As I’ve mentioned previously I deal with a myriad of chronic health issues.  One of the side effects of this is chronic fatigue.  And this is made worse when I overdo or am under stress.

I have had to increase my hours at work for many reasons.  But the result is still that I am dragging my ass.  I slept late, and slept relatively well, for the first time all week and frankly I feel the worse for wear.  I could go right back to sleep!  The thing that worries me is that I am shooting for OT this week at work (luckily I haven’t obligated myself to it) and the idea of working tomorrow and then over 40 hours in the following 5 days …. well just thinking about it is tiring.  But it is for a good cause as I am earmarking this money for Xmas/Yule shopping.

I managed to do a little “shopping” online last night and wound up with quite a few cool things for my girls without having to spend a whole heck of a lot.  Today the plan is to go over what I already have hidden away in the attic and the trunk of the car and see what blanks are left to fill in between gifts for the girls and gifts for assorted “nieces” “nephews” and friends.

The rest of the plan today is to get the girls to work on their closet and drawers so that clean clothes can be put away without it resulting in stuff being shoved willy-nilly, to go through the toy boxes and pull out the things no longer played with (and decide whether it is worth keeping them for posterity, trying to sell them on Ebay, or to toss/donate them), and to pull out the bags of stuff I already have packed up and itemized for a Salvation Army pickup this thursday.

Me thinks it will be a buzy day.

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Yesterday I had to work and it wound up feeling like a much longer day than it was.  I worked 7 hours without a lunch or break and can’t say I came home in the friendliest of moods.  But if you worked where I worked you’d understand.

While I was there my daughter went out with her “boyfriend” and spent the day hanging out with his family.  They adore her as evidenced by us already receiving a call inviting her back today despite her not getting home till after 8pm last night.  Its sweet, its cute, and frankly its a little unnerving.  But so far everything is totally innocent (as it should be since they are each only “just about 12″) so I can’t really argue with her.

The girls are outside now getting some fresh air until lunch time, after which it is time to CLEAN.  I told her that if we can get the house ship shape in time maybe “N” can come HERE next weekend. 

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On a side note …

One of my daughter’s best friends (since like 1st grade) has started recently telling other people “secrets” about my daughter.  Little stuff mainly — like telling everyone she had a boyfriend — but apparantly she also told her about our family being Pagan.

Now I am not training my daughter yet in any particular tradition, and for the most part we simply have conversations about how different people see God in different ways … she’s flipped through a couple of Teen books on Wicca … she knows some of what I believe – the sanctity of Nature, celebrating the cycles of the seasons, the concept of the Divine as God and Goddess. 

I was always hesitant to teach her anything that would label her for fear of other people’s reactions to that label.  I’ve also told her that what I believe is MY business and not for her friends knowledge, and that if she needed a label that, for now, she should use the term Unitarian as they accept all positive belief systems.  I explained also that terms like Witch and Pagan make people nervous or even afraid because they don’t know what they really mean (or they believe they are simply wrong).

So apparantly my daughter’s friend, told her parents “what we are” or what my daughter “is”, and they promptly told her it was all made up nonsense.  Not her story … OUR BELIEFS.  So my daughter’s friend promptly told my daughter this.

Nothing was said directly to me so there’s little I can do about it.  The parent’s aren’t discouraging the friendship, to my knowledge, or anything.  But just thinking about it and I fume a little bit.

I’m angry at being part of such a judgemental society.

I’m angry that there hasn’t been enough positive exposure for Wicca and Paganism to be considered as a valid belief system.  Our own president has proclaimed it “nonvalid“.  (Just look at the battle to get the VA to accept the pentacle as a religious symbol)

But mainly, I’m angry at myself for not sticking to my guns and just raising my daughters as Wiccan.

Years ago we had a “baby blessing” for my eldest daughter.  She was 11 months old.  We had a party at a hall and brought in a Unitarian minister to perform the rite (which I wrote with the help of various Pagan texts).  Lady Rose and her hubby were godparents.  I thought it was lovely!  Members of my family who didn’t diss us entirely by NOT COMING had already dismissed it as “weird witchy shit” and were blind to any beauty in it.  When we had a second child, I didn’t bother.

That moment — of having something meaningful and beautiful to me written off as silly and stupid and wrong — killed something inside me.  If I think back, that’s the moment when I ran screaming back into the broom closet, turned off the light, and hid all the way in the back behind old boxes.

When I was in college a fundamentalist Christian group put up posters for a lecture “New Age vs/ New Life” where they intended to denouce the entire “new age movement”.  I had been dealing for a couple of months with religious tracks slipped under my dorm room door (placed on my chair in classes too), and various bits of nastiness written on the wipe off board on my door and so as the lecture was held in my dormitory I went, along with a couple of friends, hoping to help balance what we expected to be propaganda instead of truth about our beliefs.  For the record they didn’t get together to talk about holding fast to strong Christian morals in the face of temptation, they simply blasted the entire New Age/Neopagan movement as being the work of Satan.

A couple of years after I attended a Renaissance Festival (Ren Faire) where a group of fundamentalist Christians attended with a lifesized cross in tow to “protest the presence of Pagans and of live steel” (edged weapons). They carried that cross in 3 circuits around the festival and then picked a spot to set up and “save people”.  It was a new faire and since they paid admission the organizers had no idea how to tell them that yes they could come in but the cross had to stay at home.

In both cases I was polite but I made my opinions known.  If someone wanted to confront me and my beliefs I didn’t back down.  Somewhere along the way I lost that person.

Maybe it was not having a coven anymore to recharge my batteries and spirit with.  Maybe it was feeling so much like a “Witch alone” as my husband wasn’t (and while much more open still isn’t) a practitioner.  Maybe it was fear of abandonment, which as an adopted person I seem to have in spades, and worry that my family could turn their back on me and on my child.

So here I sit fuming in a broom closet with coat hangers on my head.  And because I turned out the light I can’t find the door to get out. 

Anybody have a candle?

Blessings

Mama Kelly

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