The Wendy House.

The Wendy House.


"John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together" Peter Pan

A long time ago, I had two kids under the age of two and a husband who worked shifts. My "family" lived miles away (a blessing, because they are horrible people) and none of my friends had kids.
I was happy. I am not saying life was perfect. It was however pretty good.
The bane of my existence at the time?
My in-laws. Actually my mother-in-law.
Twice a week both would come round and she in particular would want to be waited on, make horrible comments and generally make me feel shitty, uncomfortable and miserable.
Long after Kara died they kept coming (but now only once a week).
This woman would pinch, poke and even smack my child and if I told her NO, or tried to get her to stop she would turn her face to the wall and ignore me. In my own home.
I had never had to deal with someone as difficult before or since.
I took to hiding in a Wendy house with little E. We would be "quiet" as mice.
A grown woman, a mother, a witch, a force of nature, crawling into my daughters play house so I didn't have to deal with that. I would just not answer the door and hope they would leave.
My husband for a while (he was sick and had some deep issues of his own with her) would say things like

"She's always been that way."
"She's just deaf."
"It can't be that bad."
"She won't listen to me either."

Looking back there were whole worlds of things I could have done about it.
Not least of which was not waiting on people hand and foot.
Yet that pressure, that desire, and quite frankly fear was pretty awful. I out grew the Wendy House and eventually hubby had to deal with her too. From poison pen birthday cards, to the constant scrawled letters of nastiness her toxicity became something he had to overcome.
Which he bravely did.
So much of her life and his is still a mystery. Where was she when he was rushed to hospital? Or when his brother broke his leg? Where was she? She never did anything in the home (from cooking to ironing Pop's did it all even after working at the pit all night).
Something was very wrong and as yet we don't know what, or why.
It is peculiar the things that floor us.
"Demons", dark magicks, the restless dead and I would not have batted an eyelid. That knock on the door at 10 am every Sunday gives me a cold shudder to think of even now! Her face would be somewhere between Sam the Eagle (From the Muppet show) to Bishop chess piece, with bright red lipstick.
I could have gotten up at 6 am to start cleaning (and some days I did) and there would always be a comment.
"She could have done *******, sniff."
I was mortified.

Taking the time to forgive myself as a young mum, with no support network, and a husband struggling to deal with abusive mother, I could almost laugh; except it is so sad.
The world is so big and loud sometimes, maybe we all need a Wendy House to hide in. 

Faery Plants

Faery Plants

"The wee-folk, the fey-folk trouping in their colour..."

There are lots of reasons why a plant or tree might be a faery tree. Their multi-dimensional reality where mountains, waterfalls, and trees are doorways into the web of worlds they live in and travel through means what looks like an old tree here might be something else, or several something else's where ever they are.

In general (very general, many differing faery have very differing preferred habitat); fae love wildness, other small animals, butterflies and birds and plants that attract those are also likely to attract fae.

I never quite got a clear idea why and have been given many reasons over the years (none of which or all of which might be true). 

They like to eat the same foods as some of these creatures. They like to eat some of these creatures. They like to hide in the flurry of golden dust and wings. They like to shapeshift into some of these animals. It's pretty.

There do seem to be plants that attract them, and plants (mostly trees) that they use as doorways.

Oak Trees

Elder trees (especially in flower)

Hawthorns 

Blackthorns

Blackberry brairs

Gorse

Growing up plants like bluebells ( Hyacinthoides non-scrita, not Harebells) were known as faery (fairybells) and were full of faery spells and magick. Poisonous (tends to be a faery theme) and spectacular both close up (many a faery illustration show them wearing them as tiny hats) and as a whole mass of sweetly scented blue carpet in May, it is easy to see why these flowers have such a long history as a faery flower. Picking them in the U.K. is now illegal, which is no doubt faery approved as they don't like their plants disturbed. Noticeable blue and green together was seen as a faery colour before St Patrick adopted the blue.

Foxgloves were also known as a faery flower (it helps they tend to grown in the same places as bluebells, ferns and other faery plants. In our house the purple ones were considered the "proper" faery flowers with random white one having had their magick drawn from them. I have no knowledge if this is the cases but it was certainly the folklore at the farm.

Fearns (Bracken)
Bracken (as I have always known it) is an interesting plant. It is lush and green in gentle but tough leaves that animals don't like to eat, that ripple in spirals, that transforms into this strange golden, brown plant, often on mass, when the weather changes. It gives shelter to many small creatures and has huge amounts of lore. It is one of the few faery plants you could pick that didn't kill or give you bad luck.   

Don't disturb faery flowers if you can help it. This is not some quaint superstition. Having had to help a friend deal with a distinctly unhappy bunch of faeries after some hapless human peed against their door tree (an huge old oak), they are very creative when it comes to vengeance and "stupid humans".

A Troubled Child

A Troubled Child

After the sexual abuse came out I had a social worker come out and visit me twice. It had a lasting impression on me. It gave me some quite negative ideas about myself and unfortunately social workers too.

I can only record my own experience rather than those heroic souls who see the fragile beauty in all children.

She was short (though tall to me) with a sharp long black bob hair cut and small mouth which was emphasized by her bright red lipstick and severe black eyebrows. I was sat crosslegged on the swirling coloured carpets (unusually) watching television when she entered the room. She didn't speak to me she just stood there and glared at me.

I felt this glare keenly, deep to my bones. She looked at me and she saw there was something very, very "wrong" with me. That glare was like ice, like a piece of steel in my me. Much of how I have developed over the years, much of my adult fears in truth come back to that moment. That women who name I never knew the taste of looking at me like I was something to scrape off her high heeled patent shoes.

I knew that something bad had happened to me before that. I had known that. I had known something not right and icky had come to pass but until then it had been something done to me. From then on, it was something I had caused or courted. It was something wrong, broken, wicked in me. Barely 8 years old and I wanted to die. I tried a few times, sitting with my legs hanging from my bed room window feeling like I wanted to erase myself from the world. When I found I couldn't do it, I felt even worse about myself. I was too much of a failure to even die. I wanted to jump into oblivion.

My mother made light of this deep self loathing and suicidal feeling by calling me a "drama queen" who needed to just be "ignored".

After I found I couldn't erase myself I started on my quest to "fix" myself. To be "unbroken". To be right instead of wrong.

Meditation was certainly part of that and learning how to "not be" and essentially not exist for a limited time was beneficial in more ways than one.

You can imagine my delight in having to deal with not one, but two such women in my home this week. I would like to say I dealt with it gracefully but I swung between Mother Wolf's fury, uptight and insincere politeness and one one or two occasions soul racking fear I was terrible and didn't deserve my own wonderful life, family and daughter.

It has been two days and I woke up still in "it".

So I had to pick at the scab of it. Find the barb still in their deep from one look, one woman gave me nearly thirty years ago. Realise that, it her problem, you view of me that was wrong. That it was her, bad day, her need of new glasses, or inability to see me that was her problem, not mine. That how she looked at me was far, far about her than it was about me.

I do not know if that thorn is completely removed, I just know it doesn't hurt as deeply. That I feel more calm and relaxed than I have in about a week.

It's a full moon tonight, E and I have been talking about all this and she suggested I draw of this woman and burn the picture. My daughter is so wise.

I feel I could sleep in a way I haven't for a while, the restful kind of dreamlessness. 

The Art of Constant Cleansing is what I call this process. Where you find what is really hurting and draw it out, look at it. Washing, cleanse it and let it go. Target your daily practice to help heal that wound.