List Price: $16.95
6" x 9" (15.24 x 22.86 cm)
Black & White on Cream paper
270 pages
Black & White on Cream paper
270 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1463576516
ISBN-10: 146357651X
BISAC: Fiction / General
ISBN-10: 146357651X
BISAC: Fiction / General
Demeter’s Daughter is the third book in a contemporary series by Beth Mitchum. Each book is dedicated to a different Goddess. Although the Goddesses represented here are all ancient Greek Goddesses, there is no connection between the books and the land of Greece, except in a metaphorical sense. The books are dedicated to the spiritual energy these Goddesses can bring to our lives by helping us to become all that we are meant to be.
Set in the late 1990’s on the cusp of the internet revolution, the series begins with Artemisian Artist, where we meet four women who become connected to each other in sometimes unexpected ways. In the first book, we see their lives through the eyes of Liz Higgins, an artist who is just beginning to find success in her work. In the second book, Gaia’s Guardian, we follow the thread from the perspective of Gerry Pearcy, a Lakeland police officer. In this third book, we follow the narrative from the perspective of Melissa Higgins, a student at the University of Central Florida and Liz’s younger sister. While attending college, Melissa deals with strong maternal urges and a sometimes confusing love life. Melissa’s life takes a puzzling metaphysical turn while she grapples with the sudden return of her mother, who vanished when Melissa was a toddler. The series reaches its exciting conclusion in Hestia’s Healer, which is told by Dr. Terri Jackson, a healer in more ways than one, and the fourth character in this extraordinary quartet of friends.
Each one of the books focuses on one of the women and is narrated by that character—Liz, Gerry, Melissa, and Terri. Together they weave a tapestry of women’s empowerment through self-growth and strong relationships.
Set in the late 1990’s on the cusp of the internet revolution, the series begins with Artemisian Artist, where we meet four women who become connected to each other in sometimes unexpected ways. In the first book, we see their lives through the eyes of Liz Higgins, an artist who is just beginning to find success in her work. In the second book, Gaia’s Guardian, we follow the thread from the perspective of Gerry Pearcy, a Lakeland police officer. In this third book, we follow the narrative from the perspective of Melissa Higgins, a student at the University of Central Florida and Liz’s younger sister. While attending college, Melissa deals with strong maternal urges and a sometimes confusing love life. Melissa’s life takes a puzzling metaphysical turn while she grapples with the sudden return of her mother, who vanished when Melissa was a toddler. The series reaches its exciting conclusion in Hestia’s Healer, which is told by Dr. Terri Jackson, a healer in more ways than one, and the fourth character in this extraordinary quartet of friends.
Each one of the books focuses on one of the women and is narrated by that character—Liz, Gerry, Melissa, and Terri. Together they weave a tapestry of women’s empowerment through self-growth and strong relationships.
Chapter 1:
All Wound Up
“I can’t believe it, Terri. I just can’t believe it.” I paced back and forth across the living room of our apartment, alternating between holding my torso and throwing my hands up in the air. I felt a little like a wind-up toy that didn’t know when to quit. I was so angry, happy, and fearful all at the same time. “My mother disappeared when I was two years old. Now she suddenly turns up and I’m supposed to act as though nothing has happened? I don’t even know this woman! I know her only from photographs, some of which are nearly twenty years old. What was Liz thinking bringing her back here to live?”
Terri came up behind me and wrapped her arms around me, “Sweetheart, Liz actually knew your mother. She’s so much older than you that she had a history and a relationship with her. She’s trying to restore that. I suspect Liz knows that you’re not going to respond to your mother’s reappearance the same way. Hell, I think each of your siblings will have a different reaction to it. I’m pretty sure Liz realizes the upheaval this reunion will cause but figures that ultimately it will be worth it. One way or the other, everyone will be able to get some closure on this whole ordeal.”
I wriggled out of Terri’s embrace, took two steps forward, and spun around to face my lover. “And that’s another thing that infuriates me. She’s dying of cancer, for god’s sake! Why show up now just so I can lose her again? That’s just mean!”
“Whoa, Melissa, sweetie, she’s not dying of cancer to spite you.” Terri put a hand on each of my shoulders as though she needed to ground me to the earth. I certainly felt as though I was about to blast off out of my body into orbit. “I think she’s taking the opportunity life has afforded her to make amends before she leaves this world. That part makes perfect sense. She’s not trying to re-enter your life just to hurt you by making her final departure. No matter what else has transpired in the life of this family, I can’t imagine that your mother doesn’t love you and hasn’t agonized over leaving you since the day she chose to walk out that door.”
