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One Goddess

Once upon a time Mother leapt fully formed and armor-plated from the forehead of Zeus, sword in hand, a once-in-a-lifetime howl announcing her presence on satellite Earth.

Mother sometimes has the body of a woman and the head of a lion. She crafts her own arrows from found branches and feathers, she smiths her own arrowheads and swords with the fire of Hades and a stolen Thor’s hammer. Mother sands the sides of her blades with stone until the striking edge is sharp enough to slice clouds into rain.

One day long ago Mother said to the world that she would be just that: a mother. To preserve her legacy she would only raise warriors.

And so:

Child number one, Dee, ran out of the womb when Mother exhaled.

Her second child (me) procrastinated for two long weeks. I got distracted by the warm rope texture of the umbilical cord, and I named the afterbirth Charlene and proceeded to tell her everything. Then Mother decided that, dreamer or not, child number two is going to come out. She entered a hospital on her birthday and passed on pain killers to stubbornly embrace bite-a-leather-strap mind-bending agony (minus the whiskey chaser). Mother-masochist forced me into the world completely sober, and with no mind-alteration to make the experience funny, I cried.

Mother said: “You’ll be Fine. Just Fine.” So I am.

Three years later Mother and the fates delivered child number three, Rae (she came, she saw, she conquered). Three chasing three created good celestial mojo for another push-and-pop labor. Mother said “go” and Rae stretched and yawned and then walked out laughing and slapping high-fives to the doctors. She already got the joke.

Mother left Dee and me at home with our grandmother when she entered the hospital. When we arrived to get an eyeful of our new sibling and potential competition we were wearing the same clothes Mother left us in. We were hungry. I don’t remember anything of that weekend, and I’m glad.

I do remember seeing Rae for the first time. I had to stand on ballerina-toes to see through the glass. Father pointed to show me which one was three, (and I was 3 years-old), and the glass blocked his finger from touching but I tried my best to follow it right to Rae. She was sleeping and sort-of smiling and *poof* I was big sister, so I grew 37 inches to reflect it, though nobody noticed but me.

Mother looked upon her children and thought of all things three, like the three Zorya of Slavic mythology, sitting in the Big Dipper and reigning in a giant dog to keep him from eating the world. Their names are Morning, Evening, and Midnight. Mother has all her bases covered.

Mother looked at Dee and me already covering three: dirty, smelly, hungry. She stiffened and knew she must raise warriors. She was there to protect her children; she and no one else.

The magic age of 7: the number of days in a week, the week it took to complete experiment Earth, the 7 layers of heaven observed and recorded by the prophet Muhammad, and there are 4 seasons and 28 days in each moon-cycle, and 7 times 4 is 28.

I already like numbers.

Every 7 days Mother takes us to the library. We can get as many books as we want completely free of charge. When Mother reads she sticks the nail of her first finger in her mouth and props her feet up on the coffee table, and if my legs were a bit longer, I would do this too.

I sit next to Mother, as close as I can without crawling into her lap. I read books my teacher insists are “too hard,” but if Dee and Mother read chapter books without pictures, I do too. Compound words are crazy things, two little words hugging each other to try and trick me, but I decipher their riddle. It’s the words with punctuation seemingly tossed in at random to create shortened versions of words that were never long in the first place that confuse me.

“Hey mommy, what’s this word?” I ask.

“Well,” She begins. “What’s the first part?”

“Should.”

“Okay, well, the next part makes it mean ‘not.’”

“It says ‘should not’?”

“Close. Shouldn’t.”

Oh.

I continue reading, sliding even closer to Mother, because I have an idea. If I steal Mother’s memories I won’t have to ask her so much. I can know every word ever written. Mixed with my own memories I could be wise before Tuesday. I slide close enough to make Mother sweat, and memories pop up along her neck in moisture beads. I gather these drops with my fingertips when she’s reading (and not looking), and I place them in my pocket. Later I release the caged memories to crawl up my arm and into my head, and they’re so pretty I decide to keep them. I think her memories are just like a slideshow, because no one could appreciate them as much as me. All I want to know is everything.

I sit at Mother’s side, stealing, until she sighs and scrapes me off with a spatula.

Mother can sew anything. She sews a flower girl dress for a girl who lives down the street named Aphrodite to make extra money. I’m jealous that the puffy-sleeved peach-colored gown isn’t mine, and Aphrodite knows she looks cute and twirls a circle around my envy.

I want her to bow to Mother and call her the best weaver to ever live before Mother turns her into a spider. She acts like she’s a princess and Mother’s her peasant, but she’ll be sorry when she sees my sisters and me are three and fully capable of fury.

