In a rage and too dejected to keep up her divine duties, Demeter lets the crops wither and the earth becomes a wasteland. She disguises herself as an old woman and travels to the town of Eleusis, where she sits beside a well in despair. Zeus tries to talk some sense into her. Hades will make a nice son-in-law, he says. She needs to lighten up and let the crops grow. Demeter will not budge.
The earth becomes so desolate Zeus finally gives up and orders Persephone returned to her mother. As Persephone prepares to leave, however, she unwittingly swallows some pomegranate seeds, which ensures her return to the underworld for a third of each year.
Mother and daughter are reunited on the first day of spring. Interestingly, Hecate shows up for the occasion, and the myth says from that point on, she precedes and follows Persephone wherever she goes. (A curious piece of the story that rarely gets noticed.) When Demeter learns about the fateful pomegranate, her joy is tempered, but she stops her mourning and allows the earth to flourish again. After all, her daughter is back. Not the same innocent girl who tripped through the meadow picking flowers, but a woman transfigured by her experience.
Later, I would learn there’s a name for this mother-daughter reunion. The Greeks call it heuresis.
I dig through my travel tote for my map and unfold it across the bench. I find Eleusis, the ancient site of Demeter’s temple, located just outside of Athens in what’s described as an “industrial area.”
Contemplating a visit before we leave Greece, I stuff the map back in my bag and wander off to find Ann, who has disappeared into the next wing.
I want my daughter back.
I find Ann circling a tree rack of postcards in the museum gift shop, and notice she has plucked off a card depicting a statue of the Goddess Athena.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” she says, holding it out to me and digging in her purse for the drachmas we exchanged for dollars in the airport.
A few moments later we step into the blare of sun and car horns and walk in silence, or possibly in stupefying shock at the heat, which was a hundred and five degrees when we left the hotel earlier. It’s like slogging through pudding. Athens in high summer is not for the fainthearted, but I love how it spills into the streets, with sidewalk markets bulging with apricots, loquats, nectarines, and melons; the bougainvillea hanging in hot-pink awnings over the outdoor cafés; the white apartment buildings etched with grapevines.
We plod several blocks in search of a cab and are rescued on the corner of Voulis and Ermou. The taxi is an air-conditioned Mercedes-Benz. Ann and I fan ourselves in the backseat with museum maps. When we get out, I ask for the driver’s card.
Inside our room, we joke about making an offering on the Altar of the Air Conditioner Vent. We order room service and eat Greek salad, which is a Pisa-like tower of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and feta. Then we draw the curtains and go straight to bed. It is 3:30 in the afternoon.
Lying on the twin mattress, I stare at the edge of light oozing under the curtain and I think about my relationship with my daughter. Congenial, warm, nice—those are the words that come to me. We’ve never had one of those pyrotechnic relationships that end up being written about so often and famously in books.
We’ve had our moments, naturally. The period of mild rebellion when she was fourteen springs to mind, a phase when the door slammed a lot. Beyond that, we had the typical antagonisms and disagreements. I suspect like most mothers and daughters we’ve participated in the classic struggle: the mother, trying to let her daughter go while unconsciously seeing her as an appendage of herself. And the daughter, enmeshed in her mother’s power, compelled to please her and pattern herself in her mother’s image, but straining at the same time to craft an identity separate from her.
Mostly, though, our relationship has been full of goodness. I would even say, given the natural constraints of adolescent girls and their mothers, we’ve been close. And yet I feel my relationship with Ann now exists largely on the surface. There is distance in it that I have trouble characterizing. We talk, for instance, but nothing really heart to heart. It’s as if the relationship has fallen into a strange purgatory. For so long our roles were strictly defined as mother and daughter, as adult and child. But now as she leaves college, we both seem to sense some finality to this. She is changing and I am changing, too, but we don’t quite know how to shift the conversation between ourselves. How to reforge our connection.
I feel traces of guilt about the growing distance between us. I toss on the bed, remembering that while she was away at school metamorphosing into the young woman I barely know, I was too busy with a book project to notice she was gone. Her leaving was not a problem. At least not in the maternal trench where these things are usually battled out. What’s more, I was proud of this. I chirped to my friends: “I don’t know what the big deal is about the empty nest. It’s kind of wonderful, actually.”
It seems now I said this with smugness, as if I were somehow immune because I, after all, had a life of my own, creative passions, a spiritual journey, a career separate from my role of mother. Ann was rightly abducted from me by her own separate life and I was too self-absorbed to come to terms with it, to figure out what it meant, what it should mean.
I sit up. Ann is sound asleep.
I tiptoe to my suitcase, retrieve my journal, then crawl back into bed where I write down the streams of awareness that began in the museum. When I drift to sleep, I dream.
I am in my kitchen, stirring a pot on the stove. I turn around and find a large, mystifying crevice in the center of the floor. It is jagged and gaping and looks as if an earthquake has taken place. As I stare down into the darkness, I realize with horrifying certainty that Ann has fallen into the hole. I drop onto my knees and call into the blackness. I scream her name until the sound clots in my throat. I don’t know what to do. Finally I search for a flashlight so I can see down into the opening.
