Did you know that today is believed to have been Achilles birthday? Indeed, it is! For those of you who didn’t already know this by now, my Mona Lisa is extremely well versed, if not obsessed with all things Spartan and Greek. Lol. I’m fairly certain she was a Spartan in another lifetime, and the sketch above is one of my hands down favorite pieces of her self-taught artistry EVER! Meanwhile …

Who was this mythological Semi-God?

The son of the mortal king, Peleus, and the sea goddess, Thetis, Achilles was fated to become the strongest, bravest, most handsome warrior of Agamemnon‘s army in the Trojan War. In a non-Homeric tale, it was said that his mother dipped the newborn Achilles into the River Styx in hopes that its “magical powers” would render him invincible:

According to myths and stories composed long after the Iliad, Thetis was extraordinarily concerned about her baby son’s mortality. She did everything she could to make him immortal: She burned him over a fire every night, then dressed his wounds with ambrosial ointment; and she dunked him into the River Styx, whose waters were said to confer the invulnerability of the gods. However, she gripped him tightly by the foot as she dipped him into the river–so tightly that the water never touched his heel. As a result, Achilles was invulnerable everywhere but there.

(History.com)

Hmm? Sounds like a good plan to me, mom. NOT! Indeed, he became an EPIC warrior and hero … but, NO, he wasn’t invincible. Of all the things to take him out, it was an arrow through the one place on his body that wasn’t bathed in the river since his mother’s hands were wrapped around it as she dipped him:

ACHILLES’ HEEL!

While Thetis is historically depicted as a loving and devoted mother who bore the burden of knowing her son’s fate while trying to save his life, change his path, and make him immortal, in my opinion, it was SHE, and not his heel who became is downfall. She all but spoon fed him his god complex by overprotecting, coddling, and inflating his ego with a sense of grandiosity, superiority, entitlement, and invincibility:

My mother Thetis, the goddess with the silver feet, says that a twofold fate carries me toward my death. If I remain and fight to take the city of the Trojans, then my homecoming is no more, but my fame will be forever. If I return to my home in the land of my fathers, there will be no glorious renown, yet I will live long, and the doom of death will not soon find me.

{“Illiad“}

By the way, did you know that Achilles was also mentally ill? Not only are are some of the oldest descriptions of PTSD and generalized anxiety ever written found in Homer’s Iliad circa 720BC, but he was also a textbook NPD. Momma raised an arrogant narcissist whose self-grandiosity became the death of him.

As far as I’m concerned, there is an EPIC parenting lesson to be learned here, moms and dads. Don’t fill your kids’ buckets with fictional tales of magic rivers and become the arrow in their heel. Rather, fill their buckets with the truth about their weaknesses and mortality! Otherwise, they’ll just stand there looking pretty, pounding their chests and running their mouths INSTEAD of being truly prepared for battle, survival, and watching their own six!