Nine: a magical age of anything goes, three squared, the last of the single digits, the age of the lives of a cat. When you multiply any number by nine the resulting digits add up to nine, as in 9 X 9=18, 8+1=9. Hebrews call nine and her nine-pointed star “the symbol of immutable Truth.”

When I am nine Mother shows me how to sew. We select a pattern together after flipping through the bloated design books in the back of the fabric store. She helps me pick out something simple and flattering: a straight skirt with elastic waist and pockets. The pockets are my idea. I like to hold things: dropped buttons, seeds, receipts, bits of tinfoil, safety pins, memories, tissues for my never-slowing-down nose, and pennies that just might be lucky if given the chance. The verdict comes in at the end of the good or bad day, when I keep the penny or kiss it and return it to the ground in hopes of things turning out better for someone else.

The chemistry between each person and each penny is unique.

Sewing the pockets is my favorite part. Merry-go-round and round the pocket turns through the sewing machine, not a straight line but a circle made to exactly fit my hand. I insist on double-stitching the pockets so nothing leaks out. I learn there are lots of things involved with sewing: colored pencils and chalk and measuring tape, patterns and pinking shears and threading of bobbins, loose stitching and tight stitching and hemming and pressing.

We sew a lilac purple skirt (not so princess, but purple is a royal color) with pockets (pockets!) and Mother adjusts the hem so it rests just above my knees and I can run and kick like a warrior. I celebrate my skirt by wearing it with everything: button-up shirts with flutter-by necks, T-shirts turned blue from crayon-in-pocket dryer accidents, dressed-up with still-white sweaters Dee used to wear and flat-soled shoes purchased at Payless for under ten dollars.

At school I give a report on how to sew while wearing the purple skirt, complete with visual aids that feature examples of patterns and different types of stitching glued on poster board. I have 50 notecards and an addiction to feigning expertise. I get an A.

That same day, another child’s mother comes in to talk to the teacher about an on-going discipline problem. The somber parent-teacher pow-wow happens during lunch and recess and none of us know what’s happening; the accused isn’t even invited to his trial. When we get back from lunch mother leads child into the hallway with a “come here” finger gesture women perfect after giving birth. From the hallway comes the sound of smacking and screaming and crying and the whole class falls silent.

The kid comes back into the classroom with his head hanging low, and the mother comes back with her face looking sky-falling-gray, and the teacher thanks that mother over and over again: “Thank you so much for coming in, you’ve really been a tremendous help…” None of us say anything at all.

And we’re quiet for the rest of the day, thinking, stunned and humiliated right along with the victim we can’t even gossip about, and as we gather our coats to leave the teacher says, “That’s much better!” with regards to our behavior that day.

At the age of 9 I know a lot about fury; I know all three of them. I spend the next school year crushing that teacher’s head between my thumb and forefinger every second she isn’t looking. Even after draining Mother I don’t know everything, but I know that if the curses of children don’t fall on deaf ears, in this life or the next, Justice will bring the beaten child’s revenge.

Mother has many names. Dee and I give her one: Walk-It-Off. We call her this in comic acknowledgement of her motto. To Mother, sickness is annoying, fear is inconvenient, needy is a sibling to burden, and this strange, clingy character should be left alone on an island with a dull knife and a crust of bread for 48 hours to turn sob into howl. I don’t go to the bathroom in public for the first 13 years of my life because I’m too nervous. The feeling of father waiting outside and Mother growing foot-tap impatient is enough for me to will my bladder buffalo-sized, until waiting 8 hours is not a problem. Children aren’t born with superpowers; they grow them.

Sometime after the hallway incident a counselor arrives at school to analyze and write papers about the big sad eyes of inner city youth. She arrives to encourage us in transparent ways to turn in crackhead parents, missing-in-action parents, or nothing-a-good-smack-wouldn’t-cure parents. She tells us that every (every!) mother loves her children more than her husband or boyfriend; she has to, because mothers are a child’s only defenders. The other kids and I exchange glances.

“Really?” I whisper to one.

“I guess so,” he whispers back. I’ll have to ask Mother about this.

“Hey mom, who do you love more, us or dad?” I ask while Mother folds laundry and herself to recover from a day of taping gauze over breakdowns as a psychiatric nurse. I’m sort of helping with the laundry, but mostly questioning.

Mother thinks for a second. “I love your father a little bit more,” she says.

Oh.

Even gods and goddesses and superheroes have weaknesses, like vanity and envy and kryptonite. Mother has father. I walk it off.

