I’m a mother.
Motherhood changes your life. Some of the ways are obvious, others not as much. Last night I had a dream about a child who was engaged in self-mutilation. In the middle of it, I asked Loki to stop it.
“Why? It’s an initiation.”
“Because he’s a child and I’m a mother and I can’t abide it.”
Everything stopped when I said those words. Stopped still as death while He waited for me to Get It. The years between my rape and my son’s birth were more than a little mad, and I don’t talk about it much, because it almost feels as if it happened to someone else. I’ve always wondered how and why I bear no physical scars from that time in my life.
“You were supposed to be Mine then, but you asked to be a mother.”
“I did, and everything stopped. It all stopped with [my child].”
“I’ve always given you what you wanted.” He’s not exaggerating. Sixteen years ago, I put my hand on my best friend’s very pregnant belly, wishing I might have a child of my own, and nine months later, my child was here. I nearly bled to death during the birth.
“It would’ve been a madness initiation then. It turned to illness.”
“Yes.”
I grew very quiet then, and indeed, I’ve been very quiet all day, just mulling that over. Did I change my wyrd in asking for my child? Did I trade one form of illness for another? Have I judged people who go the Madness road harshly because it was my perception that I ‘just got better?’
In the US, we as a culture attribute most of our good fortune to our own hard work. The unlucky aren’t working hard enough or whatever BS we tell ourselves to feel better about not giving a rat’s ass. And there’s an awful lot that’s determined by luck – race, gender, sexual orientation, whether or not your physical body lines up much (or at all) with the astral one.
But my child is a gift, and one that I can never thank them enough for, because I wouldn’t have learned or grown in the ways that are meaningful to me without that impetus, that incredible need to take care of him.
I can certainly relate to this. I was supposed to be Odin’s bride in my early twenties, but I wanted instead to be a mortal wife and mother–and He allowed it. The “wife” part, of course, went sour pretty quickly, and I spent the next fifteen years or so trying to get out of an emotionally abusive relationship. (Which is probably why Odin has been so reluctant to treat me harshly, even when it’s called for.) The mother part I will never regret, as my daughter is now a beautiful young woman and I don’t think I would be able to give Odin as much as I can without having had that experience,
I’d wager there’s more than a few of us who got waylaid and claimed later.
I was supposed to be Loki’s wife in my 20s too, but I thought I was in love with somebody else who put me through hell till my 30s when my path finally crossed with Loki again. I think Him whooshing the fire to life from nothing that one night in the mid 80s in front of me was His sign of frustration, and a reminder. That someday I would outgrow that delusional belief and obsession I had at the time and awaken to Him.
I completely relate to this