[Editor’s Note: This and subsequent excerpt parts are from the anthology entitled Wounded Feminine: Grieving with Goddess, published by Girl God Books (2024).]
Grief for the Mothers Who Lost the Goddess
Alison Newvine
How do we grieve for our mothers who have lost the Goddess?
How do we release the guilt over our own escape,
knowing she’s been left behind?
How do we relate to her choice to remain
within patriarchal belief systems?
The Woman Trapped in the Tunnel
Imagine you are trapped in a tunnel with no access to or imagination of anything beyond that tunnel. You’ve been there for generations. The options laid before you in this tunnel are virgin, whore or mother, and you are a good Catholic (or Protestant or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu) girl with a strong capacity for connection and nurturance. There is only one “choice” you see. To become a mother.
But Mother doesn’t turn out the way you imagined it would. Not within the patriarchal paradigm. On this Mother path you are bound to feel resentment simmer beneath your skin. You’ve lost something, an ancient something you don’t have a memory of, but something to do with your magic, your power. You have become a vessel that is endlessly emptied and never filled, the best parts of you doled out to others, whether you want to or not. The cauldrons in which you brewed elixirs of healing and magic when you were your oldest grandmother are now buried deep in the mud at the bottom of the ocean. You are trying to feed and nurse your sick children with only patriarchy’s poison foods, toxic concoctions and sharp, sterile instruments. There’s a nagging sense of something being deeply wrong. You know you should have the power to make them well, yet they are growing sicker and you are beyond exhausted.
There’s a holy rage trying desperately to escape. It has become a caged beast breathing fire from the twisted net of patriarchal suppression, spewing molten spittle upon the skin of your own children in your attempt to express what you know deep in your bones. Something is wrong.
Defining Motherhood
God defines motherhood very differently than Goddess does. Under patriarchy, mother is synonymous with servant. A good mother is selfless, ever-giving, ever-patient, a bottomless container for everyone else’s pain and tantrums. Who can live up to this? Who should? She subsumes herself to the needs of her children, as well as their father, and this is holy in God’s eyes. She is defined solely by what she provides to others. She must be entirely satiated by the mundane tasks required to sustain young life, and if her husband pitches in from time to time, he is a hero and she should never cease showering him with gratitude. Historically, his participation in child-rearing is insufficiently offered and only guiltily received.
Mother is not the head of household, even though it is she who is responsible for running it and seeing that its members flourish. Her innate, sacred impulse towards agency becomes twisted and deformed and winds up harming others and herself. In this she digs herself a deeper hole and she loses the respect and trust of those closest to her. Her attempts at agency instead build the walls of her own coffin.
How does Goddess define motherhood? You are Her own majesty reflected back to Her. You are revered for your life-giving and life-sustaining powers. Tens of thousands of archeological artifacts from Goddess-worshiping cultures attest to the reverence with which mothers were treated during an earlier time. Mother is Divine. You are to be supported and nurtured and praised on a regular basis. Perhaps most importantly, Mother is an aspect of your being, not your totality. Your mother aspect functions in harmony with all of your other divine expressions ~ artist, dancer, writer, singer, community organizer, performer, lover, student, teacher, athlete, activist, mystic. Mother isn’t a container you must collapse your entire being into, rather it is one of many powerful expressions of your divinity. As Mother, you are allowed to be imperfect and allowed to say no. You are encouraged to be introspective and evolving. Goddess doesn’t infantilize you. She adores you. She challenges you to continue to grow and change, to desire and create, to heed your soul’s highest calling. Most importantly, She empowers you to define yourself on your own terms.
The Daughter of the Goddess
Today, there are many daughters who are reaching further back than their own mother’s memory, further back than the memories of all of the grandmothers whose names are still known to them. These daughters are born restless, questioning everything, reacting to what is “normal” in ways their mothers do not understand. These are daughters who refuse to believe what they are told and who spend their lives searching for truth. They act out, go off the rails, cause all manner of chaos and heartache. In contrast to their mother’s engrained self-sacrifice, they seem extraordinarily selfish. These are the daughters who find their way back to the Goddess.
Betrayal
The Mother of the God and the Daughter of the Goddess do not see eye to eye. They are attempting to relate across paradigms and this can feel like an endless onslaught of betrayals for each of them. The daughter who has recognized patriarchal oppression and actively resists it will feel deeply betrayed by her mother who is loyal to it. She sees her mother as complicit in each of their oppressions and it fills her with horror. She struggles to reconcile the goodness she knows her mother to be with the callousness with which the mother parrots dehumanizing political stances toward those the patriarchy deems “other.” Illegal Immigrants. Drug Dealers. Atheists. Promiscuous Women. Lesbians. FemiNazis. In the early years of their dance, the mother doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know, just how many of those epitaphs belong to her own daughter. As they surface, one by one, the mother feels stabbed in the back and the heart and the gut as she struggles to reconcile her fierce love for her child with her visceral horror as these dangerous “others” encroach upon her family.
