Daughters of Demeter
~For all our mothers, now and forever!
I’ve always loved the Persephone myth. Most see it as a story about the changing of the seasons, abduction, and sacrifice, but I’ve always viewed it most as a story about the unique and unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters. After Hades takes Persephone from her mother, Demeter (the goddess of nature) mourns so profoundly that nothing grows on Earth, ushering in a brutal winter. When Zeus, knowing Demeter is both saddened and incredibly pissed, strikes a bargain with Hades, Persephone returns to her mother, but only for six months because she ate six pomegranate seeds, the food of the dead. Demeter takes her win and celebrates the return of her beloved daughter, allowing the coming of spring and new life for the other six months.
As the daughter of a rural mother who single-handedly ran a small cattle farm for nearly forty years, I especially appreciate the complicated symbolism of this story. I grew up with a healthy mix of strong black coffee, hard work, tough love, and very high expectations. Along with these, my mother also enveloped (sometimes smothered) me in a fierce protection known mostly to lionesses, honey badgers, and Chihuahuas. We didn’t always agree on things, both of us formed with a stubborn, feral, and unyielding nature typical of women willing to get up at 4:30 am to a freezing house before the fire was lit to feed the bottle calves in the barn, crack the ice in the watering troft in dead winter, mend the barbed wire fence so the cows didn’t end up on the train tracks, and blast the shotgun in the air over the coyote eyeing the chickens. I can still see her standing on the front porch, shot gun shouldered, laughing as he tucks tail and runs away.
Once, after formally complaining several times about the loudspeakers blasting from the July tent revival at nearly midnight, keeping anything with ears from sleep, my mother grabbed her 12 gauge, dressed me in my tallest leather boots to guard against snakes, and we walked down our long, serpentine dirt drive, over the railroad tracks, to the revival. At six years old, I watched her issue an ultimatum when we arrived. With a keen eye on the target of the offending speakers, she said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Luckily, they chose the easy way, and our return journey was made in silence, accompanied only by the stars and the calls of a few night birds on our way back up the mountain. My mother didn’t play, a well-known fact for miles around.
Like most kids, I didn’t appreciate the unusual and eccentric education I received on the farm with my mother until I was much older. Others my age were told NEVER to play with matches, but my mother, seeing daytime heat anywhere but in the den as a luxury, would yell from the kitchen, “if you want to visit with your friends in your bedroom, you’ll have to bring in the wood and make the fire!” I’m sure I was whiny and annoying at times, and as a teen, I probably rolled my eyes a lot and sighed dramatically at every perceived injustice, just as teens do in my classroom.
After I left for college and found my way into the larger world, I’m ashamed to say I didn’t look back enough, at least not until I was older with more perspective. When I was in Egypt in my late thirties, I went for an overnight stay with the Bedouin in the desert, and when the guide did not return for me the next day as I expected, I contemplated life if I were stuck there for eternity. I shared a tent with a lovely girl named Elil and her goat. We didn’t share a language, but she showed me how to make bracelets and milk the goat, except I already knew how to milk and was ridiculously proud of this fact. My mother never traveled far from the farm, but she enjoyed sharing my adventures through postcards, photos, and phone calls when I could find strong enough Wi-Fi so Google Voice worked.
During that trip, after a nice Nubian man who spoke English (and also offered me matrimony, telling me I was “worth many goats!”) sorted out the misunderstanding and returned me to my lodging two days later, I called my mother, eager to tell her I was able to be of use during my stay, that I milked a goat and made the fire for breakfast. My mother raised me to be of use, one of the most important character traits to her. One must be of use in this life! Hearing the tale of my time in the desert, she was immensely proud. As I grew up, my mother was conflicted; in contradictory desires, she wanted me to stay on the farm and take over from her, but she also hoped I would go to college and see the world, which I did. In her older years, she told me how proud she was that even though my life had taken me in a vastly different direction than hers, it warmed her heart that I still had the skills to survive any apocalypse, Zombie or otherwise, that might arise. The fingerprints of her training (sometimes handprints on my ass!) were forever etched onto and into me.
