fices to get it or will feel guilty. Moreover, she fails to set limits on
behavior. From toddlerhood on, she gives in to her children’s de-
mands, nourishing their selfishness. As a consequence, her children
grow up feeling entitled to special consideration and ill-prepared
to conform. Their behavior problems arise in school; their conflicts
with authority disrupt employment. In her attempts to be an all-
providing “good mother,” such a mother can become the opposite.
MIDDLE YEARS
The midlife period is an important time for Demeter women. If a
woman has not had a child, she is preoccupied with the awareness
that the biological clock is running out on the possibility of becoming
pregnant. Married Demeter women raise the baby issue with reluct-
ant spouses, and they visit fertility specialists if there are problems
with conception or miscarriages. Adoption may be considered. And
unmarried women contemplate becoming single mothers.
Even if a Demeter woman has children, her midlife years are no
less crucial, though she may be unaware of their importance in
shaping the rest of her life. Her children are growing, and each step
they take toward independence tests her ability to let go of their
dependence on her. She, too, may now feel the pull to have a late-
life baby. One woman came to see me in the middle of a midlife
crisis: Her children were in school and now, at age forty, it was time
for her to go back to school herself if she were to grow beyond De-
meter. She discovered that she was afraid that she would fail at
graduate school, and that another child was the only excuse she
herself would accept for not enrolling. She could then separate the
desire to have another baby from the fear that she would fail as a
student and could focus on exploring this concern. As it turned out,
she did go to graduate school, studied a subject she loved, and now
is an inspired teacher.
In her middle years, a founding mother of an organization may
face a crisis when it gets large enough for others to covet her position
and power. Unless she also has Athena’s strategist mind and can
play politics well, ambitious managers may “abduct” the organiza-
tion she gave birth to and reared
Demeter: Goddess of Grain, Nurturer and Mother