Relationships Evolve So They Don't Have to End

Or, how the Queen of Pentacles helped me make peace with Mother's Day

Rather listen to this newsletter than read it? Scroll to the end for the audio! This special feature is available to paid subscribers only. Thank you for your support!

I am not one of those Substack writers who has the hubris not only to admit that their newsletters are casual, off-the-cuff pieces written the night before, but to actually brag about it like it’s a selling point.

It’s just not my style. I plan. I write in advance. I revisit. I pull tarot cards. I rewrite. I scrap. I write more. I polish. I do not word-vomit Saturday night and assume a thousand people will ooh and aah the next morning.

And yet, here I am on a Saturday afternoon still with nothing to say for tomorrow’s newsletter.

And I know why.

It’s because it’s Mother’s Day.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Mother’s Day. I like my mother. I even quite like my mother-in-law.

But I am also 38 years old and, by choice, not a mother.

I imagine Mother’s Day weekend for child-free women past a certain age is like the week of Christmas for non-Christians. You get wished a happy Mother’s Day by servers, store clerks, and cashiers intent on spreading good cheer and human decency, and instead of pointing out the flawed assumption that has led them to extend an inapplicable gesture to somebody they know nothing about, you smile and say, “Thank you,” and even extend a “You too!” if it seems appropriate.

Unless you’re me, of course, in which case you so badly do not want to disappoint a complete stranger who just asked about your Mother’s Day plans in the slowest moving elevator on the planet that you invent not one but two non-existent children who are planning to make you breakfast in bed which means - you cock your head to one side and lower your voice in jest - a late morning trip to Starbucks will certainly be in order, am I right? And you laugh and laugh, two mothers in an elevator, until the ding and parting of the metal doors call “scene” in this unnecessary drama of your own making.

I am at neither the giving nor receiving end of motherhood these days. So Mother’s Day seems to accentuate the limbo I as a woman without children find myself in. And as much as we’d like to say society has evolved and gender roles have loosened, motherhood is still such a defining facet of women’s lives - especially women my age - that it feels pretty alienating to live a life in which motherhood doesn’t play a primary role.

My own mother lives a mere fifteen minutes away from me, and yet she largely leaves me alone. Not in an unsupportive way. More in a she’s always done her own thing and she’ll tell me when she needs me way. In other words, she no longer mothers me.

And, just as noticeably, she doesn’t seem to have much need for me right now either. And while I was really uncomfortable with what felt like a distance and disconnect at first, I’m getting better at accepting things as they are.

I was granted tenure this semester. Hooray! And when I first told my mother, she exclaimed, “Ten-year already!?” An immigrant homemaker and retail worker, my mother didn’t even go to college let alone learn about the career trajectories of the ivory tower. She has no idea what tenure means. In fact, this past week, when I texted her about the Board of Trustees meeting that officially granted my tenure and promoted me from “Assistant Professor” to “Associate Professor,” her response was, and I quote, “Sounds important, great.”

And that’s okay. (It would not have been okay a few years ago, let me tell you. But I have grown.)

My relationship with my mother has always been different from her relationship with my sister.

I left home at 18 for college and never lived with my parents again. I’ve had entire stints in apartments with roommates they’ve never even seen! My sister, on the other hand, lived with them until she got married in her late twenties, and then again for a bit while her husband completed a fellowship at Stanford.

My sister married a fellow Armenian, and my parents threw her a traditional Armenian wedding in an Armenian church with an Armenian priest and a party at an Armenian banquet hall to follow. I, on the other hand, married a white guy I was already living with for years and paid for my own wedding which I planned myself while finishing grad school after having quit my job as a lawyer. My dad at least walked me down the aisle. But my mother? Bless her heart, she was basically a particularly obnoxious wedding guest who drove our poor wedding photographer crazy by darting into the aisle with her digital camera at the worst possible times.

