Traveling with Pomegranates (3 page)

I tell myself it’s natural for the feeling to surface now, with the two of us captive in each other’s presence, brought together in a way we haven’t experienced in . . . well, forever. Once, when Ann was twelve, we’d traveled—just the two of us—to San Francisco, but that was hardly comparable to this. At twelve, Ann had not been away for four years during which time she transformed into a young woman I barely know.

Her backpack is plopped open between her feet while she copies something from the sign beside the bas-relief into a blue spiral notebook. It has not escaped me that Demeter and Persephone have captured her attention.

We have by this point tromped by a few thousand antiquities at least—frescoes from Santorini, gold from Mycenae, bronzes from Attica, pottery from every nook and cranny of ancient Greece—but
this
is the spot where I told Ann my feet are in abject misery and I need to take a break: before Demeter and Persephone. At the intersection of mothers and daughters.

I wander over to the marble canvas and stare at the two robed women who face one another. Their myth is familiar to me.

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 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.