God/dess

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Bare as birth, I lower myself into the tub, watching the warm water rise around me. It is after one o’clock in the morning and I should have been long asleep by now, but I need to have a good cry. Tears do not come easily to me, even when I wish that they would. Submerging myself in a tub of water in a room lit only by the merry dual flames of the lavender candle my sister bought me is often the only way I can allow the deep emotions to emerge. I must recreate a womb before my inner child will allow me to mother her, and it isn’t easy even then. Apparently, I was three years old when I told my mother I was done breastfeeding. “It’s keeping me yittle,” I said. I don’t remember, of course, but I can almost hear me saying it. I am far more comfortable taking care of someone else than I am being cared for. But here I am…attempting to relax into hot Epsom salts water with the slightly sweet smell of warm soy wax and lavender buds wafting over me.

I like my skin best by candlelight. Rising pale out of the clear water, a Caucasian Te Fiti¹, doughy birth belly proof I have also given life. It is not until I became a mother that I began to notice the presence of my self-child who was still wishing I had let my own mom mother me longer. I am the oldest of four kids, my brother only two and a half years younger than me. I wasn’t out of pull-ups before I had to step up and be Big Sister. It was the same with my oldest, Rena, three years old and barely weaned when her sister, Lee, was born. By then I had truly become an island, although I felt more like I was stranded on one. Not yet four years married and already I had endured three pregnancies (two normal and one more difficult) and three births (two traumatic and one that felt like it was), moved out of state and had to figure out I was actually not nearly as “natural” a mother as I had always been told I would be without any support system at all, discovered that making friends as an adult is way harder than it was when I was a kid, dove deep into the depression I had kept myself blissfully unaware of throughout my teen years by staying busy and being outside as often as possible, learned to hate my perpetually pregnant or postpartum body with a vengeance, buried a child and with her the innocent assumption that loving your kids is always enough, watched my family relationships and our church back home crumble like a sandcastle in the surf, moved back to Ohio but still far away from family and old friends, and lost my faith. Except for the moving and the births, it kind of all happened simultaneously. Sad, right? Such privileged misery. But I was miserable…and I was angry. Rising out of those dark waters, lava spewing, I barely recognized myself anymore. I had traded a God-father for a Christ-husband, who loved me better but was still human. As every identity I had spent my so-called formative years forming dissolved in the fires of those first four years of “real life,” I was left with three things I knew:

1. I was not anything like the woman I thought I would become.

2. Parents screw up their kids no matter how hard they try not to.

3. I was DONE with the puny, angry man-God I had tried so hard to please.

I guess that’s when I remembered that I used to be fascinated by goddesses.

Maybe it was Te Fiti herself who reminded me. A goddess, but also painfully human; so enraged by the ingratitude of humans and the violation of her own identity that she would lose herself entirely, becoming Te Kā, a demon of earth and fire, fiercely protecting the resting place that was all that remained of who she used to be. I understood Te Kā. I knew what that felt like. In the movie, it is the goddess who becomes lost and angry, and it is the desperate child who sets out to save her dying island who restores the goddess through respect, understanding, and love. In the breathtaking climax of the film, the waters part and two beings are reborn: the girl becomes a woman, and the demon remembers that she is a Mother. I cry every damn time. Throughout those heartbreaking, will-crushing early years of motherhood, my soul was longing for a Mother, someone I could believe would hold and heal me even when I felt unworthy of anything good.