My sisters and I joke that we were raised by cats.
Fu Fu, our Siamese, was compared to Nana, the nanny dog in Disney’s Peter Pan. If you’re not familiar, this is the dog that tends the children as they tuck in, brings them medicine, as I recall? Nana generally performs caring human tasks for the children. It made sense to me as a child—Fu Fu was Nana. Obvious. It’s all a bit problematic seen through the adult lens of neglect and attachment now, but growing up, the idea of animals tending children was very real in my imagination and personal experience.
I grew up with a mom who suffered from a debilitating autoimmune disease and was often in bed. This led to the myth that my sisters and I were raised by cats since there were many times where the cats were more alert to us than mom was at times. Being “raised by cats” however, does not translated into the Disney gets-kids-medicine kind of way, but in a more-comfortable-around-animals kind of way.
Needless to say, my relationship to the maternal and all the weight of gender, domestication, and family nostalgia is complicated at best. For this reason archetypes of motherhood, such as The Empress in tarot, have not strongly resonated with me.
Until this lunar cycle that is.
I didn’t love pulling the Empress card. I felt like I spent all last Water Moon reflecting on motherhood, I didn’t want to push it further. But then I listened to Dr. Carla Ionescu speak about Artemis of Ephesus as a wild undomesticated mother figure, and my universe grew a little.
Undomesticated mother.
What an idea. The Mistress of Animals—both hunter and mother—she who kills and cares. My connection to this is, of course, a cat dropping a dead bird on the kitchen doorstep. On offering for her family. Wild and nurturing.
The wild mother is outside my received cultural traditions, but within my own childhood experience. If I take seriously the task of integrating my childhood with my values and lifestyle now, the role of an archetype like Artemis of Ephesus feels like a critical bridge to navigate my inner landscape and childhood experiences, and, in turn, my relationship with the external and other-than-human world. Maybe the undomesticated mother is found in many wild creatures; spiders, trees, stars, wind, storms, waves—maybe the wild mother is all around me.
I can’t relate to a woman in a kitchen with an apron, but I can relate to a woman in the woods with a bow. I love it that those can both be maternal. I want more of that kind of mothering. More of Artemis of Ephesus.
This lunar cycle I am wishing to meet the undomesticated mother in me.
Alexandra Ross Works 