Mother of Swords
The card is smooth, the edges velveted from use. The image is sharp in its contrast, her eyes piercing. In black and white, the Mother of Swords – depicted here as a snowy owl – is perched on the hilt of a sword, pointing downward and balanced on its point. I have drawn her many times by chance. This time, I called her on purpose.
Mother: who suffers no fools, who will slice through illusion on your behalf, who will reinforce your boundaries for you whether you like it or not.
I have turned over cards again and again. My husband, heretic and nonbeliever, asks me to pull his cards each New Year’s Eve. The veil is thin and we are at home with a child upstairs and nothing to do but conjure magic. When I was pregnant, I flipped cards for the year ahead: an atlas for a new self. The month of my son’s birth was anointed with a card that foretold the annihilation of the sense of self. The veil is thin between delusion and truth: a screen door under a cat’s determined claws.
One year, I predicted someone else’s child, and while I tried to hedge that perhaps the birth was more of a metaphor, her son is now five. There is part of me that still wants to give you the answer you want, rather than what’s in the cards.
The Mother of Swords packs a tough love sandwich in my Rainbow Brite lunchbox.
This mother is the aspirational crone. The card itself is concerned with logic and pragmatism – which is not, on paper, my strong suit. Maybe I’m looking for reinforcements – someone to back up my intuition with something more convincing. This one is obsessed with data, communication, knowledge, and the mind. That can’t be right, I think.
I turn the card over to reveal no trap door. (I am still shaking off the voices that called me silly and frivolous and naive and bad at math. The ones who didn’t know that I could see the details in the dark. That I can hit the target with deadly accuracy with eyes closed.)
I see that this mother is also independent to a fault, and I can no longer hide from that accusation. She peers inside my heart: the one that cringes at the risk of bothering anyone.
A snowy owl, like the one depicted on the card, flies silently. Their wings are enormous, with velvety feathers that dampen sound as they scoop the air. Owls fly slowly, silently, and with fewer wingbeats: their dinner never sees them coming. This Mother of Swords, likewise, has a proficiency with the element of air, bending it to her will. I can feel her eyes resting on me from the trees. Standing atop her sword, she is determined, rather than precarious. The card takes flight.
She awakens me to the truth. An owl has a face like a bowl, designed to absorb sound and information without letting it ricochet. Its concave shape does not issue judgment, but reveals in minute detail: This is how it is. Here is what the world has to offer today. She turns her face into the wind. There is the mouse across the icy cornfield in the dark. Here is the smell, the sound, the silhouette of the thing you cannot yet write about, but what you know to be true.
Her talons pierce the bubble of what we wish were true. They shred the myth of permanence, slough off pretense. Some consider her cold, when in reality she is only true and direct. She says, Truth is not a race. It has to do with specificity of feeling; it concerns itself with not only accuracy, but resonance. It’s a matter of translation. Or digestion, she says, with an owl pellet lying at her feet, the bone and fur that could not be used.
Or maybe, it’s like this: How, when you are lying in bed in the middle of the night thinking I don’t know what to do again and again (again), and it’s so fucking humiliating, and you worry you’re a disappointing weirdo, she puts her soft wing against your cheek and trains her piercing eyes upon you. She begs you not to sell yourself out; her knowledge offers belief in nothing so much as yourself.
Protector of fearless selfhood, slayer of bullshit, purveyor of justice.
Christy Tending (she/they) is a writer and activist living in Oakland, California. Their work has been published in Longreads, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature, and received a notable mention in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023. www.christytending.com