Greek mythology

The Daughter of Zeus


Goddess (comics)

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Reading Rick Riordan‘s new Olympian heroes series to Dee has only increased her polytheistic leanings. As we stood at the bus stop this morning reveling in plus 1 temps and a pleasant semi-Chinook wind, she wondered if perhaps the wind gods were angry and the blowing was a sign of their displeasure.

She has a habit of mulling before giving her growing philosophy voice. Perhaps I should have seen this coming, but it was still quite a surprise when she asked,

“Do you ever think you are a god, Mom?”

I frowned. Surely, a goddess would live a much fancier and risk-free existence than I was my first thought, but instead I asked,

“Wouldn’t I have super powers? Or be able to work magic if I was?”

“Not if your godly parents were hiding you for some reason,” she replied, smiling that pleased way she has when she’s puzzled something out and come up with – to her mind – the best explanation.

“Well,” I said, sitting down on her bed to level our eye contact, “I don’t think so.”

“You were adopted, Mom,” she explained patiently, “right? And maybe Zeus and Hera gave you to Grandma to keep you safe.”

“You think I am the daughter of the king and queen of heaven?”

“Oh, yes,” more pleased beaming.

“And does that make you a demigod?” I asked.

Dee longs to be a demigod. If she could choose her godly parent, it would be Hestia but as that means giving up me – and getting around the pesky fact that Hestia was a virgin goddess.

“Oh no, you had me with a mortal person,” she said. “So I am just mortal.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I don’t think that I am a child of a god. I can’t do anything special. No magic.”

She shrugged with her little secret smile that says “I know better than you” and replied, “You never know, Mom.”

Indeed.

From there the conversation rounded back to reincarnation. She simply can’t understand why demigods don’t choose to come back as “part of nature” like the satyrs and the dryads do.

“It’s good to came back as a tree or bush,” she argued, “because it’s part of nature.”

Rather enlightened for eight because most people hanker to come back and give mortal existence and a chance for the brass ring another go rather than simply contribute to the scenery.

Being a daughter of Zeus would mean dealing with a great many inherited personality flaws. The power to do anything positive would be lost in the struggle, I fear.

More interesting to me is Dee’s not quite voiced curiosity about my origins. Understandable. I am curious myself though not enough to undertake any quest for knowledge. I am still firmly anchored in my belief that my birth parents would not view my presence positively and that more younger siblings  (as there undoubtedly would be some) would add nothing good to my life.

When I was about her age, I spent a period quizzing my mother about my birth parents – my birth mom in particular. I wish I could recall everything Mom told me because she and dad were given quite a bit of information about them. Dad burned all the papers and Mom’s recall was incomplete.

Dad knew a lot. Occasionally he would let things slip but for the most part, he refused to part with details. He didn’t want us going off looking for our birth parents and he wanted our “histories” to be his history, a goal he largely succeeded in as I consider his family history to be mine.

But, it’s a bit annoying knowing that he had answers and chose not to share them because he felt insecure about his place in our lives.

There is a discussion in the blogosphere right now about adoption as the solution to abortion. Which is idiotic. Pregnant teens and young women have two choices realistically – keeping their babies or aborting – usually before ten weeks. Those ultrasound photos of babies at 16 or 20 weeks are so disingenuous when abortions are nearly always done before a “baby” emerges from the clumps of dividing cells.

Anyway, the debate centers on the awesomeness of being adopted. It’s a “win-win”.

It’s neither.

It’s a trade-off like most things in life are. There is nothing awesome about being adopted. It’s wonderful, I guess, but mostly, it’s been something to deal with in one way or other all my life. It’s neither a good nor bad thing. It just is. I can compare it to nothing as I know nothing else.

I don’t know what to think about Dee’s spin on my lack of biological heritage to pass on. Another thing to deal with that, hopefully, as she gets older she will lose interest in.

If I were the child of a god, however, I would choose Hestia too. She was the only one guarding the home fires when the war came knocking after all and who wouldn’t want a mother who puts family ties above all? Though, ironically, I had that in my dad and cannot say the same about my birth parents, whose obligations to me stopped at the relinquishment – that awesome thing they did.

Overwhelms the senses, but in the end it’s not silence but unanswered questions.

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Accidental Polytheist


The Birth of Venus.

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Began reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians novels to Dee this past spring. They are a bit old for her, but she adores mythology and I figure, it can’t hurt, right?

But it seems that her 8-year-old world view is still grounded enough in fairies and Santa and magic to latch onto the idea of gods, satyrs and demigods and add them to the moral base Rob and I are instilling in her.