I wake with a dry, achy throat, throw off the sheet, and go stand by Ann’s bed, taking in the sight of her. My heart still thuds a little. It awes me that the myth has moved into the intimate space of my dreams.
At this point in my life, I’ve been recording my dreams for twelve years. I think of them as snapshots floating up from a mysterious vat, offering metaphoric pictures of what’s going on inside. Sometimes the images suggest where my soul wants to lead me and sometimes where it does not, giving me input and guidance about choices I might make. I am not thinking of the soul in the typical sense, as an immortal essence like the spirit, but rather as the rich, inner life of the psyche, the deepest impulse of which is to create wholeness.
Unlike most of my dreams, this one is not enigmatic. Its associations to the myth are obvious, as if the dream choreographer is being lenient, trying to make sure I don’t miss the point. It intrigues me that the opening through which Ann falls is in the foundation of the kitchen—one of the more nurturing, feminine rooms in the psychic house. For me, the kitchen represents the hearth, a symbolic heart-center. I feel as if the dream is exposing a hole in my heart.
I wonder if dropping to my knees—helpless and grief-stricken—foreshadows the collapse of my old relationship with my daughter. Ann, Ann, Ann. In the dream, I shout her name as if Demeter herself has showed up in me at the height of her raging. The dream ends with my confusion, then a hint about what to do: find a flashlight. In other words, find light, a new consciousness—a very unsubtle allusion to Demeter lighting her torch in the myth.
Eight years before I had this dream revealing the growing separation between Ann and me, I had an experience that also made a small explosion in my life. And it, too, was about my daughter. One afternoon, I walked into the drugstore where Ann had an after-school job. She was on her knees, stocking toothpaste on a bottom shelf. She was fourteen. As I spotted her, I noticed two men stop beside her. One nudged the other, saying words that fairly pivoted my world: “Now that’s how I like to see a woman—on her knees.” The other man laughed.
I watched the expression that
floated across Ann’s face as she looked up. I would describe this moment later as Kafka’s “ice axe,” which broke a frozen sea inside of me. Ann seemed more than my daughter. She was my mother, my grandmother, and myself. She was so many daughters. I confronted the men, trembling with anger. “This is my daughter . . . ,” I began. They had tapped Demeter’s passion.
I only vaguely understood at the time the ways that I myself was on my knees, how in need I was of taking back my soul as a woman. The episode propelled me into a collision with the patriarchal underpinning of my church, my faith tradition, my culture, my marriage, and, most illuminating of all, me. It sent me in search of the feminine dimension of God. It began a spiritual cataclysm. My old life dissolved and a new life, a new consciousness, rose up.
I wrote about that experience in my book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which had come out in 1996, just a couple of years before the trip. Now, as I slip into the bathroom to wash my face, I think about that juncture of my life, about the book. One particular line from it swims back to me . . . about a certain music that comes from the feminine soul, how the strands of it pulled me unceasingly into awakening.
In the hotel bathroom, I stare at myself in the mirror over the sink, bewildered about why such thoughts are coming to me now. Except—perhaps I’m hearing the music again.
I return to Ann’s bedside and pull the blanket over her shoulder, tucking it about her like she is six or ten or fourteen. It’s a regression to a ritual of mothering I enacted almost every night of her childhood. From the time both of my children were babies until they became teens who stayed up watching David Letterman, the last thing I did before going to bed was to slip into their rooms and observe them asleep on their pillows. Sometimes the moment extended to the tucking of covers, sometimes not. I told myself the visits were a way of checking on them, but in reality they were small benedictions of love—a way to let myself feel for a moment the immensity of what was in my heart, to be intimate with a tenderness that often went missing during the strained, conflicted days of motherhood and writing.
It is possible I’ve kept company with Demeter more than I’ve thought. I’d imagined myself traveling more in the orbits of the so-called “virgin” Goddesses like Artemis and Athena, whose forms of the feminine are about the search for an independent self. They are the ones who could bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan. I haven’t much pictured myself as a “mother goddess” type. My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression. Is it possible I also valued motherhood less?
Once in an art gallery, I came upon a painting of the Madonna holding her toddler in one arm and an open book in her opposite hand. Her eyes are turned toward her child as if she has just been torn from her reading. Heavily lidded, they exude a look of sweet adoring, but they also carry a wistful expression, the sigh of interruption, the veiled craving for her book pages. It was like observing a conflict at the hub of my existence. Baby or book. Children or writing. Motherhood or career. I bought the painting and hung it prominently in the living room. In secret, I sympathized with the self-actualizing side of the Madonna, feeling her perturbation at the child’s demands.
My own post-World War II mother, still alive and well, worked for a time doing secretarial work in my father’s business, but she was a consummate Demeterian woman. Growing up, I didn’t witness expressions of feminism in her. Indeed, not even in my adult-hood. The image she conjured in me was not the Madonna in Conflict, but Maria Lactans, the breast-feeding depiction of Mary contentedly offering her child the milk of her life. I asked her once: “When you were a girl, what did you dream of growing up to be?” She did not hesitate. “A mother,” she answered. She had four children, and if there was ever conflict in her mothering, none of us glimpsed it. It seems revealing of my mother and me, and maybe of our generations, that she was the one who got the “Mother of the Year” award, while I got the “Career Woman” plaque.
