It happened again at Big Len’s place in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A steady flow of true humanity came through there every day. Big Len’s specialized in cold beer to go and weekly room rentals, an odd mix but it had been around for years.
I had just returned from buying a carton of cheap cigarettes.
It was my daughter’s sixteenth birthday. I hadn’t been pregnant for fifteen years, eleven months and nineteen days. On that morning, I experienced a miraculous conception. What would come from my womb some months later would not, indeed could not, be, from a man.
Long ago, I recognized that one should take these things as they come. The years and more than five-hundred-fifty pregnancies have tempered my weariness and bone crushing sadness with wisdom. Inexplicably I felt driven to invest in this child so that it would be more successful than all the others combined.
One minute, I was walking up the backstairs to my bug-infested room, a communal toilet and shower down the hall. The next, a fresh new soul spontaneously generated in my ancient womb. The cigarettes slipped from my grasp and bounced down the dingy stairs, bounding higher as they picked up speed. The carton cracked against the door and burst open spewing cellophane wrapped pleasure across the sun-lit landing.
“Shit!”
I can’t explain it; I just knew it had happened again. It’s like Zen, if you’ve experienced satori, you get it; otherwise, you’re shit-out-of-luck.
I sat down three quarters of the way up the steep stairs. “Shit, shit, shit … I’m too tired for this.” I slammed my elbow against the wall; dingy, faded wallpaper fluttered. “How does this always catch me off-guard?” I took a long drag on a generic cigarette, my last. “So many myths about gods becoming men and walking among us, the gods of mythology were too chicken-shit to become women.” I ripped at the wallpaper exposing years of corrupted paint. “Woman’s work my ass,” a sarcastic laugh slipped out. “Men should try motherhood.”
My story starts in the mists of time, before I conceived the collective unconsciousness of humankind. Known by a thousand names – Eve, Ishtar, Isis, Mother Earth – I am the Oracle of Delphi who doled out visions, generation upon generation, ad infinitum. The Greeks referred to me as Gaia, the one who sprang from Chaos and became the mother of all things.
Myth cloaks the truth trapping humanity in ancient prisons of ignorance. A son once said, “The Truth shall set you free.”
I have born more grief than the mind can conceive. In vain, I have staggered through humanity searching, always searching for true companionship, a true equal.
Jung wrote, “Whenever the earth mother appears it means that things are going to happen in reality; this is an absolute law.” His words were confused. I do not appear. I never disappear. I keep moving, looking into eyes that cannot see, listening for words that convey meaning. Carl understood one thing. For those who come to know me, reality takes hold. Through the mind-numbing millennia, I have witnessed pockets of hope, people whose peaceful coexistence drew me toward the mainstream. Such communities were but flickering flames blown out by human progress.
Every sixteen years I become pregnant and carry the baby to term – which is usually some time during the twenty-fourth lunar month. I neither consult nor require a patriarch to participate in these sacred events. These children of fiat are my offering, my sacrifice to humanity, gifts meant to foster evolution so that humanity might come to a full realization of their divine nature.
Through the centuries, I have mothered some famous and infamous people. Ishmael and Isaac, those naughty boys who denied the goddess, were mine. Siddhartha and Jesus were my sons as were Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Mohamed. You see, I am doomed to have sons, boys and men who must throw off the fear and oppression of women or die. Warriors, orators, gurus, and shaman alike I have birthed, but very few wise men.
Sid was a rebellious boy in the beginning. Jesus died too soon. I fled the Christian lands after seeing so much harm done in his name. Humans constantly teeter on the brink of madness. After the first jihad, Mohamed tried to honor me in his book, “Christ, the son of Mary, was no more than a messenger; many were the messengers that passed away before him. His mother was a woman of truth. But they had both to eat their food.” Can you imagine? My own son did not understand the divine reality of the one who bore him into this world. With a broken heart, I slowly made my way north and west.
Sadly, most of my sons turned out to be self-centered egomaniacs. Tragedy seemed my only companion. Witnessing their utter lack of respect for women and the goddess, I began to desert my boys by their sixteenth birthday. Hitler broke my heart long before he broke the world. I fled to the west.
I arrived in the new world just after the turn of the century. My next child, Sunnyland Slim, soulfully interpreted my heart through his fingers and songs. But the moral decay and utter inhumanity of the last several centuries had brought me low. I took a long vacation, which brought me to Big Len’s with my only daughter.
Human potential for greatness is exceeded only by its arrogant individualism.
Around each child’s thirty-third birthday, when the calendars of the sun and the moon align, is a powerful opportunity in their lives. At those times, the collective unconsciousness draws toward the surface of conscious thought throughout the earth’s inhabitants. At that time, every generation faces the great question – will they accept their maker as she is. Only during that powerful alignment of the lunar and solar phases, is vision able to break the bonds of human limitation and broach the domain of collective reality. That unified vision is the key to human evolution.
I loved the renaissance when men nearly grasped the divine nature of humanity. Rubens honored me, and all women, with his exquisite art. Things had always been dicey with the boys, but they really went downhill fast during the industrial revolution. My son Karl wrote about a community of equals, but he was no Jesus. He thought economics could alter the human condition. He could not see that lasting social change will only come through an evolved race.
For thousands of years, since the men of this species overthrew the goddess, violence toward women and children has run rampant. The prehistoric patriarchal revolt disfigured the male capacity for love, trust, and connection. In the process, my heart fractured, and so began my perpetual search for wholeness.
The myth of the ages is that human men become mature. Their adult lives are lived as an extension of their boyhood. They do not mature they merely age. Their deeply buried true self rarely surfaces. Panic ensues in the hearts of men when they glimpse their feminine side. The fear of homosexuality is but a disguise. Their terror lies in something sinister and primal that they cannot face.
They fear me in them. In the gap between Eden’s fall and recorded history, they knew me as the goddess of all things dark and uncanny. Men’s hearts filled with fear, knowing I could strike them down with arrows of conscience even from afar. In rebellion against the true nature of all things, they have subjugated women since the dawn of human history. Once they seized control, they denied their essence and proclaimed their superiority.
To survive I had to go on the lam. Of course, modern humans have no recollection or understanding of these things. Primeval instinct leads men to oppress and deny their nature and needs. They do not comprehend that their claims of physical superiority and manifest destiny are born of fear.
Men need not fear. I am the self-existent One. Ex nihilo I made all things. I am woman and man, the beginning and the end, the lover of all things. I draw many into oneness creating a race of divine equals, who knowing their origins choose to embrace their divine nature. I alone procreate – the divine begetting the divine.
#
A sign flashed above my head, Sacred Heart Hospital. I floated along into an elevator. Everything smelled clean and white. Doors parted, closed, and opened again. People rushed past my horizontal floating frame.
“She’s in trouble. Get her into surgery.”
Who could they be talking about? How long had I been here?
I hear my daughter’s voice, “What is it? What is wrong?”
“She’s hemorrhaging. We need to take the baby now.”
“Looks like a lot of scar tissue, possibly an acute ectopic. Get the on-call surgeon.
“Blood pressure’s dropping, pulse is dropping.”
“She’s going into shock; we’re losing her. Come on people!”
#
The doctor explained that they had done a “clean house” hysterectomy. I would never have another child.
My firstborn daughter, now eighteen stepped forward and looked into my eyes. She held her new little sister with pride and hope. “Mama, she’s the one; the last one.”
The End
Author’s Note: This is fiction and does not necessarily reflect my beliefs.