And now, my sister, unlike me, is a mother herself. This means that although she may not need my mother to care for her, she certainly needs my mother’s help caring for her son. My mother is primary baby-sitter, child development counselor, post-parenthood marriage advisor, housekeeping guide, and even impromptu home goods shopper to my sister. Every now and then, my mother will show up to my sister’s house with some gadget or other. “I got you a salad spinner. You need this. It dries the lettuce fast,” she’ll say as she puts it away in a cupboard.

What’s interesting is that it has never occurred to me in those moments to insist, “I also eat lettuce!” My mother comes to my apartment only a handful of times a year, and I can’t imagine her ever showing up with an unsolicited item and even knowing remotely where to put it.

And today I find myself wondering why.

The truth is that the child-parent relationship most of us are comfortable with is one of need. When we are young, we need our parents to feed and nurture and care for us. To raise us and teach us and support us until we can fend for ourselves. And, if we are lucky enough to have our parents live to a ripe old age, the relationship we expect then is still one of need, only reversed. Our elderly parents in their varying stages of feebleness will need us to feed and nurture and care for them.

But what do we do in the in-between when neither of us necessarily needs the other?

In Greek mythology, Demeter and Persephone represent the ultimate mother and daughter relationship, with Demeter, goddess of grain and harvests, representing the mother archetype. In Goddesses in Everywoman, Jean Shinoda Bolen describes Demeter much like the Queen of Pentacles in tarot: the personification of maternal instinct, gaining fulfillment “through providing physical, psychological, or spiritual nourishment to others.”

The Queen of Pentacles is shown against a backdrop of lush fertility, which portrays her as a nurturing, provider archetype. The bull on her throne represents the virility that impregnates her, and the rabbit in the bottom right-hand corner is a nod to, well, also that. But most important is the Queen’s doting on the pentacle in her lap. This gesture of maternal attention, devotion, and care represents the role this Queen - like Demeter - finds the most meaningful and important in her life.

The Queen of Pentacles, like Demeter, asks herself, “How can I ensure that those around me have what they need to flourish? How can I bring abundance to my loved ones?”

In fact, in the Greek myth, after Persephone gets kidnapped by Hades to become his wife and Queen of the Underworld, Demeter is so distraught by the separation from her daughter that she refuses to perform her godly duties. As a result, fields lay fallow and famine threatens to end the entire human race. It isn’t until Zeus (Demeter’s brother and baby daddy) brokers a deal with Hades to have Persephone leave the underworld for a few months out of the year to spend with her mother that Demeter recovers from her depression. During the months Persephone is allowed to be with her mother, the land blossoms with fruitfulness and plenty (the spring and summer months). When Persephone must return to Hades, Demeter’s grief causes the plants to wither and the ground to lay bare (the autumn and winter months).

In many versions of this myth, Persephone is a helpless victim of Hades’ kidnapping and trickery. But in other interpretations that give Persephone a little more agency, she takes quite a liking to Hades and her reign as Queen of the Underworld, kind of like in Season 3 of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. She is no longer a young child, after all, but a budding woman who wants a life and domain of her own. Persephone no longer needs Demeter’s care and protection. And Demeter, herself still a youngish and formidable force to be reckoned with, doesn’t yet need her daughter’s help and care.

So where does that leave them?

Or me and my mother for that matter?

This absence of need might feel awkward or unfamiliar at first. But it’s also a beautiful opportunity to experience a new type of relationship. A more adult one? A more friendly one? A more casual one? A fairly uneventful one most of the time? I mean, don’t get me wrong. When all else fails, I have still been known to call my mom sobbing and blubbering unintelligibly. But mostly we lay by the pool without saying much. Or text each other pictures of my nephew. Or, on rare occasions where we both have the afternoon off and she’s not baby-sitting, we’ll go see what TJ Maxx has to say.

And let’s forget about me for a second. Who’s to say this isn’t exactly what my mother wants - even needs - from me right now?

Sometimes relationships evolve so they don’t have to end. And if I let go of what Mother’s Day used to mean, or what it sometimes feels like it should mean, I can start to appreciate what it actually does mean in my life right now.