The counsels of wisdom I had meant to give Teleri went unspoken. For her sake I had missed even the glimpse of him I might otherwise have had, though at the time I had thought even that much unwise. Constantine wrote to tell me that he was going to Egypt with Diocletian to fight someone called Domitius who had started a rebellion there, and so to my other troubles I could add anxiety for his safety.
And then Constantius left Britannia, and I learned the true meaning of despair. Lying with curtains drawn in my bedchamber I refused to rise and dress myself, and neither Drusilla’s most delicate recipes nor Hrodlind’s pleading could persuade me to eat. For most of a week I lay, accepting no company but that of Hylas, who was now grown so old that he spent his days dozing by the brazier, though when I was in the house he still insisted on following me from room to room. I rejoiced in my growing weakness, for though I had promised Constantius I would not take my life, this gentle slide into oblivion seemed a welcome surcease to my suffering.
And as weakness loosed the fetters of my mind, a vision came.
It seemed to me that I was wandering in a misty landscape like the borders of Avalon. I had come to confront the Goddess, to learn the next step in my own passage, to go beyond the Mother and meet the Crone. Before, I could never see beyond the Mother, who must be the central face of the Goddess, and the two on either side, Nymph and Crone, only Her handmaidens.
But what I was enduring now was the ultimate childbirth, the ultimate test of strength and courage. Now, confronting my own transition from the status of motherhood, I was forced to see the world-tragedy of mothers. Even Jesus, according to the Christians, had a mother, and again and again and again I saw him leaning on her arm, and when life deserted and defeated him he cried out to her too. I said, “Just like a man; he went on and died bravely and left the women to put his work together again afterwards.” Fear for my own son overwhelmed me and I cried bitterly, “Does the Mother have to let her children go just to be crucified?”
I asked what was beyond. Again and again I received only the sense of being a ship’s figurehead cleaving water towards the unknown.
Then I seemed to perceive woman’s central tragedy. I had lost my own mother before I could even know her, and was left alone, lost, desperate, crying out for comfort. It was a situation in which we women continue to find ourselves lifelong. We are forced to lend strength to men, to bear and feed our own children. Outsiders saw me as strong, but I was a child crying in the dark for comfort and my mother had gone away and would never be there for me again.
And then the twist of the knife. Before I was barely old enough to stand alone, before I had had time or strength to know who I was, a smaller hand had been tucked into mine and the Voice had said, “Here. This is your little cousin. Look after her.”
And this is the confrontation with Life, the first awareness that perhaps we should cry out, “No,” and strike down that little form and batter it until it lies dead and cold and no longer demanding, and run on free, untrammelled, shouting, “Mother, wait, there’s only me.”
Or else we must make the other choice, being deprived of the Mother, to become the mother, and pick up the little one when she falls down, and wipe away her tears, and rock her to sleep, clinging together against the dark because she is as much in need of comfort as you, and you are the stronger so it is yours to give…
And that, I realized as the bright images misted away, was what I had done, first for Becca and Dierna, and later for a succession of maidservants and soldiers’ wives and junior officers in my husband’s command. And for Teleri, though I had failed her, at the last.