I’d always adored my mother. I soaked up her plush maternal spirit. Yet I wanted to differentiate myself from her. In the sixties, as I was coming of age, I knew I would be a mother—yes, absolutely. But differently.
I walk to the hotel window and peer through a slit in the curtain at Syntagma Square directly across the street, then east to the Greek Parliament House where I can just make out the Presidential Guard. Ann informed me earlier that the short, white skirt they wear is called a foustanella. I imagine she read that once in a book, probably two years ago. Ann forgets nothing. Her mind clicks like a camera, storing memories and fine details. Remember when we were at the beach when I was three and you had on a red bathing suit and I almost stepped on a jellyfish? Hearing such a careful rendering, I stare at her, thinking what red bathing suit, what jellyfish?
A flock of pigeons takes off from a grassy area in the square and, watching them, I think of Ann with everything before her, everything becoming, the white moon perched over her head waxing in grandeur, and it reminds me that my moon will start its long wane any day now. This comparison with its darker implication of enmeshment and envy repels, then humbles me. It is an awful truth.
Noticing my journal on the bed, I sit down and record my dream. As I write the part about dropping to my knees, my thoughts reel back to the museum, to Ann’s little dance with her camera, the way she dipped to her knees before snapping the shutter. At the time, it reminded me of something I couldn’t call to mind. Was it rustling the memory of Ann on her knees in the drugstore?
Suddenly I understand my dream in a new way. Just as I saw my own self in Ann’s kneeling figure in the drugstore aisle, I now see myself in the daughter who has fallen through the hole in the kitchen floor. The dream is about Ann and me, yes, but it’s also a snapshot of me on the eve of my fiftieth birthday, bereft over the loss of my younger self. That other Persephone in danger of being wrenched away.
To borrow a phrase from Dylan Thomas, Persephone is the “green fuse” in the soul, the regenerative energy. She’s the bright, invisible sap within that must rise after fifty. But just how that happens I have no idea.
Without warning, my mother’s face blazes up. It crosses my mind that I’m not only Demeter in search of Persephone, but—God help me—I’m Persephone in search of Demeter, too. When The Dance of the Dissident Daughter was published, I sent my mother a copy. I didn’t hear back from her about it for two months. I had no idea what to make of that. I knew the tumultuous journey I described in the book would seem alien to her. Oddly, that was what concerned me most about writing the book—not so much taking on an entire religious tradition, but the reaction of my mother down in Georgia.
Then a letter arrived. She never wrote me letters. Inside, I found her account of reading the book. She told me that my “dance of dissidence and search for self ” had proved difficult for her at first, but she had felt its truth. I’ve committed her last sentences to memory: “I am seventy-five years old,” she wrote, “and all I can think is that I want to take care of myself so I can live long. Oh, Sue, I don’t want to miss the ‘dance.’”
I have to tell myself what is true, that I didn’t follow up on that bright opening the way I might have. My relationship with my mother, like the one with my daughter, has no history of fireworks, only the necessary loss and then the loving congeniality. Yet I wish for a deeper connection with her, too.
Outside, the heat of Athens dissolves into dusk. It sifts from yellow and gold and parched brown into the colors of the sea. On the other side of the room my daughter naps. Across the world my mother is probably sleeping, too. I sit still on the bed and let the longing fill me.
Ann
The Acropolis-Athens
As we climb the path to the top of the Acropolis, my mom stops every five minutes to admire something in the distance—t
he Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Theater of Dionysus, the Hill of the Muses. She has the guidebook out and a red leather journal tucked under her arm. A pen is wedged between her teeth, so when she asks, “Is that the Hill of the Nymphs,” it sounds like “Is that the Will of the Wimps?”
“Yep, the Will of the Wimps,” I tell her, and we laugh.
Yesterday when we left the archaeological museum, the heat had been so awful we’d retreated to the hotel and gone to bed. Today is better, but not much. I look toward the crest, trying to judge how long before we get to the top. I’m in no hurry. The thought of being up there again unnerves me.
Seventeen months ago I came to Greece as a twenty-one-year-old history major participating in a college study tour—an experience that changed me. I realize everybody says that, but I promise, something deeply altering happened to me during that trip. It was supposed to be about earning college credit but instead turned into a kind of unraveling of myself. The culmination had taken place on top of the Acropolis in what I still refer to as my moment because I don’t know what else to call it. I do know that when it happened, it seemed like all the dangling wires of my future came together to throw a spark I thought would last forever. I came down from the Acropolis with a vision for my life, destiny in hand, a big, jubilant fire warming my insides.
Recently, though, all of that had more or less fallen apart. Now, not only have I not explained any of this to my mother, but my feelings around it are so confused and filled with pain, I’ve been unable to face them myself. At this moment they are stuffed in a small, lightbulb-less closet in the back of my chest. Trudging up the hill with Mom, I wonder how I can be up there again without the door bursting open and everything falling out.