Mother raises warriors. When I or Dee or Rae falls down and scrapes something, we get up. Mother doesn’t spray bactine. She doesn’t apply Band-Aids. She doesn’t drive to the ER for stitches. Mother says: “Cuts heal if they’re allowed to breathe.”

Mother plants her children to grow beanstalk big. She waters us with a concoction of Vitamin D milk and aspirin and rose petals and kielbasa, and I grow 300 feet tall. I never have to climb anything; all I have to do is reach. When I stretch the trees turn green with envy. One day I’ll ride to school on the back of a bull.

Mother takes me to a library sale, and I don’t know how old I am. I know I’m older than 7, because that year we didn’t buy anything. Mother cried in the grocery store when other families were buying Thanksgiving turkeys and cranberries that come in a can, because she was taking bread off of her receipt. That day I swallowed her expression and let it leave me full. Her face takes up so much space inside me that while I think about food all the time, when it’s in front of me I can never eat it all. Father and Mother call the bits I leave, “bites for the faeries.” I think it’s a good idea to keep mystical things you only sometimes see happy, and if they eat maybe I will, and Mother won’t cry.

This is later than 7, maybe-9, and Mother buys me a book with a worn cloth cover and faded water-color pictures. The illustrations feature faces drawn with too many angles, experiments of geometry. These characters have two expressions: a closed-mouth smile and an “o!” to signify surprise or anger, depending on the direction of the eyebrows. They hold hands too much and cover their faces when they cry and don’t have the good sense to have knees. The book is called, King Arthur and his Knights. I can read on my own, even the words with extra punctuation, but Mother reads it to me because I ask her. I don’t pay much attention to the story; my focus is the music box of Mother’s voice, the rising of my head as she inhales, the slow drift back to earth as she deflates.

I only care about Morgan Le Fey, because there’s almost nothing written about her. All the book says is that she’s a witch, which doesn’t make her as interesting as what I’ve already read about witches, like Baba Yaga running around the woods in a house with chicken legs. I wonder about Morgan as my eyes start to close, because I think you need chickens to be a witch. I long for her dark hair and violet eyes (instantly my beauty ideal), as Mother’s heart-tempo walks me down to dream.

Father comes home and Mother gets up and my head feels cold and I wish Mother would come back but she doesn’t, because like every other day father’s mad about something. Mother makes coffee while angry father takes each angry stair one angry step at a time. I think this will give me a few moments before I have to hold my breath again, but he calls me upstairs about a dresser drawer I neglected to close. He points at it as if it were a bucket of freshly mutilated animals, while screaming something unintelligible; it’s best to enter the early stages of parent-rant catatonic. I kneel to close the drawer and he kicks me in a hard salute; I fall forward to smack knee against cheap, splitting wood. Father storms away to change out of work clothes.

“I hate daddy!” I announce to Mother as I head downstairs. It’s time for my pocket to open and for the loudest secret hiding there to run.

“Why?” Mother asks. Mother, reach for your armor…

“He kicked me! I left my dresser drawer open, and he kicked me!” Mother, your sword. You mustn’t forget your sword.

“Why did you leave your drawer open?”

No, this isn’t Mother’s answer. She’s a goddess. I know it. I’ve seen her face turn from woman to lioness. I have her memories; I gathered them from the back of her neck and placed them in my pocket. Mother, we have the same birthmark, I was born on the same day you leapt from the forehead of Zeus. If I know anything, I know this. I know.

Mother?

I retreat to the room I share with Rae, pale with defeat, and Dee comes in quiet and sits down. “Look,” she says, and she pulls the drawer out. I watch as Dee re-aligns it. She has super powers, too.

Later father comes upstairs to Band-Aid my knee.

“Do you still hate me?” he asks, after the cut has been covered so it can’t breathe and won’t heal.

I am 9 years-old, I can go 8 hours without peeing, and I am 300 feet tall; no one has noticed this yet. Mother hides the face of a lion. I hide the face of a warrior with dark hair and violet eyes. She says: It seems we’ve found his Kryptonite.

“Do you still hate me?” he asks, after the cut has been covered so it can’t breathe and won’t heal.

“A little,” I respond, giddy at how small father looks from afar. With a mind-altering experience to make the whole thing funny, there isn’t any reason to cry.

Amanda Sledz has both a BA and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing. "One Goddess" is an excerpt from her memoir 9 Dreams of Prison. Amanda has 14 years of journalism experience, and maintains the online journal Zori3 (http://www.zori3.org). She lives in Portland, Oregon with 4 humans and 3 cats.