Ann Batchelder’s debut memoir, Craving Spring (Legacy Press, 2023), explores her quest for healing and renewal in the face of her daughter’s severe depression—with Demeter, the Greek goddess, as her guide.
Blending personal narrative and Greek myth, Batchelder takes us inside the dynamics of a mother-daughter relationship gone sour. Batchelder writes about her desire to be the “perfect mother,” until her daughter reveals her struggles with an eating disorder, suicidal thoughts, and a heroin addiction. Guided by the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone, Batchelder learns to acknowledge her own addictions, including a compulsion to be her children’s protector, eventually finding peace in the process of letting go. Batchelder’s narrative reveals a familiar complexity in mother-daughter bonds and how mythology allowed her to see herself more clearly.
I connected with Batchelder by Zoom and email, delighted to discuss mother-daughter relationships, the enduring power of mythology, and how letting go brought an unexpected freedom.
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The Rumpus: I’m always interested in the structure of memoirs, particularly one like this, which braids together your personal story with Greek mythology. Can you talk a little about your book’s structure and how it came to be?
Ann Batchelder: I started writing this memoir around ten years ago, through journaling and in writing classes. During the pandemic, I tried to piece together the book. I had bits of writing lying all around the floor in piles.
As you mentioned, my memoir ended up being structured around Greek mythology, specifically the mother-daughter myth about Demeter and Persephone. I first heard about the myth when my daughter was in high school. At that point, I was completely frantic and desperate to fix her depression. One day, my therapist said to me, “You’re just like Demeter.” Later, I finally read the myth and saw myself in that story. Here was an ancient mother whose daughter was captured and dragged to hell. Demeter was willing to do anything to rescue her child. I totally identified with her, and I even felt vindicated by her story in a way.
So when I was writing the book, I knew I wanted to include the myth, but I wasn’t sure how. At first, I was just going to add an introductory chapter with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in it. But once I sat down to really study the myth, I realized Demeter didn’t just search for her daughter. To reach the next stage of motherhood, she had to learn to compromise, accept her daughter’s independence, and eventually return to herself. This was similar to my experience transitioning from raising a troubled teen to guiding a young adult. Demeter became a mentor for me. That’s when I decided to use these turning points in both stories as the scaffolding for my book.
Rumpus: I think Demeter intrigues so many of us still. Do you see her as a timeless symbol of maternal love, both admirable but also overbearing, by today’s standards?
Batchelder: Definitely. I think if someone witnessed Demeter’s actions today, they would label her as “too controlling.” Demeter kept a close watch on her daughter and refused to let the young male gods court her. Then, when Persephone disappeared, Demeter was completely distraught. She ignored her duties as the goddess of the harvest and took off to rescue her child. The people began to starve, but Demeter didn’t care.
What’s interesting, though, is that for centuries, the Demeter myth was revered as purely a story of a mother’s devotion to her daughter, not as an example of a helicopter mom the way we might see it today. When I read it, my honest reaction was: Isn’t this the way most mothers would act? Why do we have to shame mothers for being their child’s advocate? That’s when I thought that maybe, if I could write a story that showed compassion for what mothers go through, I could also discuss the need for mothers to learn new skills as their children grow up. For example, it’s not healthy to treat an adult child the same way you would a grade school kid. But the truth is that many mothers don’t have a road map for how to make that transition. I believed that the story of Demeter, along with my personal story, could provide readers with that road map.
Rumpus: I was interested in your choice to begin the memoir in a hospital room with your daughter, at an emotionally charged moment that falls halfway into the chronology of the story. Can you talk about why you decided to start the memoir there, versus at the chronological beginning?
Batchelder: Like many of us, I watched a lotof TV during the pandemic. At some point, I got hooked on a Spanish soap opera called Velvet. Of course, everyone was having affairs, and the costumes were terrific. The show started with a car crash. You don’t really understand that scene until halfway through the series when the car crash is repeated. Yet, this wasn’t the last episode. The story continued to evolve like a piece of classical music that climbs and falls, straining toward resolution yet circling around again and again.
