Back before Wife and I were married, she missed her period one month. I don't remember if we bought a pregnancy test, but we were convinced she was pregnant. It was definitely a bad time to have a child: we weren't even married yet, she had a job, we were trying to get into graduate school—life was busy and confusing. A child would have upended it completely. But we also felt queasy at the idea of abortion. (We could bring ourselves to support it politically, in the abstract; but actually going through one? Shudder.)
While we were still trying to decide what to do, the full moon rolled around and we went to her coven's Full Moon ceremony. Part of the ceremony was regularly given over to magical work, if anyone had anything they wanted done. Sometimes the whole coven worked on something together, and sometimes they just backed up a single person who did some work alone.
Wife announced that she wanted to place a petition with a deity; and after thinking it through she decided that she wanted to petition Cerridwen, the Crone Goddess of her pantheon. Cerridwen later became Wife's patron, too, but at this point Wife wasn't consecrated to anyone yet. Anyway, she said she wanted to make a petition, without (apparently) having discussed the idea with her High Priestess or anyone else. So the rest of the coven backed her up, while she called to Lady Cerridwen, and asked for her help in eliminating this "misbegotten" child. And then she went on to say, "In return I promise that I will bear a daughter and raise her to be a priestess for you."
There was a silence after she finished, and it seemed to go on for a long time. Finally her High Priestess broke it with a soft, hushed "So mote it be." (That's what her coven used in places where a Christian would say "Amen.") And I really don't remember if there was any discussion after about whether that kind of promise was a good idea.
Fast forward a dozen years. By then Wife was trying to get pregnant, and was experiencing serious infertility problems. After a while the doctors found a silver bullet to treat her infertility, and Son 1 was born. It took us a while to adjust to having a baby in the house, but adjust we did. And Wife started thinking more and more about her promise. So at one Full Moon ceremony, she asked the Goddess to let her get pregnant easily for her next child, so she could bear the daughter she had promised. A couple of nights later, she got pregnant. We know the exact night, because it was the only time in that whole month that we fucked—and by the end of the month she was pregnant, where she hadn't been at the beginning. It was also one of the best nights of sex we ever had together—unplanned, but everything clicked just perfectly to make it wonderful for both of us. That almost never happened (our communication around sex was generally very poor), but it happened brilliantly that night. We later joked that to conceive Son 1 required a huge battery of infertility treatments; but to conceive Son 2 required no more than a pot of spaghetti and a bottle of merlot.
Anyway, the baby born from that pregnancy was Son 2. A boy, not a girl. Not a daughter, and not someone that could end up a priestess. (Also, Son 2 has shown no interest in Wicca, for whatever it is worth.) Did that mean we were going to have three children, two boys and then a little girl? We talked about it as a possibility. Once upon a time, three children wouldn't have been at all remarkable; maybe it's still not.
But Wife's doctors started to tell her that a third child would be a really bad idea. Son 2 was born early, because her condition was starting to deteriorate. They waited long enough that they thought his lungs ought to be fully formed (I think that meant 36 weeks) and then scheduled a Caesarian section to pull him out before her health got any worse. They told her it was likely that another pregnancy would cause her to have a stroke. And then, before we could make any hard and fast decision about what to do, she entered menopause very early and the decision was taken away from us.
Once, at a subsequent Full Moon ceremony, she asked the Goddess what happened? Wife reminded Cerridwen that she (Wife) had promised to bear and raise a daughter as a priestess for her, but added that she couldn't do that if her body wouldn't bear a daughter. Before Son 1, she apparently couldn't get pregnant at all; less than a year later she was pregnant with Son 2; and after that she was told not to have any more children. How exactly was she supposed to fulfill her promise?
Cerridwen's reply was simply, "He was Our choice." No further explanation. [Update: Turns out I got that quote slightly wrong. You can find the whole conversation in this post here.]
And that might have been the end of it. Maybe it was the end of it. But a couple days ago I got an idea to pose another question to John Michael Greer. I didn't give him all the details, but just asked this much:
What happens if you make a promise to a god and then don't keep it?
To be clear, I'm NOT planning any such thing! It's about someone I know who promised something years ago and hasn't done it yet, and now there's no way it will ever happen. (Not in this lifetime, at any rate.) Also her life is kind of a mess. Is that a coincidence? Also, do promises like that carry over from one life to the next?
His answer was short and grim.
You'll keep it. If not in this lifetime, then in another, and the grief will just keep on piling up until you do so. No, the smoking crater of the person's life is no coincidence. That's what happens when you break a promise to a god.
So now I wonder. When Cerridwen said that They chose Son 2, did that let Wife off the hook? Or does Mr. Greer's remark answer my question in this post?
Or is it None Of The Above? Maybe that's always an option too.
P.S.: I realize I also allude briefly to this story in my post "Suzie's Dream."
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