I threw my hands up in the air again, causing Terri’s hands to fall away from me. “Then why did she do it? Why did she leave us?” I started crying at this point. I hugged my own body tightly, but couldn’t stop all the painful thoughts and feelings from escaping from my chest in the form of ragged sobs. I felt as though I had suddenly developed multiple personality disorder as a result of one telephone call from my older sister, Liz.
Part of me had been happy to learn a couple months ago that my mother was indeed alive after all these years, just as Dad had suspected. But to find out that she was dying of cancer all in one breath was just too ludicrous. That made another part of me furious and still another part was fearful of losing her all over again. It was all way too much for one college student to handle. I’d just started learning how to live out from under my father’s roof. What on earth was I supposed to do with this sudden reappearance of a mother I’d gone my whole life not knowing?
She left us without a word. We didn’t know what had happened to her or if she were alive or dead. I couldn’t bring up a single memory of her that hadn’t been experienced secondhand through one of my older siblings or my father. I had no clear personal memories of this woman who was supposed to have given birth to me. I sunk down into a chair. “In all my years of growing up, I didn’t have a mother, Terri. What am I supposed to do with one now?”
Terri enfolded me again in her arms and stroked my hair. “I don’t know, babe, but I’m here to see you through it. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. If you don’t want to see her, then you don’t have to see her.”
I lifted my head slightly and brushed the hair away from my face. I whispered hoarsely, “I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know what to think about all this. It’s too much.”
“I know, Melissa. It is a lot to handle right now, especially on top of all your school work. But it will be okay. You just have to take it a step at a time, and if you decide not to take the step to go meet your mother, you don’t have to. I don’t think anyone would blame you. Both of your brothers and Liz actually knew your mother, so it’s a little different for them. Plus your mother was in contact with James for several years after she disappeared.”
I sniffed back my tears and thought about my brothers. “I know. I think that makes Stanley
“Hmm. It doesn’t sound like that will be a pretty reunion either then. Stanley
I shrugged. “I don’t know what he feels. He never talks about Mother. I could usually get information from James, even if it was only information about our mother when she was living with us. But I’ve never heard Stanley Stanley
Terri squeezed me. “No more than any other family on this planet, I suspect. My family wasn’t exactly normal. I grew up not knowing my father. My mother had to work to support both of us. My mom and I are close, but only in that sense of shared adversity. When my father died, my mom was suddenly thrown into the workplace in an area of the country where there weren’t exactly a lot of jobs, much less ones that paid much, particularly if you were a woman. I spent most of my years in my neighbor’s house, waiting for my mom to get home from work at the diner. That was some life for a kid, watching television with an old woman with no teeth. She was kind enough, but all she ever did was watch soap operas, suck on pieces of fruit, and collect her social security checks. Mom split her tips with her every night, but that was all she could spare for childcare on a waitress income. What a life that must have been for them.”
I nodded, thinking that it was strange that her neighbor had no teeth. I don’t know why that one particular detail stuck out to me, but it was part of Terri’s story I had never heard. I knew she’d grown up in her neighbor’s house pretty much, but for some reason the no teeth thing hadn’t been mentioned before. I tried to visualize a younger version of Terri, growing up watching television while a toothless old woman sucked on fruit and watched soap operas. It suddenly struck me as funny. When I burst out laughing, Terri looked at me with a perplexed expression.
“Are you okay, Melissa?”
I tried to stop laughing, but I couldn’t. Eventually the laughter turned to tears again. “God, I don’t know what’s wrong with me! I’m not usually like this.”
“I know. That’s what has me a little worried. You want me to call Liz? Maybe you two should talk again.”
I made a huge effort to pull myself together again, breaking from Terri’s embrace so I could go and sit on the sofa. I sat there for a minute taking long, slow breaths. “No, I don’t want to talk to Liz right now. I’m not sure if I’m over being angry with her for all this crap. I know this is not her fault exactly, but I could have gone the rest of my life not knowing for sure what happened to my mother. It’s not like I thought about it a lot. It didn’t impact my daily life in any way. God, why did she have to hunt her down?”
“I thought James was the one who tracked her down.”
“Maybe so, but it was because Liz started asking about her again. Why couldn’t she just let it be?”
