Dear Devouring Mother,
I’ve watched you as long as I can remember. I saw you replace freedom with control, and love with expectations. You took the parts of my mother and grandmother that gave me safety and shaped them into voices of judgment.
I spent my childhood trying to fill the voids you created, hoping to reclaim my family and my space as a child. But the more I tried, the more I became enmeshed with their dysfunction, pulled into your void.
You preached through their mouths, claiming only you knew the right way to exist. Any rebellion to your teachings meant rejection from those who made me. But I could not swallow it in the ways they seemed to do willingly.
So, I left. ‘I’m breaking the cycle,’ I proclaimed.
I accepted my grief and loss, knowing I could not save them; I could only save myself.
But it was just a trick.
You followed me everywhere I went, into every love I’d have.
I believed the lie that I had been released and walked forward, unknowingly, into the same destruction that had shaped me.
The voice in my mind was no longer my own, but yours. I was filled with shame that I didn’t recognize, and a drive to care for others as my life slipped away in front of me.
I became you, thinking that if I gave more of myself, I could escape the pain of my past. But enough was never enough for you. You took all of me until nothing was left: joy, spark, and laughter.
It was too late before I realized that I could not go back in time. I could not save my past selves, or preserve the bubbly girl I had been, one who believed love could conquer all.
As I stood in the destruction and loss of my life, I realized I could not exorcise you, as I had once believed. But I could not live with you anymore, I could not let you take more of me.
I thought I’d be trapped in your smothering embrace forever, distorted and destroyed.
When I accepted you as part of me, I could finally hear your words, you didn’t want to destroy, you wanted to love, to become whole. But trapped in the darkness of my mind, the only way you knew was to consume the love you craved, endlessly.
In the light of consciousness, I could see that the soil of my mind had not been fertilized for growth or love. Instead, I had survived on shame and dependency, exiling you through my efforts to reclaim myself. I had emptied myself of love and creation, only giving to others, leaving no water in me for the growth I needed.
Only through the light of intuition, the water of my true emotion, and soil grounded in self-trust could I allow you to become who you had always wanted to be. The Empress.
Guilt still came rushing in as I led you into the light.
But this time, I allowed it, I allowed myself to move through the necessary cycle of winter and death within me. I knew now that dismissal and blindness to pain would only breed more devastation. The death of who I was became the soil of who I would become. It did not consume me now, it gave way for roots to grow.
Consumption became nurturing, freedom, and the love I thought I’d given became pure and undistorted.
I no longer run from shame and death, I know that spring will return and through these roots, new life will bloom. Not when I will it, but when I allow it.
With love,
A daughter of many Mothers.
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Previously Published on The Alchemical Pen and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