I believe my experience is not unlike other daughters of rural mothers, who tend to be raised with a great love of nature but also a healthy fear of the same, as well as the ability to exist in the moment. Faced with a cow struggling to bear a calf, keeping the pressure cooker from blowing a hole in the ceiling while canning, or a rattlesnake too close to the house, one tends to live in the now rather than worry about tomorrow or next week. Admittedly, I lapsed in this ability for a while, falling victim to the unconscious anxiety accompanying modern life that often robs us of joy. But when I get out of the city, I find it again. For me, sitting on a porch in the mountains, savoring a hot cup of strong black coffee as the sun rises above the trees puts many things in perspective. The sound of the river or the crackle and scent of a bonfire have the same effect for me. T.S. Eliot called this type of experience “The Still Point in the Turning World.”
In my youth, I was lucky enough to have a circle of friends who were also Daughters of Demeter, growing up much as I did, some more rural than others, but all with fierce yet loving mothers who formed us into the women we are now. These women collectively and patiently mothered us into our adulthood with equal measures of sugar and salt, shaking heads disapprovingly as we tried to sneak into the house at 3 am, reeking of booze and cigarettes, more drunk on our youth and our ill-conceived immortality than on Jack Daniels. And I watched each of our mothers try to hide a grin as they abused us all the way to the bedroom door, behind which we would sleep our way to evening, when we would do it all over again. I am sure their worries could have filled oceans, but we were oblivious to that then, a cruelty I didn’t understand fully until we started losing them to sickness and age, when WE were the age that they were then. In our youth, they would wake us up, the heathen daughters we were, feed us too much, and talk of jackets and driving safely as we hurried through doors and into cars that would take us to whatever mischief and danger awaited us. Whichever mother standing in the doorway was left wringing her hands, trying not to reveal she was terrified, only consoled by the fact she knew we’d been raised with the tools to live through it all. In my mind’s eye, I can still see her there, the mom we’d landed with the night before, waving in the rearview mirror, watching our little collective of Persephonies enter the Underworld. “Don’t eat the food of the dead! I raised you to know better!” And when we did it anyway, she would march to the Underworld with the resolve of a general headed to war, and haul us back by our hair, kicking and screaming. We didn’t get it then, but we do now, still feeling the tug on our scalp.
Then, in our middle age, the roles reversed somehow. We became Demeters and our mothers were Persephone, the one who must be protected at all costs. We tried our best, making the tough decisions that ripped at our hearts, trying to ease their pain, but time marched cruelly on. Luckily, as we became the lioness, advocating for our mothers in their decline, all those lessons resonated with us, giving us the strength to be the women they needed us to be. My mother lived to be 94, sound of mind and running her farm until her late 80s when the cruelty of dementia took her somewhere else. After that, she would have a few lucid moments where she thought I was still a child and needed to go feed the bottle calves. I always complied, telling her I’d just finished, and they were happily wagging their tails like puppies. She would smile and fall asleep, appeased.
Every year, the arrival of spring causes me to revisit all of these memories as well as the Myth of Persephone. Once, I thought the reason my mind returns here was my mother’s absence as the world comes alive again, green and vibrating with heartbeat of the Universe, full of potential. Now, after some years to reflect, I think I got it wrong. It isn’t her absence that causes me to think about her more in the spring, but instead, it is my mother’s presence, her vitality, which remains in her memory. As the world throws off winter, she is again Demeter, readying the garden soil for planting, tending to the baby calves, nervously watching over the new chicks, understanding why their hen mother is bold enough to chase the dog away even though he might as well be a T-Rex!
And as for our mothers, the collective Demeters who have crossed over, I imagine them happily sitting around a big pitcher of sweet tea (and probably a selection of pies and cakes they taught us how to make), watching the most glorious sunrise and their once heathen daughters now as adults. They are very proud of us (though they cackle at our youthful foibles; let’s face it—we were hilarious!). All of them are laughing and smiling, taking a second slice of cake because why not, it being Heaven and all—no calories! Maybe they are confessing their own madcap adventures to each other, stories that might shock us a little or maybe a lot (though they would never confess these infractions to us!), back when they put their own mothers through a bit of grief, terrified, standing in doorways wringing hands, then waving, becoming small, blurry images in the rearview mirror as their daughters—our mothers—bravely and mercilessly traveled to the Underworld, filled with that plucky sense of immortality we had once, yet armed with the same tools they passed on to us, knowing what we needed to survive long before we ever would!
Sherry Fowler, 2-29-24