Exceedingly of the Mother

I wrote this piece 7 years ago. I often cringe reading back my old work but this one is an exception. Looking back at your old self is always uncomfortable but I think this is when I began using words in an interesting way. During that phase of my life I had moved away from the idea of patriarchal gods. I think it is tremendously damaging to the psyche of any person, regardless of gender, to only worship a male god. Sometimes I think back on the moment I realized I could worship women and felt as if I had discovered a missing limb. 

Important things to know:

This is written from the viewpoint of Athena (also known as Pallas Athene) and she is speaking about her mother, Metis, and her father, Zeus. Metis is married to Zeus (not willingly) and is pregnant by him (not willingly). She is also fated to birth a son who will overthrow him. So Zeus swallows her to prevent this and thereby takes her name (which means “wisdom”) and her power as his own. But Metis is still pregnant inside of Zeus and continues to grow and Zeus develops a terrible headache. He has Hephaestus split open his head to relieve his pain, and Athena is born from him, fully grown and wearing armor. If you would listen to men like my arch-nemesis, Ovid, tell it, Athena is the original gender traitor. Even her birth is a perversion that gives the labor pains and miracle of birth to Zeus and not Metis. The playwright Aeschylus, has Athena describe herself as, “exceedingly of the Father.” Perversion and sacrilege if you ask me! This is my version of events. I believe it is very important to create myths that set the foundation for the world you want to live in.

I will set the scene:

It is Mother’s Day in 2017. A young Catie has been comissioned to write a piece about Athena, the famously virginal goddess, that is somehow also about mothers and perform it on the backyard stage of a bar in Texas. I wrap a bedsheet around me, march onto the stage surrounded by attendants, and smash a watermelon that represents my father’s head with a baseball bat and am born from that head on stage.

ATHENA

My mother was a cunning woman

A goddess of deep thought and magical guile

A shapeshifter, a trickster.

My father was a general.

A hero to his people.

A king. A rapist.

My mother would not obey my father

So he swallowed her whole

And took the magic of her name as his own

But my mother was a cunning woman

And inside of him she grew me

And whispered to me the truth of her magic and the lessons of her mistakes.

And when I became too large for my father to contain his head was split in two

and I emerged fully grown with a mighty battle cry.

They say I look just like him.

When I was a newly formed goddess, Pallas the giant took an interest in me.

As the titan of warcraft he nurtured my gifts and was a second father to me

or so I believed.

When Pallas saw I had grown to trust him 

He attempted to strip me of my chosen sacred virginity.

So I stripped him of his skin and made it my shield.

I fastened his wings upon my feet and took the magic of his name as my own.

When you are a woman

There will be men who use your image, defanged

To tell your story about themselves.

But listen to me when I say,

Medusa was a monster but not in the way that you think,

My mother, Metis, was conquered but not in the way that you think.

And I am like my father but I am exceedingly of the mother.