Some call me a monster. A demon. A liar.
They say I have abandoned reason. That I have turned my nation into a herd. That I have stolen from millions what they call freedom.
How curious.
I am the mother of millions.
And yet, I am judged for not loving my children the way they expect me to.
The mother is humanity’s first social contract. Before the law, before the State, before religion, even before a child understands that a world exists beyond its own body, there is someone who feeds them.
Someone who keeps them alive.
Someone who decides when they eat, where they sleep, what they may touch, and which dangers they must be protected from.
The child does not negotiate this contract. They do not read its clauses. They do not demand guarantees of freedom.
They cry.
And someone responds.
So tell me: why, when they grow up, do men pretend that need has stopped governing them?
Why do they call it oppression when, throughout their lives, they have accepted it in exchange for security?
I feed. I educate. I protect.
And if I can guarantee that my children will live to see tomorrow, why should I leave that tomorrow to chance?
Everyone has a purpose.
The problem is that not everyone has the privilege of choosing their own.
You call that cruelty. I call it organization.
A nation cannot be sustained by individual dreams. It is sustained by work, production, discipline. By millions of small obligations fulfilled by people who may never discover the meaning of their own existence.
And the rest?
The rest of the world is statistics.
Deaths are statistics. Famines are statistics. Wars are statistics.
Until one of those statistics has the face of someone you love.
Then, suddenly, the numbers have names. And you beg someone to do something.
I do.
That is why you hate me.
I do not want my children’s faith. Faith is unstable. Today they kneel, tomorrow they doubt, and the day after they find another god.
I do not want faith. I want children.
Children who eat. Who learn. Who work. Who fulfill their roles and understand that a society cannot be rebuilt every morning according to the whims of each individual.
They say my nation has abandoned reason.
But answer me this: does a child ask for reason when they are born?
Do they ask for freedom?
Do they demand the right to choose among a thousand possible futures?
No.
They ask for a breast to feed them.
The first human experience is not freedom.
It is dependence.
And hunger is the mother of all philosophies.
The starving do not debate the nature of the State. They do not write treatises on autonomy. They do not contemplate the infinite possibilities of the human spirit.
They look for food.
And when they find someone capable of providing it, they listen.
That is how the world works. It always has.
The difference is that I do not pretend it is anything else.
You speak of freedom as if it were free. But you pay for it every day. You pay to live where you want, to study what you want, to choose what you eat, to buy what you desire.
You pay for options.
And when you cannot afford to pay, you discover how many of those options ever truly belonged to you.
You call it freedom because the word is beautiful.
I prefer to call it by its proper name: the power to choose.
And the power to choose depends on resources. It depends on circumstances. It depends on a world you do not control.
You fear me because you believe I can take your choices away.
But have you ever stopped to think about what happens when no one can choose anything?
When food runs out?
When the rent comes due?
When illness strikes and the money is not enough?
In those moments, freedom does not disappear by decree.
It disappears because there are no alternatives.
And there is no crueler speech than telling a hungry man that he is still free.
Do you know anxiety?
I am not talking about the fear of a gun pointed at your head. That is simple. The danger is right before your eyes. The body reacts. You run, you fight, or you hide.
I am talking about the silent anxiety that follows you into bed.
The kind that remains when the house is locked, the door is bolted, and no one is trying to kill you.
The anxiety of not knowing.
Not knowing whether your job will still exist. Whether your money will be enough. Whether your children will be safe. Whether your illness can be treated. Whether everything you have built over decades could disappear in a single morning.
Much of your anxiety is born from what you cannot predict.
And this is where I come in.
I, Mother Ceres, do not speak of tomorrow.
I show it to you.
I do not offer you a thousand paths. I show you the one you will walk.
I do not hand you a future filled with possibilities. I give you a future with clearly defined boundaries.
You know where you will work. You know what you must learn. You know what is expected of you and what will happen if you fulfill your obligations.
