In the Hills of Emerie by Himring

Epilogue: Her Son

Ancalime's son Anarion has not learned anything of his mother's recent humiliation at his father's hands.
But the effect on her does not pass him by.

This chapter uses the following prompt of the SWG's Middle-earth Museum challenge:
Headdress
(alternative link: Queen Puabi’s headdress).

The relevant B2MeM 2018 prompt is: Initial prompt no. 20: Nocturne: a night-piece, music that evokes a nocturnal mood

I asked her: ‘My Lady Mother, will you take me to Emerie to see the sheep?’

For always, she had seemed calmer and spoken to me more openly in the green hills than elsewhere, not indeed as women commonly speak to children in Numenor but sharing her thought, so that some things she said to me there I stored in my memory as she had spoken them and only understood years later.

But this time she spoke sternly: ‘Do not ask, Anarion, for now we can never go there again.’

I feared then that I had angered her without knowing. I hesitated to enquire further, in case I angered her more, but my eyes filled with tears. I weep easily, like my great-grandmother Almarian and her daughter, my great-aunt Almiel. Some say it is a weakness in a king.

My mother perceived my tears and said more gently: ‘Hush, my son, it is none of your doing.’

And on the second evening she came to me, as I lay in bed, tended by my attendants and prepared for sleep. It was late and already beyond the window the sky was dark, although the night was not yet unbroken but disrupted by the flicker of lamps and torches at this hour, as commonly in Armenelos. My mother took off her starred golden head-dress, with its triple wreath of willow and poplar leaves, set it aside on the chest, and sat beside me on the bedstead. As I watched her in wonder, she bent her head down low, almost to my pillow, and then she sang softly in my ear, so that none other could hear, three of those songs of Emerie that she had otherwise abjured. And I understood that this was just for me.

It is not seldom seen that the unhappiness of parents is bequeathed to their heirs and the strife between them is visited on their children. But I was luckier than most, for I had good friends and, when I came to marry, my wife and I understood one another.

Chapter End Notes

The humiliation referred to is the occasion on which Ancalime had forced Hallacar to leave his family farm and he responded by arranging a multiple wedding ceremony for her female staff behind her back. (I've written about this elsewhere in the series.)

It is possible to read the canonical account in the Unfinished Tales as saying that Ancalime had a bad relationship with her son.
She certainly seems to have fought over him with her husband. She also rejected her society's expectations of motherly behaviour.
I think that his relationship with her could not have been an altogether easy one, but not necessarily therefore a bad one, or not entirely so, at any rate.