Today I am the Mother.
I am struggling so much with the change in my relationship to my son. Empty nest. It’s wonderful and it’s sad, exciting and lonely, and most of all, it’s an undiscovered country. Moment by moment, I don’t know who I am without my child.
I am Demeter. I could, if I choose, wander the world in agony, destroying everything in my wake. Or I could find renewal in a new kind of nurturance.
Demeter lost Persephone in just the way that every mother loses her child; to maturity. Persephone was abducted, one reading of the story goes, but another reading is that the Maiden becomes a Wife. Persephone leaves her mother to be with her husband, and Demeter’s heart breaks.
It’s a big, loud break. I know that break from the inside.
Demeter ravishes the world. None shall have joy while she suffers. (And to my credit, I haven’t once felt like ravishing the world.) Ultimately, in disguise (as a Crone), she becomes nursemaid to the infant Demephon. She seeks to make him immortal, but when his family sees her dipping him into the fire (burning away his mortality), they panic. In righteous anger, Demeter reveals her true self, and puts into place the rules by which she will be worshiped.
I can look at that story today and see that Demeter must learn to nurture again, in a new way. But she cannot simply replace her immortal daughter with a new immortal child, she must find a new path to fulfillment.
So, my deity for today is Demeter, the Mother who finds a new path in life when her child grows up and leaves her.
