Every year, the mango tree behind my house bears fruit, and every year, the one who looks after its flowers and fruit is my mother. She gets up before dawn to water the trees. Once the fruit starts to grow, she keeps trimming the branches and stems so the growing mangoes turn out as big and tasty as they can be. When a branch has so much fruit that it bends down, my mother even goes to the trouble of climbing the tree to tie it up with rope. It’s a picture of care and tenderness if ever there was one.

But there’s another side that people may not see or know about: my mother is very possessive of those mangoes. When she shares them with anyone, she thinks it over again and again, and she has to pick out the nice ones to keep. So hardly anyone around here gets to eat them, and dozens of mangoes are left sitting in the basket in the kitchen.

Seeing what my mother does with the mangoes made me think of card number 3 in the tarot: The Empress.

The Empress is card number 3, and 3 mostly means creating, producing, or even giving birth. Add the picture on the card, which shows abundance and the gentleness of the woman in it, and there’s no doubt that this card can stand for a mother who is loving, caring, self-sacrificing and truly giving.

But every card has two sides. This card looks good, but it has another side too (like my mother).

The Golden Dawn linked this card with Venus. On the good side, that can mean beauty and harmony, with everything looking good. But the other side is being infatuated with the things you have made yourself. If The Empress’s love goes too far, it turns into love that wants to possess, loving too much, until it can sometimes affect other people.

Loving and caring for what we’ve made with our own hands, and sometimes being protective of it, is right and natural. But wouldn’t it be better to share our work so other people can enjoy it too? Who knows, we might find out that those people love and admire our work, or even us, as well.

Wouldn’t it be better if what we make is loved by other people too, instead of us admiring it on our own?

Come to think of it, I’d better sneak off, pick some mangoes and hand them out to the neighbors…