At some level, the Mother knows the real threat is patriarchal predation. However, she has been taught, shaped and molded since birth to not see this. She is driven to keep her daughter safe in a world she knows threatens her because of her gender. Yet safety, in the eternal sense, is dependent upon belief in and loyalty to a Father God and his male representatives in the clergy. Since they know best, she learns to mistrust her own intuition and instincts. But these instincts are too strong to be fully suppressed. As the battle rages below the level of her conscious awareness, she instinctively lashes out against the degradation of women in popular culture and the media, mistaking rape culture for all of sexuality and splitting the virgin and whore into a thousand pieces once more. Her daughters swallow this woman-delivered patriarchal shaming of female sexuality, putting them more at risk of suffering the victimization she was trying so desperately to circumvent for them.
The Daughter’s Grief
The early stages of this journey are characterized by battles, anger and tears. Burning through the seemingly endless stratums of rage she feels for having been betrayed by the patriarchal mother, what does the daughter of the Goddess come to find? The grief she buried so long ago. There is grief over not being understood, not being seen, being actively rejected in part or in total. She grieves the connection she wants to have with her mother, a connection based on reverence for the feminine and resistance to patriarchal oppression. And deeper down there’s something else.
When she has sufficiently processed her feelings of betrayal, rejection, anger and hurt, there is something even more painful waiting there. It is emanating from the empathic connection formed in the womb and in the early years of complete interdependence. She can feel what her mother has dissociated from. It still lives in her. She carries her mother’s unconscious grief over the loss of the Goddess, the sacrifice of her own divinity.
For her mother, it couldn’t have happened all at once, but slowly over time, pin prick by pin prick punctuated by periodic harsher blows to her sense of worth, value and dignity as a little girl. The wounds of her mother’s childhood live inside of her own being now, along with so many of grandmother’s wounds before her. In losing a sense of their innate goodness, and the sacredness and safety of their sexuality and body, the mother, the grandmothers, learned from a young age to mask and to armor. Theirs was not the armor of knights or warriors but the costume of the good girl, then of the dutiful wife, the selfless mother and always of the faithful consumer of patriarchal wares and ideals
Guilt
Patriarchy teaches us to morph our grief into guilt. We daughters who found the Goddess feel a type of survivor’s guilt. We escaped. We found our way back to the Divine Mother and in so doing had to separate from the mother who gave birth to us. We’ve misstepped a thousand times in our attempt to find a healthy separation and have harmed her in the process. We learn to hold boundaries that can seem to her like rejection. We see her still suffering there, without a root system into her own sacredness. She can only relate to divinity through a masculine intermediary, including her internal concepts and images of the divine. She is fundamentally separate from God and thus from holy empowerment. She experiences her power through dissociated moments of destructive rage or coy, twisted statements belying judgment, manipulation or a tenuous sense of superiority. She has forgotten that she is magic and as we daughters soar on the wings of the alchemical bird goddess, there is a pang in our hearts that she cannot fly with us, that we must leave her behind.
Integration
The daughters who have found the Goddess wrestle with many questions. Can we endeavor to love like She does? Can we release our guilt over escaping the clutches of patriarchal mind control and see that those who decide to stay are in their agency? We all have the right to choose to remain in the purgatories of our collective forgetfulness. Can we trust that Goddess is holding the mother who has forgotten Her?
Maybe we don’t have to completely release our longing for our mother’s remembering. Maybe this can live as a desire in our hearts and a trust in our souls that translates as a candle that glows for her from the etheric realm, from that dimension of space-time when our souls entered their bodies, when our bodies were one.
Agency
When we really feel it, the guilt dissolves into wave upon wave of grief. The medicine for this grief is in the feeling, the expressing, the sharing. The medicine for this guilt can be found nested in the fundamental difference between patriarchal and partnership models of spirituality. The Father God compels obedience through threat of punishment. You have free will in theory but if you defy Him then He will make you suffer. He is very clear than nothing short of an eternity of torture awaits you should you stray from the path He has designed. Then He gaslights you with talk of His all-loving, all-forgiving nature.
The partnership model of spirituality, the path known to those who call divine She, is based on agency, on free-will devoid of the threat of eternal damnation. It is a pro-choice model in every sense of the term. The partnership path holds us in relationship with the divine, in active collaboration. Goddess has patience with our mistakes and is a compassionate witness to the suffering we cause ourselves when we act out of integrity with our own goodness. If we move away from Her, She lets us. She respects our choice. She is watching us and loving us through it all. And She never turns her back.