Feminine Wiles

Apparently, my practices and beliefs can be offensive, which is odd to me. We have such ethnic and religious diversity in the U.S. that I guess people figure I have to subscribe to something. I don’t. The sum of my upbringing, family history and life experiences have pushed me down a path that is somehow both pragmatic and mystical.

My first mistake, I suppose, is that I don’t believe in god. I definitely don’t believe in a single god whose image we are made in, and my “spiritual” idea of there being a “higher power” is waning. People don’t like to hear that you don’t believe in anything.

Even though I don’t have a stated religion, I’ll practice almost anything. Rituals are fascinating and necessary. I find ritual in almost everything I do from the mundane task of taking a bath to something as permanent as getting a tattoo (I have two and have more planned). I argue with my family often about this, I don’t ritualize in order to praise some arbitrary, all-powerful force, I ritualize the tangible. I believe in being conscious of all your actions, and ritual provides reason for your actions, no matter how silly they may seem.

I wasn’t raised this way. I was raised Christian, went to bible school, even sang in the church youth choir for a time. As a pre-teen I gathered friends together who were god and Jesus-loving and, most important at the time, who weren’t slutty, because somehow that was the ultimate no-no.

So how did I evolve from a good, Christian choir girl to vampy, Atheist pagan woman? I’m not really sure. I think my convoluted life has much to do with it. There are so many twists and turns that it is hard for me to believe that any of it is planned or guided by any higher power. There is just too much stuff going on and multiply that by billions of people; I just don’t think it’s possible to keep up.

Then there’s that I’ve always been open to alternatives to what I learned in bible school. It spurred my own personal quest for truth. Truth, to me means that I have to respect of other people and acknowledge that I may not be right, even if I’ve settled on what I chosen to believe, all those other people can’t all be wrong.

Then, I have to take into account my multi-faceted upbringing. My parents split when I was about two and they are on complete opposite ends of the spectrum. I’ve dealt with it by trying to find a balance between the two for myself, which is difficult and keeps my forever challenging myself.

This is a good place for me to begin my life journey, at the time of my parent’s split.

When my parents split, my sister and I lived with my mother in Simi Valley. She never really stopped being that crazy free-spirited person. We loved it. She took us everywhere with her and her crazy friends; long hikes in the mountains, bonfires by the train tracks, camping in Ohai, swimming at the beach. There was always company, we were considered “cool kids” and I guess that meant that we could hang. Living with my mom was like a magical adventure everyday of our lives.

Looking back on the reality of it, my mom and her crazy friends were smoking pot, doing coke and drinking all the time. (In my memory have an image of a square mirror with a gorgeous unicorn engraved on it. most of the time it had white powder on that I knew I wasn’t supposed to touch, but I just liked to look at the unicorn.) Our house was the party house because all of my mom’s friends were quite a bit younger than her. If you look at our school records, we were absent about half of the time. Everyday was like an adventure because she would decide that she didn’t feel like stopping her fun to pick us up from school, so she would take us with. At the time, my sister and I never knew the difference, it was just fun.

One Sunday night after a weekend with my dad he took us back to the house in Simi and my mom wasn’t home. We waited in the driveway for what seemed like hours to my seven-year-old mind. We left to go eat and came back, she still wasn’t there. We went to a pay phone and my dad called a couple of her friends, I guess they didn’t know where she was either. Eventually he told me and my sister to go to sleep. We woke the next morning back in our beds at his condo in L.A. My dad went back to Simi couple of times that week; he left us with his girlfriend rather than take us. We asked when we would go home, and never got an answer.

The following Monday my dad enrolled us in Third Street Elementary School. We thought my dad stole us. I would sneak to call my mom and never got an answer. Sometimes in the bathroom with the water running, we would whisper about getting a map and riding all the way to Simi Valley, back to where it was fun and free, and would talk about how much our mom must have missed us.

Life at my dad’s was very different for us. We hated it. It seemed like there was so much school and so many rules. We could never go outside since we lived in the city. We rode our bike and scooter in the building’s underground parking. We had to go to church. We had to wear stockings. When we lived with my mom we only had to do that once a year when we visited our great-grandma for Easter.

At school it wasn’t any better for me. I was an awkward kid with a huge imagination. That was no different from before, I was always the weird geeky kid that boys picked on and girls ignored. What was different in the L.A. school was that the girls picked on me too. More than just picked on me, they were down right mean, some girls even wanted to fight. My keeping to myself was taken as I thought I was better than them because I had “that good hair” and I was suddenly a “high yellow heifer.” I had no idea what they were talking about. I hated my hair, it hurt to comb it and it was frizzy. High yellow, that was beyond me. Mind you, I’m seven, I came from Simi Valley and race was never discussed in my mom’s magical world.

