Happy Mother's Day

There will be a normal post tomorrow, but I wanted to make sure and put this up today.

Lately I've been talking about fairy tales, and mothers tend to get a bad rap in them.  My last post talked about a wicked mother.  Other stories have wicked stepmothers, or mother-like figures, or godmothers, etc.

Mythology can be just as cruel to its mothers.  Greek mythology, for instance, has Hera dropping her own son off of a cliff; in another story, Aphrodite is the scariest mother-in-law ever.

But that isn't always the case.  In fairy tales, we talked recently about The Little Green Frog, which has two mothers who are ripped away from their children but love them nonetheless.  I did a post a while back about Hades and Persephone - what I didn't cover in that post is the fact that Demeter wanders the earth searching for her daughter, and is so deep in despair that she refuses to allow anything beautiful to grow.  This, ultimately, is why Persephone is returned to her mother.  There's not a huge amount of nice stuff you can say about Izanami, the Japanese goddess of the dead, but when she was still nice she sacrificed her own life to bring her son Kagutsuchi into the world.

People tend to focus on the bad parents within fairy tales instead of the good.  Today, I wanted to turn that on its head.  Fairy tales and mythology are brimming with wonderful examples of mothers (and of fathers)...you just have to be willing to look for them.

Happy Mother's Day!