Hera Chera

by Mary Oak O'Kane

Driving home from a legal consultation to file my divorce, I switch on the radio, "severely parched land" reported from Greece. On Samos, fires are blazing out of control. Hera's island is burning. Evacuations are taking place. I too, am fleeing her sacred ground of matrimony and betrayal, leaving a marriage long arid, heaving the dream I served long beyond its curdling.

My bridal veil was fine antique mesh from my grandmother's drawer, gathered to a crown where I wound Lilies of the valley round with ribbon. There are many veils to marriage. Filaments weave transparency, obscurity, cocoon, encasing. We reveal and conceal ourselves. Lace, membrane, gauze, net.

I always avoided Hera, shunned her story. What was there to tell? Her bitter glory of wifeness? Her wrath and vindictiveness; her perpetual victimization? She appears in a recitation of reaction, of cruel revenge. Does it bear repeating?

But before the father's distortions, her cult celebrated sexuality as potent as what became Aphrodite's domain. Hera Telaia: Fruitful epiphany, marriage as true union, beyond its contraction into contract. Reduced to figures and furnishings, we divide the marital community. "Dissolution", it's called, in the State of Washington. And what was that phrase: Irretrievably broken? Irreparable? Beyond reconciliation. I left the documents behind, but not Hera. She's been stalking me. She doesn't care about the rightness of wording; she knows this is no abrupt severing. She knows it is akin to famine in her world; parched land.

I was never comfortable in her world, defined by "Mrs.", radical wife that I was. I watched friendships falter as women became wrapped in partnership, escaping differentiation. I could list them and their subsequent casualties, they rarely lasted long.

Mine did. 22 Years. I was married more than half my life, but I'll outgrow that, if I'm lucky - these first steps of walking away marking a road ahead. Hera's luck is she has a hidden side, another aspect beyond heavenly queen and bride. "Wife" doesn't contain her. Hera Chera: She Who Turns Away. Waning moon, dark moon. Her adamancy for true union, not fully met turns to seeking solitude.

Veil becomes shroud.

In the guise of marriage, I was wed to isolation. I disguised absence, holding out for change. So many ways I hid in the shell of marriage, cracked open now. Now this is the change I held out for: shedding a form outworn. Turning away, walking away, leaving. I tear away the veils, cast away the encrustations, strip away the shrouds.

When we took off our wedding rings to mark our separation, I asked my husband if for the honoring of our final closure he might place my bridal veil back around me. He refused. "That's all about you," he exclaimed. And so may it be! Ground note of new beginning, unknown dance on scorched terrain.