As if we needed another reason to love spring: My take on Persephone and Demeter

As a kid, I was completely obsessed with Greek mythology (this was before Rick Riordan make it cool). Somewhere in the depths of my grandfather’s basement I found two books from a larger hardcover set: The Myths of Old Greece, copyright 1898. I received many, many more books over the years but those were always my favorites.

It was an incomplete set so I didn’t have the full pantheon of stories to choose from, but I loved the story of Persephone and Demeter the best. Persephone was a sweet pretty girl minding her own business who got swept up in adult events and passions that were none of her doing (I had a lot of questions about Hades though….). She missed her mom and wanted to go home; she tried really hard to follow the rules; but she was also really really hungry, and she was, after all, a kid. I understood that the repercussions of this were so much bigger than she could have realized.

Demeter was always kind of an afterthought in many of the stories and seemed like a boring mom doing all sorts of boring things, harvest, blah blah blah. But mess with her kid and she became A Whole Other Thing. So what if every living thing on earth starved to death? Give me back my daughter. Peer pressure from the other gods asking her to play nice? Screw you – give me back my daughter. As someone’s daughter, I was very much taken with the idea that there was a mother who would literally wipe life off the face of the earth in defense of her child.

Once I became a mother I had a whole different appreciation of this story, especially once my daughter hit her teens. I think that teenage girls are lovely, reckless, dangerous, and utterly oblivious, and they deserve meadows full of flowers to wander around in unselfconsciously while they navigate the bridge between childhood and womanhood without any interference from the greedy lord of the underworld or his human equivalents. And Demeter pulled out all the stops in her defense; her cold, shivering, remorseful daughter held out, knowing that actual hell had no fury to compare to her mother’s rage. I feel this story in a whole different way, knowing that the banked power of that mother love is the greatest source of strength I possess.

So every spring, there’s always a little extra in my heart. There are fresh green growing things and warm breeze and sunshine and baby animals everywhere, and in the old world it was because a mother pushed the world to the very brink in defense of her daughter. Spring is a reminder that Mom will always come through for you.