Always looking for that ultimate paradigm, the archetype of womanhood Lost, when I lost my childhood innocence, or was it beaten out of me?
Split between the goddess and the whore
My subconscious got strewn between these poles.
Evaluating and unresolving my relationships They usually fell apart when I realized the truth, I was either repulsed or she remained forever beyond.
Torn between desire and admiration, the goddess in white garments and the woman in the lacy black lingerie.

To have infected all those relationships, all those pathetic pursuits to nowhere, so much effort and obsession After fantasy and images, dreams and pre-conceived fragments To be followed by the inevitable repulsion or rejection does it matter which?
Strung in both cases between those awful poles of isolation.

But now in ageing, I see clearer.
For I have inevitably been forced to finally appreciate what was so precious, what was so refined and subtle, what I had missed all along... that Sargon femininity, that ultimate image etched into my subconscious, first and lastly, the picture of my mother holding the violin playing her Paganini piece or Beethoven Romance as she won the all India violin competition, that iconic image of her in her black velvet dress, the low cut appeal of that black velvet despite her innocence, and the ability to hold both purity and seduction without loss of either, the freshness of her gaze and guilelessness.

That precious absence of manipulativeness, of deviousness, of pseudo-naiveté that I have known in encountering other women along the way. At some point, I had lost that image. Where had I forgotten this deep feeling?

That primordial image I had seen all my childhood like those Sunday afternoons with the Sargon women hugging the walls and the men with their Arabic playbeads in the middle of the large living room in Wembley. On puffs and small ottomans, speaking of world affairs and business and the women chatting on the sidelines; of pleasantries.

But those very women come back to me now as I realize that what I really needed all along, what I had been searching for without knowing it, was that precise notion of womanhood. That innocence and lack of guile, yet attraction and desire, the absence of that conflict, found only in Sargon women.

Even more so, all those women who brought out the worst in me were really a gift bringing me to this place of realization. This place of return of the past and the ancestors, the Sargon women.

Holy sisters, mother, aunts, Becky Florence, Matilda, even Diana, Ray, Myrtle, and my beloved Nana, then nieces and daughters ... and now as I stare at my granddaughter playing, 7 months old, her coyness as she places her tiny hands on my beard inquisitively, I bask in the reflection of this knowledge that those values will continue, that I have come to peace with the mother goddess.

That my notion of Schechina has come full circle as I welcome the bride each Sabbath projecting onto her all those virtues of the eishis chayil.

Thank you for the gift of womanhood
Of innocence yet desire
Of purity with the body
With no guilt or shame
The refusal of the lacy black, but the retention of the burning and yearning desire. Thank you.