I knew then that I wanted to begin my memoir not at the end but at the middle of my story, the moment my relationship with my daughter began to change in a more positive direction. In that hospital room was the first time I felt a sense of peace within chaos. I knew I would never give up on my daughter but also understood that I could not rescue her. At that moment, something beautiful and transformative happened despite the hardship and suffering. I felt resolve as well as sadness in letting go, a spiritual recognition, a deeper connection to compassion. I knew that was the climax of my story, not the end. There was more to work out after that crescendo, as my process continued to ebb and flow, like any recovery.
Rumpus: I was also fascinated by the inclusion of a spirit-like character, Malvado, in the opening scene, who makes a couple of other appearances in the book as well. Would you be able to talk about him and his role?
Batchelder: Yes, the opening chapter has a shadowy figure I called Malvado who visits me in my daughter’s hospital room. He was a figure I’d seen drawn on the wall of a back alley in Spain that basically took up residence inside me. It really felt like he was the embodiment of my anxiety about my daughter and everything she was going through. By including him, I was trying to capture how it felt to be a mother completely consumed by fear and guilt when her child’s life is in danger, how it feels to be out of control and desperately searching for answers. For me, that fear put me almost in a dissociative state, and Malvado represented that as well.
Rumpus: I’m struck by how much people talk and write about Greek myths today, in social media posts, books, essays, and more. As someone who’s been deeply entrenched in myths, specifically the Demeter-Persephone story, why do you think these types of myths remain so popular?
Batchelder: I think what makes them so relevant still is that myths, legends, and cultural stories focus on deep truths rather than scientific facts. Myths used to be the way people learned about life. Today, unfortunately, we’ve lost much of that, and we concentrate more on logic. The myth of Demeter has traditionally been seen not only as a mother-daughter story but also as an explanation for how the seasons came to be. The compromise for Demeter is accepting the fact that there is a time every year when her daughter has to return to Hades. During those months, Demeter becomes listless, the land becomes barren, and crops do not grow. But when Persephone returns to earth, it’s springtime again. Demeter has to face the reality that life involves winter as well as spring. The myth, then, reassures us when we face loss that there will also be renewal.
I read something by the scholar Karen Armstrong, where she says that myths unlock the heroic potential in people by helping them see what steps they need to take toward transformation. Too often in our society, we don’t slow down long enough to seriously consider issues of life or death. Myths give us hope. They help us deal with the beauty and horror of life and what it means to be human.
Rumpus: It occurs to me as you’re talking that the mothering and parenting books we have tend to be very practical. They focus on proven methods for helping children and scientific explanations of developmental stages.
Batchelder: Absolutely. I find that most academic or how-to books take a rational approach to mothering. For example, they have concrete lists of do’s-and-don’ts based on the latest child-raising theories. What’s different about myths that focus on motherhood—along with memoirs, poetry, film, theater, and other types of storytelling—is that they tend to capture the essence of a woman’s experience as she navigates her responsibilities during each new stage of raising a child. That includes her expectations, joys, disappointments, pain, or trauma—all of which live in the heart, not simply the mind.
Rumpus: When writing memoirs that revolve heavily around other people—in this case, your daughter—I imagine that it can be very hard to keep the focus on you, the writer. What do you think makes this your story? How did you navigate that from a craft perspective?
Batchelder: When I began this story, I honestly thought I would be writing mostly about my daughter. But pretty quickly, I realized the story was more about me. Most memoirs about addiction I’d read were told from the perspective of a person in recovery and tended to focus on the horrors of bottoming out. I was interested in something different: I wanted to write a book that spoke to the experience of motherhood. Mom-shaming, stigma, and challenging perfectionism are popular themes now, but when my daughter was a teenager, women felt a lot of guilt around being codependent or overly protective. Using the myth of Demeter, I was able to take this discussion out of twenty-first century debates and look at the universal experience of motherhood.
To keep the story about me, I was very conscious about only writing about my impression of what was going on with my daughter. I couldn’t assume what she was thinking or feeling, only my interpretation of events that related to me. Instead of focusing on how she landed in this situation, I began to interrogate myself and my own responses. How had I developed these attitudes about motherhood and addiction? What was it about my upbringing or culture or past experiences that contributed to my guilt and fear? A big part of the story is exploring what helped me get beyond my fear—all the steps I had to take from therapy, to going through the Twelve Steps, to mindfulness practices. For instance, one of the things I discovered in the middle of writing my memoir was that my daughter’s suicidal ideation and drug addiction—the very real fear that she might die—triggered a PTSD response in me from having lost pregnancies earlier in my life.