Terri cleared her throat nervously and raised her right hand as though she were being sworn into a court of law and was about to make a statement. “Um, I think part of that was my fault, sweetie. I was the one who starting asking Liz a bunch of questions in the beginning when we were first getting to know each other. I grilled her about why she didn’t try to find out what happened to her mom. I don’t even know why I did that. It just seemed rather surreal to me to have a living parent and not know where the hell they were. If I ever found out that my father hadn’t died in that jack-knifing accident, I’d have hunted him down. I couldn’t fathom her not knowing for sure. It didn’t make any sense. It felt like a missing part of her, and it felt to me as though it may have been tied to the insecurities I kept tripping over.”
“Really?”
Terri sat down on the sofa next to me. “Yes, really. It's as though she had this part of her mind and heart that questioned whether anyone would or could ever love her unconditionally. I can’t imagine that is not somehow tied to losing the one person in her life she thought should have done that but instead had chosen to abandon her to her fate. I can only imagine how that would make her feel.”
“Yeah, I can totally see that, but how is it that Gerry is able to get through all of that insecurity?”
Terri shook her head. “I don’t know, Melissa. I think they were made to be together. I don’t know how else to explain that. When I saw the two of them together for the first time, I sensed that instantly. It helped ease the sting of our unsuccessful attempt to have a relationship. It also helped me realize that I wouldn’t have had the energy or time to put into a relationship with someone who needed to be that overwhelmed by love and desire. With my internship and the uncertainty of my future, I know I couldn’t have done for Liz what Gerry managed to do. I think I was even a little relieved when I realized how much work Liz would’ve been. That may sound a little callused, but I’m being honest about how I felt at the time.”
“It’s okay. I think I know what you’re saying. I’ve seen that part of Liz change so much since Gerry entered the picture and overwhelmed her in a sea of Gerry-ness
“Yeah, and I wasn’t likely to be able to provide more than a trickling stream for a little while at least. God, that makes me sound like a pitiful excuse for a human being.”
“Terri, I don’t think that at all. I think you’re being realistic about Liz’s needs and your inability at that moment in time to attend to them. I think we have to be balanced in our expectations about relationships. No single person, whether it’s a mother, father, lover, or whoever, can be everything to another being at every moment.”
“There you go again with your youthful wisdom. Now think about what was going on with your mom at the time when she gave up trying to be everything to everyone. She probably felt so totally overwhelmed with everyone else’s needs that she wasn’t attending to her own. She created a huge deficit, as parents often do, to the point of emotional bankruptcy. James is how much older than you?”
“Twenty years.”
“That means that your mom had already put in over two decades as a mother of what became a brood of four children plus your father, who by his own admission was more like another child she had to take care of.”
“Yeah, and according to Dad, every time she got pregnant he went off and had an affair. He said that he felt cut off from her during her pregnancies. Apparently Mother was pretty moody and not exactly attentive to his needs at those times.”
Terri’s brow furrowed. “I see. That’s a piece of the puzzle I didn’t know. I knew he’d been with other women, but I didn’t realize that they were tied to your mother’s pregnancies. I wonder how that made her feel. Certainly not like a woman who was loved and cherished for who she was more than what she provided for your dad. That does throw an interesting light on things.”
“Makes my dad look like quite the schmuck.”
“I wasn’t going to say that, but since you did, yeah, it does. But the point is, does it make you more sympathetic to your mother’s situation and state of mind at the time?”
I rubbed my hands back and forth along my quads, kneading the muscles, not because they needed it, but because I needed to do something with my hands while I thought. After a few seconds of this, I said carefully, “Okay, I can see why she would need to change things so she could take better care of herself. But couldn’t she think of another way to do that without leaving Liz and me without a mother?”
Terri placed a hand over each of mine and squeezed them. “I don’t know, but I got the feeling from my conversations with Liz that James was of the opinion that your father hadn’t left her with very many choices. By controlling the money, he had total control over her whole life in a way. He held all the power in that relationship. If your mom felt powerless, perhaps she did the only thing that she could do, hard as it was. Then once you leave, how do you go back again? She certainly didn’t want to return to the prison-like life she’d lived before under your father’s roof. So how could she come back to you without coming back to him too?”
I jumped up and starting pacing again. “This is making me feel crazy inside. I have all this pent up energy, frustration, anger, something! I’m going for a run so I can vent some of this without spewing all over you any more.”
Terri stood up and stopped me in mid-pace. “Sweet lover of mine, you can spew all you like. You are usually so unflappable that it’s rather nice to know that you can be as nutty as your sister.”
I smiled sheepishly at her. “Thanks, I think.”
She kissed me on the tip of my nose then softly on the lips. I was sorely tempted to fall into that kiss, but knew instinctively that somewhere in the middle of lovemaking, I’d want to get up and pace again, so I decided that no matter what we did later, what I needed in that moment was to run.
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