K, Internet World, this is my first post and I don't know what I'm doing, starting this blog. It's 9:28AM on a Wednesday and I've got work to do, a daughter to take to the doctor later today, a house to clean, books to read, a dead career to jump start.
Oh, look: 9:29!
In some ways, to say my life is a mess would be an understatement. I'm going bankrupt. I mean that actually. Bankrupt. My partner, Ms. Red Hair, and I want to have another child, but being that we both work full time, have our hands full with our current daughter and then my money problems are impeding our ability to move forward with our family. I'm 31 and I'm not getting younger. Or richer. I work 2 or 3 jobs and it's never enough.
My daughter...Curly Sue we'll call her...god love her...is also a mess. The best time with my daughter is in the mornings, when she's eating breakfast. That's just about the only time of the day it feels like we have time to talk and enjoy just being together. By the time she's gone to school and gotten in trouble and lied about having homework and come home and been rude and I've become frustrated and am having an anxiety attack...well the day is usually completely ruined by 6PM if not earlier.
And then, in other ways, life is great. More than great. Lovely. Amazing. I am so blessed. I have a house, a garden, a partner and daughter. We're vegetarians. I brew beer and read and fuss over my plants and talk to my mom once a week. I live in a city I love, in a neighborhood I love. I have a car and I love it. I love my mechanic and my local grocery store and my coffee shop and the people at my full time job. I have best friends, people I would do anything for, who I feel like would do anything for me.
So all these good things and bad things come crashing together every day. I feel torn apart sometimes. I cuss in traffic a lot--that makes me feel good. I drink beer (too much, really). I bake bread and make lemonade at home. I kiss my daughter every night but fear I don't get enough pleasure from it. I also tell Ms. Red Hair and Curly Sue that I love them every day as I send them off to school and I get a great deal of pleasure from that. Every new day feels good. Some nights I just feel wasted.
More than anything, I am lost. I want to move forward, but I want to enjoy every moment.
A few years ago, feeling this feeling of intense lostness, I started to read books about wicca and paganism. Religion has never been a good fit for me. My mom has been basically estranged from Catholicism ever since her divorce when I was just a baby. In third grade, I had my first communion, but that's the last time I ever considered myself to be Catholic. I had Catholic and Baptist grandparents, my best friend growing up (now my partner) was Methodist. I grew up in a little town in the midwest, where almost everyone is Christian if not in practice then at least by label, and Evangelicalism is prevalent. I have been saved but wasn't convinced by it (didn't even want it), I have been told (many times) I was going to hell, and for like most of my grade school through high school years, I was terrified of God.
9:49 now.
The summer before we adopted Curly Sue, we took her home to the midwest to meet her new grandparents -to-be. I was stressed. Wandering through the Borders bookstore, I stumbled on some books about spirituality. I've read many books by Thich Nhat Hanh and found them to be comforting, soothing.
I don't know if I found a book about magic or spells or just about wicca, whatever it was, I just picked one up. I read. I picked up another. Read more. Took an armful back to the cafe where the family was and I read, and read, and read. took notes.
That summer I did a lot of research and I found it to be comforting. I wanted to do spells and develop a spiritual path, one that made sense for me. Something that would see me through the conflicting feelings I had, about Curly Sue, whom I loved but who scared me, about Ms. Red Hair, who is an intense personality.
My pagan path stalled sometime in the following two years--I didn't have time to do the spells or practice the rituals. Actually, more than that, I didn't have time to decide which rituals were right, what were my rituals. I also became somewhat frustrated with the pagan community--there are a lot of vampyres and fayries and 15 year old girls with black eye makeup out there. I encountered them on the Internets. They made me think maybe this was all just a stupid waste of my time and that perhaps I was trying to recapture some lost opportunity to dress up like a Goth in high school.
I've got a lot of books on my shelf at home now, and I'm feeling lost again, and I've realized again that the pagan path is primarily a solitary one, and I don't need to affiliate myself with the vampyres and fayries and Buffy the whatevers. I'm just me. And I need a path. I'm looking, searching.
I'm going to start reading my books again. The pagan books. Maybe I can start practicing in little ways. Making up my own rituals. I know that there are a lot of kitchen witches out there--and that does fit me well. I live my life in the kitchen.
On Sunday night, with Ms. Red Hair and Curly Sue playing cards and drinking Pepsi at the kitchen table, ceiling fans blowing and a breeze coming in from the open windows, I remembered how blessed I was. My eyes landed on the purple magic book I bought from the Borders because Ms. Red Hair's dad spilled coffee all over it. And I remembered that I believe myself to be a pagan and I want to give that a shot again.
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