Rumpus: In the book, you interrogate the idea of what it means to be a “perfect” mother. How has this cultural trope evolved over time?
Batchelder: Back in the 1970s and 80s, women were learning to balance careers and families and trying to “have it all.” But there was also a strong sense of solidarity, a sisterhood in the women’s movement, and there wasn’t so much pressure for kids to be high achievers. Today, mothers tend to shame or blame other moms. I think that’s because they feel so threatened and overwhelmed. This only leads to higher levels of stress and guilt, which just creates a vicious cycle. Women are often too embarrassed to give or get the support they need from each other. Add to that the stigma around any problems with mental health or addiction, and it only gets worse.
Rumpus: I first became interested in your book because of the focus on mental illness, which I have struggled with for years. It feels like mental illness, and addiction in particular, are big topics of conversation nowadays. Can you share a bit about your hopes for the addiction, mental health, and recovery movements?
Batchelder: I truly believe that, until we address the fact that only a fraction of people in addiction have access to the help they need, we will never heal as a country. The same is true for depression and anxiety. As so many of us are painfully aware of, our children are facing a huge mental health crisis that needs to be addressed. The surgeon general says the primary roadblock to solving this problem is stigma. We have to stop thinking about “us versus them,” people who have addiction versus those who don’t. My hope is that as a society we can emphasize compassion over stigma and treatment over punishment.
I remember being at a party and hearing a mother joke about her kid who’d recently left for college. “He’s fine, I think,” she said. “At least he’s not addicted to drugs.” Everyone laughed, except me. I left the group in shame, for myself and my daughter. It was this feeling that mental illness is still considered a moral weakness or failure. We still judge people with mental illness, while no one blames someone for having cancer or diabetes. Addiction, in particular, is hard to define, hard to understand. New studies pop up constantly about how to address addiction, along with discussions about which methods of treatment are most helpful. What cannot be denied is this: stigma prevents people from getting the help they need. None of us are perfect when it comes to mental health issues. We are all working on staying emotionally healthy.
Rumpus: You say you believe addiction applies to many of us, beyond those who struggle with substance abuse. How do you think this applies to healing and recovery?
Batchelder: There is no one way to do recovery. You can’t just think about recovery, you have to take deliberate and consistent action. For me, it was a cleansing, an opportunity to release old baggage and start over. After that, I relied more on mindfulness and Buddhist teachings to help me heal.
I now believe we are all on the spectrum of addiction. In Buddhist teachings, attachment is a natural part of being human. We all try to avoid pain. Understanding that desire and the unhealthy ways we create our own suffering is the basis for true recovery.
I didn’t have a problem with substance misuse, but I was addicted to regret. I realized while writing my memoir that I secretly blamed myself for having had three miscarriages and a stillbirth before my daughter was born, that somehow, that meant I had failed as a mother. As a result, I felt overly responsible for making sure my kids were okay. I sowanted my daughter to be happy. I refused to admit that she was really depressed. Then I beat myself up for missing all the warning signs or not being able to fix her problems. It wasn’t until I learned to have compassion for myself as a mother that I was able to become a good role model for my child.
Rumpus: How has writing and publishing this book changed your relationship with your daughter?
Batchelder: The hardest part about writing this memoir was having to come clean about my fear of not being a perfect mother. It was humbling but so important to acknowledge. After my daughter read my manuscript, she said she finally felt seen by me. She also wrote in the Epilogue that she felt relief when I stopped blaming myself because she felt she had to handle all her emotions as well as mine. This was painful for me to read, especially when I had been trying so hard to be a good mother. I realized then that while our mother-daughter relationship was much improved, it would take continued effort on my part to stay present and honest with her and with myself. It’s not enough that we feel closer now. Each new stage in our relationship will bring new challenges. I have to keep practicing letting go.
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Author photograph courtesy of Ann Batchelder
