiss, Persephone’s mother, Demeter, calls her daughter’s name, but to no avail. Now that I am a mother myself, the story has come to haunt me in more ways than one-informing my own experience of motherhood as the continuous interplay between separation and reunification, breaking apart to come together again, and all the grief and joy in between.Īs a popular retelling of the myth goes, Persephone is picking flowers with her friends near a lake when suddenly the earth splits open and Hades, in his golden chariot, emerges and snatches her away, ferrying her down to the underworld, where she becomes his unwilling queen. ![]() When I was young, my mother used to tell me the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone at bedtime.
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