You do not need to wake up every day and decide who you will be.
I decide part of that for you.
And you can sleep.
Isn’t that wonderful?
No.
I know it isn’t.
But it is efficient.
And efficiency, my dears, has a quality that ideals rarely possess: it can be measured.
Look at your mothers.
Not the statues. Not the saints painted on walls. Look at the flesh-and-blood women who spent their lives trying to keep you alive.
When everything is calm, when the food is on the table, when the house is quiet and the problems seem, for a few moments, far away, they sit somewhere peaceful.
They look toward the horizon.
They are not necessarily seeing anything. Perhaps they are not even thinking in words.
They simply sit in silence.
And somewhere inside them, a question remains alive:
Will tomorrow be like this?
Will the job still be there?
Will the money be enough?
Will my children be safe?
Will everything I have managed to protect until now remain protected?
They do not ask because they do not love life.
They ask because they love too deeply what they stand to lose.
That is the weight of caring for someone.
That is the curse of being a mother.
You are never entirely at peace, because your children’s future is not completely in your hands.
I know that silence.
And I decided to put an end to it.
I do not promise you that tomorrow will be good. Promises are words, and words feed no one.
I show you tomorrow because I build the conditions that make it happen.
Or at least, that is what I tell myself.
A brief pause.
Have you noticed?
That is why I am so dangerous.
I do not need to convince you that I am good.
I only need to make you afraid of living without me.
Because, after a while, you stop asking whether you are happy. You stop asking whether you could live another way.
You begin asking what will happen if I am no longer here.
And when you reach that point, you no longer need chains.
You guard the doors yourselves.
You report anyone who threatens stability.
You teach your children not to ask questions that might jeopardize what they receive.
Not because you are cowards.
But because you have people to feed.
That is how love becomes an instrument of government.
You do not have to hate your own children to control them.
Sometimes, you only have to love them enough to be afraid of losing them.
She raises her eyes, as though looking out over an entire crowd.
So do not ask me to be a goddess.
Gods can promise miracles and disappear when hunger arrives.
Do not ask me to be a saint.
Saints can die with a clear conscience while their children are left behind.
And do not ask me to be just according to the standards of those who have never had to decide how many must be sacrificed so that millions may survive.
I am not innocent.
I know what I take from you.
I know what I deny you.
I know that a child raised to obey may never discover what they could have created if they had been free to choose. I know that a man protected from every uncertainty may eventually forget how to live without protection. I know that a society without the right to make mistakes may also lose the right to invent.
I know.
Do not mistake my certainty for ignorance.
I know the price. I simply refuse to pay it in the way you demand.
You want freedom even when it threatens everything you have built. You want the right to risk your children’s future in the name of a principle.
I do not.
I look at millions of people and see millions of lives that could go wrong.
And I cannot accept their suffering as the inevitable price of your freedom.
Perhaps that is my greatest deformity.
Perhaps a mother should teach her children to walk, even knowing they may fall.
Perhaps she should let them leave, even knowing they may never return.
Perhaps loving someone means accepting that they have the right to choose a path you would never choose for them.
Silence.
But I am not the mother of one child.
I am the mother of millions.
And millions of destinies cannot fit in one woman’s lap.
So I built a nation.
I turned care into a system, protection into rules, education into direction, and obedience into virtue.
I gave names to obligations.
I gave numbers to needs.
I gave a purpose to those who did not know what to do with their lives.
And, little by little, I began to believe that what was necessary was also just.
Perhaps this is how monsters are born.
Not when they stop loving.
But when they believe that love gives them the right to decide everything.
She smiles without joy.
That is why I am Ceres.
Mother Ceres.
The one who feeds.
The one who educates.
And the one who devours.
Because every mother fears losing her children.
But there is a difference between the mother who teaches her children to live without her…
And the mother who needs them never to learn how.
I feed my children so they may survive.
I educate them so they may understand me.
And I devour them when they discover they can live without me.
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