The Story

From Alexis Danau, "The Story of Demeter and Persephone Taught Me the True Work of Motherhood- The ancient Greek myth is a reminder of the necessary pain of letting a child go":

"Having Lucia made me more aware of how the myth of Demeter and Persephone had informed my relationship with my own mother. My parents divorced when I was 7, and afterward, I ping-ponged back and forth between their houses. On Sunday nights, I would pack up my duffle to be reunited with my mother after a week apart, or to leave her again. The persistent cycle of rupture and reunification put me on familiar terms with the pain of maternal separation. I was always highly aware of my own distress over my living arrangements. Now a mother myself, I could more fully imagine my own mother’s heartache as she became Demeter, the grieving mother, who had to let her daughter go every week, forever...

Sometimes I fantasize that I will keep Lucia close, like the mother in the children’s book Runaway Bunny, who vows to follow her baby bunny no matter how far afield the baby bunny tries to go. But I also hope that I will release her into the world with the same confidence and trust my own mother offered to me. Of course Lucia is dreaming of escape. We all are. This past year was stolen from her, and from all our children. Her world became as small as a pomegranate seed; its seasons, disrupted. The winter when Persephone separates from her mother, descending into the underworld where she discovers her own autonomy, evaporated into a seemingly eternal quarantine summer of togetherness without reprieve.

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I gripped the steering wheel, for a time unable to actually drive away, unable to move, so overcome with guilt and longing for my daughter, overcome by the separation that was occurring then, and by all the future separations we would endure to fully become ourselves. But I did it. I drove away—that day, and the day after, and the day after that, until the pain dulled and became routine, until it became part of me. The sight of my daughter happy, clean, and well-fed greeted me upon my return at the end of each day, and I held her again, inhaled her milky soapy scent, my heart contracting, knowing no greater relief than this...

It felt strange that first morning to drop them off and watch them disappear into their classrooms, echoing that morning long ago when I first left Lucia in the care of someone else, crying in my car, white-knuckling the steering wheel. But as I stood on the empty school lawn, I realized that we’ve always been doing this, like Demeter and Persephone, and we will continue to do this: letting each other go so we can come back together again.

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When I was young, my mother used to tell me the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone at bedtime. Now that I am a mother myself, the story has come to haunt me in more ways than one—informing my own experience of motherhood as the continuous interplay between separation and reunification, breaking apart to come together again, and all the grief and joy in between...

The story of Persephone is used to explain the cycle of the seasons. Fall and winter each year is understood to be the time when Persephone descends into the underworld, and the emergence of spring and summer signals her return to her mother and the world of the living. But the story is also about motherhood and the necessary pain of letting a child go so that she can fully become herself. You could argue this process begins the second a child is born, as being born is the first real separation from the mother, the first rupture that informs the many ruptures and subsequent repairs in the mother-child relationship.

A wise friend reminded me of this soon after I gave birth to my daughter, Lucia. We need to prepare ourselves to let them go, she said, so they can leave and forge their own paths. This, my friend argued, is the true work of motherhood. Our children are only guests in our houses. 'It’s like holding a baby bird,' she told me. 'Too tight and you crush her. Not close enough and she flies away too soon, unprotected. Hold her with the knowledge of future flight.' " (Danau, 2021).