sacred cows
I found myself taking a lot of photos of cows. They were for my grandson, who was two-and-a-half and had an inexplicable adoration of cows. I, on the other hand, had a completely explicable adoration of him, and his tiny baby brother: they were the infinitely cuddly offspring of my oldest daughter, Meghan. She was my third child, the center of the spiral of our family. She was our rock.
It was totally unfair – but that’s how Life is. Born into a crumbling nuclear family, Meghan was my last-ditch attempt to keep us together, which she did…but just us, her brothers, herself, and me, without their father. Before she was as old as her son was now, her daddy lived far away. Before I was as old as she was now, I was a single mother of three.
Family. The gift that keeps on giving. Even when you don’t really deserve it. I remembered my pregnancy with Meghan: in only thinly-veiled denial that my marriage was failing, I had been clinging to the irrational hope that this baby would change everything, like clinging to a slippery rock just beyond the shore after shipwreck, too tired to keep holding on, too far to swim.
I had been so afraid I would not love this baby, the way I did not love the father. I didn’t understand motherhood. I felt like my heart was damaged, like I was incapable of truly loving, always keeping my distance, even with my tiny sons, both toddlers under three. I took care of all their needs, fed and bathed them, read them stories, shushed their midnight tears from teething or just waking up alone. But I loved functionally, dutifully.
When Meghan was born, labor went fast. Arriving at the hospital in a rainstorm, I endured the wind whipping spray across my face as I inched my way toward the front doors. Finally in the delivery room, my water broke like a crashing wave, and immediately following that wave – here came the baby. The midwife handed her to me as I lay back in my bed. But I lifted her above me in my outstretched arms, and named her on the spot: “It’s Meghan! It’s Meghan.” And looking into her clear eyes, for the first and only time in my life, I fell in love at first sight. Head over heels. I pulled her to me, holding her tight to my heart, clinging to my slippery little rock in the storm of my life.
Meghan proved a match for her full name, which meant “noble little warrior.” Destined to be an archer, her arrows of trust and devotion hit each one of us straight through the heart, and we finally became a family, the boys and I circling around her protectively. But she needed no protection. Easily their match, Meghan could keep up with “doze bruvvers” when they were running wild, slowly reining them back in.
Refusing a distant relationship, as a baby, she wailed in frustration if I set her down or ducked out of sight for even an instant; we were literally joined at the hip, my tiny warrior princess riding shotgun with me, teaching me a new mother-daughter dance, step by step, in sync, together. Like riding a bucking bronc, this baby slowly tamed me. She reined us all in.
Even so, I was never entirely comfortable with my role of “Mom.” I refused to celebrate Mother’s Day, and so my children grew up giving me Happy Father’s Day cards instead. Chased away by my mother’s irritable words or ignored by her turned back when she was cooking, I learned to despise making meals, and my children learned that asking, “What’s for supper?” was akin to swearing at me, and would garner an equal response. Fiercely independent, I was much more interested in teaching my children to think for themselves and speak their minds than to conform to societal norms and expectations. Fiercely loyal, I offered to do it for them whenever conflicts arose at school, more a threat than an offer as we all knew, which was quickly and nervously dismissed by each child as they navigated their own issues, directed their own lives.
Much as I came to adore my children, I still armored myself in intellect and attitude. I stormed every castle in my heavy boots and long fiery hair. In arguments, I reminded them, “This is no democracy – this is a monarchy. You don’t get a vote.” When I could not dazzle, I intimidated. Yet a chink in my armor existed: a love of goddesses. It was my ultimate undoing.
They were just so cool, goddesses in all those religions I studied. Tara was not some femmy green-eyed jealous monster in a gossip magazine – she was green, like a dragon, a great defender in Tibetan Buddhism, sitting one knee up, one foot hanging off her pedestal, ready to jump down into the mayhem with you. Shakti was not some sweet little Hindu mama – she was the creative energy of the universe, to your benefit or to your destruction. Plus she always had fantastic wild hair.
What ruined me was the translation of the names. Avalokiteshvara, Kannon, Guadalupe, Tonantzin, all of their names ended up meaning some form of Earth Mother Goddess who offered compassion. My favorite translation belonged to Kuan Yin: She Who Hears the Cries of the World. Every time I read those words, they caught me, brought an ache I didn’t realize I had. Didn’t realize I’d had forever.
Now, all along the Camino, I found images of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus. She held her Little One wherever I looked, in seaside towns, in grand cathedrals, in walled cemeteries; in tiny shrines along the path, some no bigger than a dollhouse, where someone devoted, thankful for answered prayer, would refresh flowers in a vase, or light a candle. I ducked under covered porticos to enter low doors, peeped through barred windows, peered through fences and gates, finding the Blessed Mother standing in quiet corners of all the churches along the way and tucked into peaceful bends of the Camino itself.
She was everywhere. Compassion was everywhere. Holding that baby on her hip, fiercely refusing a distant relationship – with the baby, with peregrinos, with the world. And everywhere I looked, I saw Meghan. Meghan as a baby, clinging tight, and Meghan as…a mommy.
What I had always been seeking, she had become. Where I had been shipwrecked, she had sailed. And I adored her for it.
Goddesses were not intimidating – they were free to love. That was the ultimate source of their power. They encouraged me to keep going, wherever and whenever I found them always the perfect moment, forgiving me for being human…loving me for being human.
I was intent to pay my respects in Santiago and then continue on, to Muxia, and the shrine there to La Virgen de la Barca – The Virgin of the Boat. Some said she appeared to Saint James when he preached in Iberia, to encourage him to continue his work. Other stories contended that when this first apostle of Jesus was martyred, his body was returned to those who loved him in Iberia by La Virgen, in a boat, across the sea.
My favorite version: brought back by La Virgen in her stone boat, the remnants of which could be seen in the unusually smooth, flat boulders landed atop the rugged, stony shore at Muxia. I had to go there, her shrine to compassion built on the rock that held the wild, stormy waves at bay.
jade waves
velvet stone
pouring in upon themselves
the endless vessel
the endless offering