Divine Mother Part 1: Mrs. Rabbit
In the early crest of morning,
I stood over a brimming sink of dishes
mixing banana nut muffins.
It was Easter.
I sipped creamed coffee, stirred,
and watched the sun stream through
the construction paper sunflowers my
almost three-year-old and I made to
commemorate the passing of my own mother.
As my daughter slept in her crib, I thought about
how many years I had spent praying
for a moment like this: the ordinary,
domestic, often taken-for-granted
moments of being a mom. The enormity and
complexity swirled—how fortunate and
accountable and sacrificial it was to prepare
breakfast with a baby in my womb and a
little girl who would rise in thirty minutes
to ask her most pressing concern:
did the Easter Bunny come?
I glanced toward the plastic Peter Rabbit plate
I’d set on the table. Mrs. Rabbit,
her apron cinched tightly around her waist,
was bent lovingly over her baby—
an image so quintessential it was divine:
the soft-bellied, slightly-smiling, chamomile-brewing
momma embracing her just-misbehaved child.
How I understood the muscle memory of the pose.
Just last night I’d held my daughter at the same angle
after she threw the TV remote across the kitchen floor
because it was time for bed.
I traced the outline of Mrs. Rabbit with my finger,
then the little boy buried into her fur.
In the picture, he grabs at her middle in fistfuls.
He knows she will absolve his trespasses,
wake him with open arms in the morning: start over.
The image of the forever-momma is achingly maternal.
The archetype made me me miss my own mother
as much as I love my own child.
As I cracked three eggs over wheat flour,
I clutched my apron. I breathed in and
held my heart. The song birds called outside,
the oven alarm sounded inside, the world
twisted into focus and question.
This moment, I knew, represented the honor
and the struggle of the Divine Mother: the seeking,
the ache, the give—the gratitude of such deep feeling.
The sink of dirty dishes, the cold, hour old coffee,
the icon of comfort—it was the center around which
securely-attached children orbit. It was the
story and ministry of every mother.
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REFLECTION:
I have been meditating about the Divine Mother lately—about who she is to me, what she embodies, how she presents herself. So far, three distinct forms have presented themselves, one of which is Mrs. Rabbit from Beatrix Potter’s famous children’s books The Tales of Peter Rabbit.
My mother read me Peter Rabbit when I was little. The nights we cuddled under my quilt turning pages, I was always drawn to Mrs. Rabbit. She was so soft, mom-ish, kind. She was everything I yearned for as a child: comfort, nurture, security. Just looking at her made me relax. She was much like my own mother. No maternal image summons as much grief for me as this one.
But as I reflect on this, I long to situate how Mrs. Rabbit fits into my burgeoning sense of womanhood and sexuality. She is hardly a feather-wearing, rattle-shaking Wild Woman. She is tame, demure, and almost cookie-cutter—the embodiment of the non-sexualized matron.
And yet, I love her. I am her.
I want deeply to both be her and be held by her.
Perhaps my draw toward this icon of comfort parallels the third trimester of pregnancy: at 32 weeks, my sense of sensuality is overcome by late stage aches, weight gain, puffy ankles. I do not feel sexual per se, and in this shift, I worry that the “work” I have done to get in touch with my inner feminine is somehow regressing—as though there is a yardstick of where I should be at this fixed point in time. That I am “falling behind.”
The pertinent context, of course, cannot go unmentioned: we are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Covering oneself to prevent the penetration of foreign bodies, cocooning at home, and focusing on family are not only the norm, but the mandates. Oh, and I am potty-training my daughter, so I am unromantically anatomy focused: “remember to wipe your vagina”; “relax your legs”; “no, pee doesn’t come out of your bum, sweetie.”
Even given all of this context, I wonder: when will I want to have sex again? To re-engage with the pursuit of pleasure as a goal? To feel sexual? Am I always going to feel like Mrs. Rabbit?
I am not resisting this stage so much as noting it: noting the dangers in becoming overly attached to one version of femininity. The risk is what I am circling—believing that a particular version of the female self is somehow lesser than the others. In this case, that the archetypal mother is somehow less woman than the orgasmic pleasure-seeker.
In all of this questioning, I believe Mrs. Rabbit came back to me on Easter morning to remind me to honor the matron within me—both the one I learned from, and the one I will be when my daughter rouses from sleep, pulls fistfuls of my sweater into her cheek and whispers, “Snuggle me, Momma.”