Long ago I toyed with the idea of raising her in a creed, thinking that everyone benefits from having a theology to test the world against and use as a springboard to spiritual openness and independent thinking and analysis; the latter, I believe, is critical if one is to avoid being swept up in dubious (and sometimes blatantly self-serving) dogma.  But my experiences with Catholicism as it is practiced by more than a few and with the stench of hypocrisy that overwhelms whatever good there is about most religions, led me to discard the idea and allow Dee to question and come to her own decisions.

For the moment, she has decided to believe in gods and goddesses. Though she assures us that she knows they are make-believe, she seems to be forming her ideas of right and wrong moral behavior with a decidedly Greek Myth Meets Druidism perspective.

I am not sure if I am a complete failure as a moral guardian or a success beyond belief.

We ventured over to the arena today for the Country Craft Fair. The last Saturday in November, all the little rural communities around here hold craft fairs and there is a tree lighting and fireworks at the Firehall at the end of the day. The fair is decidedly crafty and bakey.

As we wandered, an older gentleman blocked our path and began that sort of grandpa-ish banter with Dee. Her curls, big blue-gray eyes and too serious for a child demeanor attract attention, and older folk in particular can’t help but try to engage her.

“Why aren’t you in school?” he demanded.

She backed away and frowned. Dee isn’t a child one should joke with. She has inherited my literal take and doesn’t always recognize “teasing”.

“It’s not a school day,” she finally replied.

“Well, do you go to school on Monday?”

She nodded.

“And Tuesday?”

Affirmative.

And the gent proceeded to tick off the other days of the week.

“What about Sunday?” he ended with.

“There’s no school on Sunday,” Dee said.

“You haven’t heard of Sunday school?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Well, Mom, ” he addressed me, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

If I’d had time to think, or even see this coming – though I should have because the community is quite religious – I might have retorted with something that could have cost me a bit in terms of acceptance in the rural society I find myself on the edges of, but I didn’t.

“Um, nothing,” I said. “No.”

It probably wasn’t what I said. I said literally “nothing”, but I’ve been told that my face is rather open and telling. And my eyes do this flat, squinty thing that served me well as a middle-school teacher and, apparently, frightens old men too.

He backed away and we passed.

Polytheism? Judgemental Christianity? Really not much to weigh, in my opinion.

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Clash of the Titans


Antique Maytag washing machine.

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And by Titans, I mean my husband and Maytag.

For the last two years and change, we’ve washed dishes by hand more often than not despite having a dishwasher. I can’t recall the exact date of what is shaping up to be an epic war of wit and will between Rob and the dishwasher(s), but we awoke this morning to yet another mechanical fail on the part of a Maytag appliance, which brings to mind a mental image of a not so lonely repairman hiding in a closet as the answer machine takes message after message from irate customers wondering where the hell he is.

Friday night, we watched the remake of the cult classic Clash of the Titans. It was a questionable family movie night pick with an eight year-old in the picture, but she is Greek mythology crazy and we decided to chance it.

The plot involved a fed up human race refusing to give the gods of Mount Olympus their due obeisance through prayers and sacrifice. A royally pissed off Zeus decides to “release the Kraken” on them as a reminder of the order of things.

It calls to mind that we are not as free of overlords demanding tribute in modern times as we think. Our daily lives are highly mechanized and dependent on gadgets and technology that free us from much of the mundane tasks of our grandparents.

The dishwasher is one I would rank as a chief among the many appliances that have unchained women from household drudgery.

It is not a maintenance free thing however and those with the ability and means to create and maintain dishwashers or washing machines, to name another huge time saver, demand worship in their own way.

After Rob checked to make sure that the power source was not the issue, he put in a call for service. The machine is just a month or so old and is under warranty. He initially met with a recording telling him to call again on Monday during this and that time. A quick Internet search led him to a 24hr line and he managed to secure a technician for a week from Monday. Warranty items are not priority and I wondered fleetingly what a family with small children would do if faced with a week sans dishwasher with both parents working?

Eat out, no doubt.

It’s interesting that this latest dishwasher outage arouses no particular ire in me. Though I was at the weary end of washing by hand this summer when the last dishwasher died and I was back to the sink, my first thought upon discovering the body this morning was to minimize Rob’s stress over it.

“Don’t freak out,” I told him when he got up. “But the dishwasher quit in mid-cycle over night.”

“We need to quit buying Maytag p.o.s’s,” he said.

“Or figure out which appliance god to offer sacrifice too,” I replied.

“This is not funny,” he said.

I guess it’s not. The time spent trying to ascertain if he could fix it took away from time he’d budgeted to putting up stone on the house because “I am not hauling all those rocks back to the truck for the winter.”

Life is never simple. But I guess it never was.

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