I stayed to myself, but eventually made a few friends who were also misfits. The intense hazing stopped after a few of the black parents caught wind that my dad is who he is, also a few girls saw his girlfriend pick me up and recognized her as well.

We didn’t hear form my mom for about a year. One day she just showed up at our school and we left with her.

I’m not really sure of the period of time in between. Perhaps I had a contact high from my mom’s frequent and indiscreet marijuana habit. We ended up back at my dad’s. He gained physical custody of us and we were to spend weekends with my mother.

The next nine years went on pretty normal. I got use to my dad’s more stringent rules, settled into attending church. My dad was just raised different from my mom, I guess, that’s why he was different with me. My dad is from Akron, Ohio and was raised in a very Christian, middle-class black family. What he said went, even when I knew, and He knew, he was wrong.

That strictness backfired on him. Not so much because I just wanted to go wild, but because he would never give a solid explanation for anything. I started to do Polynesian dance as a young girl, it was fine with him until I was turning 12, and suddenly he said I couldn’t. He said it was too sexy, which was ridiculous to me at 12. My dad’s word was the end of everything, and, looking back on that I guess that wasn’t so wrong, but his inability to explain himself spilled over into so many conversations we had. I almost began to not trust him. He didn’t make sense, so everything he stood for started to not make sense.

When I was a teenager I had an affinity for candlelight, unicorns and dragons. My aunts came to visit and saw the set up in my room (I had about 100 candles) and tried to convince my father I was practicing witchcraft. It was a horrible fight; I’m not quite sure whose side my dad was on. While I was at school one day, my aunts called themselves “exorcising my room.” They threw out everything they decided was demonic. I was furious.

I wasn’t practicing witchcraft, but after that, I started to look into it. I wanted to know what they were so scared of. What I found I loved. I didn’t convert to Wicca, but I enjoyed the mantra: “In harming none, do as you will.” This resonates as empowering and also calls you to be responsible for your actions and the impact you will have on others.

I began to notice the differences between my two parents and that began having an affect on my view of them as people, rather than parents. My father was secretive where my mother was open. My father held thing in where my mother would blow up her anger. My father was close minded where my mother was able to look beyond her personal beliefs. I began to gravitate toward my mother’s side. After a huge fall out with my dad I took off to my mother’s. By ‘took off’ I mean for a week I was taking extra clothes to school and stored them in my locker. I called my uncle, told him to pick me up, forged a note to dismiss me for a ‘doctor’s appointment’ and had my uncle take me to my mother’s in San Diego.

Only she wasn’t the answer either. My mom was definitely less strict, more accepting and definitely more fun. That’s because she’s a drug addict. She is also less reliable. From 16 to 18 years old I picked up my mom’s slack in the house; there was a lot of slack. She had three more kids with her second husband and at the time she was not doing her motherly duties. While I enjoyed more freedom, I also got a huge lesson in responsibility. It’s not like it was all on my own, my Uncle John and family friend C.C. lived there too. The burdens of the house were spread out between us, my mom with the least and me with the most.

Somehow in that time I got a lot of confidence I didn’t have under my dad’s roof. I was getting straight A’s and my social life improved 200 percent. I had two jobs my senior year of high school, a waitress and a go-go dancer. In some ways my mom was a confidence booster, though. Somehow her crazy, druggy rules of accepting who you are and doing the same with others resonated with me. Even though she was high most of the time, she made sense, and when she was wrong, which was most of the time, she admitted to it.

At 18 shit hit the fan in my mom’s. I had to get out of there. I started stripping to make enough money to move out. That, of course became a horrible wrench in my already-damaged relationship with my dad, not that I was trying to make things better (he missed my graduation). Stripping opened up a whole other world for me. I was…. an innocent stripper. I didn’t have an addiction to feed, I was molested, I didn’t have issues other than my mom was going crazy and I wanted out. I met and listened to so many stories of so many men (and women). That job forced me to tolerate other people at least for the time they were in the club.

Something else odd happened to me. I call it “finding my sexy.” I mean I found out just how powerful being a woman can be. The reactions on the Christian side of my family were so strong that I again had to find out what they were so scared of. These two factors got me back into looking at old, let’s call them faiths, like Wicca, which hold a woman, let’s say holy.

The women on my mom’s side have always been a bit witchy. Our intuition is high, we are in tune with the environment. Many of us have had experiences with spirits. We heal with our hands, keep up on herbal remedies. My Great-grandmother, my granddaddy’s mom, was a Cherokee healer and a midwife. I think that passed down through us. On my grandmother’s side they were just seductive. A dangerous combination, but I have decided to own it. That is where I am now in my spiritual quest. I no longer strip, but the things I learned about feminine power while I was doing it are still very much a part of me.