Living the Myth: The Mother-Daughter Dyad

by Kathie Collins

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First Smile

For nine days
nothing but nursing
and fretting—
a few winks
between diaper changes.
Even her own belches
startled her into a fuss.
Covered by a protective

downy veil of dark fur, eyes
shut tight against the sun’s assault,
she seemed unready for the light
of this world, and stubbornly
maintained her foreignness:
…..No longer ghost.
…..Not yet human.
…..Nor fully animal.

She was her Self
and guarded that Self,
with the same ferocity
that I guarded her—
accepting my grateful breast
with indignation,
pulling off with fury once
the milk was gone.

The pattern of our life-long
relationship imprinted in one week.

A dull constellation of push
and pull, periodically ornamented
by the brilliance of her smile—
each like that first one on her
tenth day—broad as an ocean
across her face, eyes twinkling
with the resplendence of the North Star,
guiding us through the uncharted
waters of the mother-daughter bond.

—from Jubilee, Main Street Rag, 2011

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When I wrote “First Smile,” this daughter, my first child, was a freshman in college. On a stifling August morning two months earlier, I had climbed the stairs to her bedroom to plead with her to hustle so we could make her assigned dorm move-in window only to discover she hadn’t packed the first bag. What in the world was wrong? She’d been exuberant about the move to Chapel Hill, her new roommate, and the promise of a curfew-free existence. Yet, here she was, curled up on her bed, a blue quilt dusted with tiny white flowers pulled over her head.

Her younger sister and I leapt into action, filling laundry baskets and schlepping them out to the minivan, alternately cooing and yelling at our reluctant debutante. Somehow, we made it in time––and through a long afternoon of unpacking and bedmaking. A last-minute Target-run and last hug goodbye.

I cried most all of the two-and-a-half-hour drive home.

The tears are an expected part of this story. Of course they are. Yet somehow the deluge came as a surprise. I had thought I was prepared for the change. I was happy for my oldest child; confident she would be happy. It wasn’t like she was moving across the country. It wasn’t as though we’d had the easiest, most peaceful of relationships. And it certainly wasn’t that I was returning to an empty house. Many years of mothering lay ahead, including four more freshman move-in days. Nevertheless, I felt like I was tumbling inside a giant wave of loss. My baby was gone. She’d be back for the holidays, perhaps for the summer. But my home would never again be hers in the same way. My body no longer her comfort.

She would make her own home. There would be other bodies to love and comfort her.

Only in hindsight did I see how fully the two of us were living out the mythic pattern of ancient Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone. In their well-known story Demeter, Goddess of the Grain, and her beloved daughter Persephone (or Kore) dwell in an isolated, symbiotic bliss—two parts of a whole––far removed from Olympus and its capricious patriarch, Zeus. In this mythic world, the growing season never ends and Persephone is perpetually maiden. One day, however, while Persephone and her nymphs gather flowers in the meadow, a gash opens in the earth’s surface and Hades, Lord of the Underworld, abducts Persephone to be his wife. A grief-stricken Demeter begins searching the earth with a frightened mother’s unique brand of fury. Meanwhile, Persephone is having her own experience.

And perhaps this is the real rift. Persephone misses her mother, yes. But she doesn’t hate presiding over her own realm. Despite her abduction, she doesn’t hate her husband, Death.*

Eventually, there’s a compromise: Persephone spends half of each year as her mother’s daughter and the other half as mistress of her own world. But mythic time is constant. Because this story’s events are always happening, Demeter doesn’t have a chance to get used the arrangement. Every fall when her daughter descends to the Underworld she grieves anew, withdrawing her lifegiving bounty. And, every spring she rejoices at Persephone’s return, returning green to the land.

As individual actors in this drama, we can acclimate to the cycle. To be sure, I grieved the loss of each of my children—though after that first experience, I was better prepared. I understood what I would feel. I knew I would survive it. The human species, however, operates in mythic time, which is why I’d argue there’s something of this pattern in every mother-daughter relationship, in every generation.

After all, I am a daughter, too—a first-born at that. My mother is still living, and most often she plays Demeter to my Persephone. But every so often I see her face turned toward a field full of white flowers and I sense a subtle shift in the ground—Hades and his black steeds carving their way through the bedrock. (May his trip be slow.) And when he arrives, may I be ready to become Demeter again, prepared to grieve the loss of my mother, Persephone.

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*There are a great many lenses through which to read this (or any) myth, including the feminist perspective, which reckons with Persephone’s abduction and rape. In this essay, I’ve narrowed my focus to a particular aspect of the mother-daughter bond, but in my upcoming class we’ll be looking at this myth and its cultural corollaries from multiple perspective.