On Mothers, Daughters and the Myth of Persephone

Catherine T Davidson
6 min readApr 16, 2016

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My daughter rowing away

At my age, 52, it is very nice to make new friends. I suppose I should not be surprised this happens. My mother, who is 86, makes them regularly. Last week she had lunch with a woman who was a doctor at the same hospital where my father worked; in her generation, she was a pioneer — not only in her career but in a 40 year long relationship she sustained with another doctor, both unmarried. Now she lives in a beautiful house near the beach and according to my mother is “so interesting”.

My new friend is also so interesting. She is a tech entrepreneur who has launched and nurtured a series of businesses; she is also the mother of three children, one of whom is my student, who introduced us. He thought we might like to meet because we graduated from the same college in the same year, although we did not know each other then.

In college, I was a basement café dweller and aspiring poet; she studied economics. We lived in different houses and had different friends, but now, on the other side of our 30th reunion, find we have a lot in common. We like to read; we like to travel; we like to talk about the world at large and the world at home.

Recently, we met to discuss a trip she had taken to Greece with her teenage daughter. Her daughter loves Greek myths and comic books and the threads of women’s stories weaving through time and genres. The trip was led by a professor who teaches a course we used to call “Heroes for Zeroes” in our naïve and arrogant youth because of its reputation as an easy “A”. How I wish I had been smart enough to take his class then!

They journeyed on a loop I remember well: through Athens, Nauplion, Argos and Delphi. Her favourite spot was Delphi, the home of the ancient oracle. They stayed in a dry ski resort and visited the ruins that rest on the tip of what the Greeks called the Bellybutton of the World, the deep valley surrounded by peaks that forms the dramatic backdrop to the ancient site.

My friend showed me a picture of the professor, standing like an oracle surrounded by acolytes, explaining that the smoke that the ancients breathed to trigger their visions no longer seeped through the cracks in the rocks. At that moment, vapours rose from the valley and circled around them like thin white snakes.

This image got us thinking about how magic and myth persist in the world — whether through the stories we tell or through their incarnations in new stories, new forms — films, comics, fictions.

My friend told me about how she spent a whole summer when she was 12, bicycling back and forth to her local library, reading everything she could devour. I remember that sponge-like age, too, when everything went in — junk, classics — bodice rippers and Bronte’s all mixed up together. She said she read a lot of myths but the one that stuck was Persephone’s.

Persephone sticks with me, too. For years, I have been working on a semi-autobiographical novel re-telling this story from Persephone’s perspective. I’m not sure my version will ever work but I do know the story itself has power. The myth is mostly about motherly grief: Demeter’s daughter stolen by the King of the Underworld, whose mourning creates winter and whose reunion brings summer.

We talked about why that story is so compelling. Maybe because it is one of the few which is about mothers and daughters, without a sword-thrusting hero to get in the way. Maybe because the emotions still seem so vivid and recognizable, even in a world where we are unlikely to be kidnapped or bartered or sold out of our mother’s house and into our husbands. (Not forgetting those for whom coming of age is still full of physical peril.)

I think that Persephone still speaks resonantly because of the bond between mother and daughter, the threat of its disruption and the chaos caused when this occurs. The love between mother and daughter can be so powerful; revolutionary even. It’s our first female friendship, able to last all our lives, and yet, it is never easy, or easy to explain. It is most fraught it seems to me at that moment a daughter reaches adolescence, the one where she has to leave her mother’s side in order to become herself.

My own mother and I frequently clashed when I was growing up; we loved each other as much as we drove each other crazy. Often these struggles involved the boundary lines between where she ended and I began. Is it any wonder that the myth of Persephone involves going Underground — the place where the ego disappears and only shades remain?

I have written two books about women’s adventures in growing up; they have also been books about my mother. Now I am writing a story in which the conflict is again around a mother/daughter pair, but this time I am drawing on my experience from the other side of the divide.

In this story, a woman who is trying to preserve her Turkish Greek grandfather’s apricot orchard fights with her daughter about a new, possibly unsuitable boyfriend. I am hoping to publish it with Gemma Media’s Open Door, a press I admire for beautiful books for newly literate adults, stories with accessible language but sophisticated themes.

My own daughter has only just begun exploring the adult world. She is a newly minted “teen” and recently, I have felt her push against me, as if I were the pier she needed to lever on to launch. This can be trying and it is not easy watching her go out to make her own mistakes and find her own way. I try to remember she won’t make the same mistakes I did, because she is not the same person as me. If I forget, she reminds me.

“Mum,” she has said to me more than once: “You are American. I am English. You share everything. I don’t. I like to be private.” It’s a good reminder that my job now is to be patient, to wait for her to come to me with her thoughts and feelings, much as I would love to get under her skin and know everything because I see that she needs me to be on the shoreline, not with her in the water.

When she was in my womb, my husband and I spent many hours in front of the television, exhausted from caring for her two-year old brother. Mostly we watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, written by that great admirer of strong women, Joss Whedon. Buffy was a modern sci-fi horror story with mythological, comic-book roots. Every time she saved the universe, a whole host of Greek heroes stood behind her, waving their swords. Something about the show must have seeped into my daughter’s DNA.

My English daughter was born with a strong sense of boundaries, as if such a thing could be transmitted in the gene pool. From an early age, she was a “by myselfer” where her more Mediterranean brother is like me, always in search of a friendly village to join. She won’t need to fight too hard against me to define herself as different, as she has been doing that from the day she was born.

But we will have to have conflict. How could we not? What I hope, though, as we enter this time of separation is that we won’t have to go too far into the underground before we find our way back up into the light.

If you like this story, please share on Twitter, Facebook or shouting down the phone. Please take one second to recommend — the little heart makes me feel great.

You might also be interested in: On Writing as a Superpower or On Friendship, Reading and Connecting

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Catherine T Davidson
Catherine T Davidson

Written by Catherine T Davidson

Writer, teacher, immigrant. Angeleno in London. Connecting through the world of words one reader at a time.

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