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.

The Peculiar People

The Peculiar People...

I come From.

My father was born in a cottage hospital in 1942 Ruabon (Rhiwabon) not two miles from the farm I ended up growing up on. This Father was a mechanic in the R.A.F, who fixed Spitfires and saw action all over the world. Thomas O'Malley was also of Irish Catholic stock (though he "reformed") to marry Dylis Lewis (of feverish Methodist stock). He was not allowed to see his family, though there was an Aunt Lucy my father saw, and a cousin Patrica he saw on occasion.

He lived in a nice semi-detached house, next door to his also devoutly Methodist in-laws. The Lewis's were "well to do", strict and rather poe-faced people. My Great-Grandfather Lewis was a fireman, a hero, all brass buttons and saving men's life from terrible mining tragedies, notably Gresford Colliery fire (Gresford Disaster). Several Lewis's were killed and I wonder if we were related.

Dylis was for my father a figure of intense dislike. She was snobby, smothering, self-centered, petulant and weak. She was too close to her family and I know my father blamed her for his father's early death. Thomas had the vicious Irish temper, but he was also very funny, with a quick witted and course tongue when the mood struck him. After the war he worked his way up from shop keep to area manager of Co-op, at least according to my father.

My father grew very anti-religious (especially when he found jazz) but he also was very fond playing practical jokes and stunts, especially against teachers at his grammar school. Sometimes he got caught but mostly he didn't and he would tell me stories with relish.

On Smithy Lane I can remember Uncle Jason that when we were small we visited. I never heard his surname. Yet looking it he was likely a Lewis. He was a whistley old man with a couple of very annoying yappy (and nippy) tiny black poodles.

My father was an actor and he left school and joined a rep theatre company. He was amazing at voices and impersonations. That was his bread and butter when I knew him. It is odd but true to say where most people could not have told the impressions apart, I could recognise his voice, even as someone else when it came on the television, as sometimes it did.

I wonder sometimes at the characters he sometimes did, his booming baritone thumping out a sermon, or bursting into feverish song, being a reflection of the Lewis side of his life.

He was very "anti-welsh", in so much as he refused to allow me to gain a Welsh accent, and adopted the clip up the ear first, explain why later approach. Yet he met my "Mother" at the Welsh club in London where she was working as a bar-maid as a student. 

I remember nothing of being spoken to about my great-grand-mother, and I don't know her name.

I do know that I have many of the traits, good and bad from this muddled side of the family. My father, much to his own horror I imagine, is a terrible snob, and rather petulant and self-centered too. I could never figure out how you could love jazz and be so mind-meltingly racist. I certainly saw myself more Irish than Welsh as a child (which is silly as the O'Malley's had been Wales a couple of generation marrying other Welsh born, Irish Catholics long before my Granddad).

I always felt like an outsider, but maybe that was not about who I came from. It was only when I left that I felt my Welshness more keenly. With a sense of wonder and pride.

My "mother" is a Beynon. Her mother was a Jones (though her own mother was some sort of blue-blood who was disowned for marrying Albert Jones, a foundling found nearly naked wandering the mountain.)

Their own stories make my father's appear a series of Just William stories. In truth I have coal-dust, liquid copper, milk, blue blood, and magick in my veins. 

Journey's and Visions

Journey's and Visions

I have always had "dreams" and visions of this "other world". Up until recently I believed much of it was symbolic, especially of my own life. While some of my dreams are indeed symbolic and about this world it was brought to my attention that I have been visiting, and living in these other worlds all my life. I read a book by Kevin Hunter and to my extraordinary surprise he was describing places I knew.

About six or seven years ago I started writing a fictional story, except well; I would see it play out in my head and write it down as best as I could. There were many characters, lands, realms, magicks and so on. 

The story aside here is what was told to me by some of the great and good from this other place.

The world we see, and hear and touch, garden in, fight wars in and so on is one page of a big book. It happens to be roughly in the middle. Central Earth is a cross-roads. It is between all of the realms. There are several hundred races of beings that dwell within these places. They live and fight and have wars and romances. They travel easily between the realms and while what species you are born into has some bearing one where and how you travel which ruler you serve seems to be more important than your race, age or gender.

From what I have seen there are 15 realms. Seven ruled by the Queen and Seven by the King and Earth which is neutral. When they war earth becomes a haven for each side. Seven being  traditional faery number.

In their view the whole of this was created by the dragons, ancient to even these timeless folks. A fire dragon and a water dragon fell in love and in their passion they collided, rose and fell into each other. Their love was so great it created a world. Our world. A mix of both.

That is why when life did come to this place the first great creature that rose were of their parents likeness. To them earth is a sacred place. One they visit and sometimes live in. 

Yet they experience time very differently than us. They can also be in multiple worlds at once. Like a browser with tabs. One is no more real to them than another. 

Now when hominids (of all kinds) began to appear they delighted them. It was beautiful to see their own world being reflected in this one. When humans evolved proper they came to greet them, quite respectfully. Some were worshiped as Gods or Goddesses. Some were seen as demons, dark or evil. And so it went on. Then we lost some of our fear of them and our respect. At some point things got bloody and messy.

The Queens subjects began to try and create a bond, taking children and showing them their ways. To teach them and help us all. Some even married and had children with humans. Sometimes this ended well. They became shamans, wise-women, saints or great rulers. Sometimes badly with people burn or killed for being different. The King however did not share the same hope for us. He in fact despises people. It was never clear to me why, exactly. Yet his worse fear and prophecies about us have come to pass. The more of us that came the worse it was for the old highways and by-ways of the faery folk. Then in terms of stupid stuff people do, we created a weapon. One that has (and continues to have) huge impacts not only in our world, but theirs too. A nuclear weapon when it explodes does not only do horrific damage to the world we live in, from what I have been shown it rips a giant gaping hole through many pages of the book. Sometimes out world leaks into their realms. Sometimes theirs into ours and into each other.

The faery kept trying to patch and fix these holes. This and out habit or destroying things that a beautiful and sacred has not endeared us to them much at all. Yet those who are ruled by the Queen try to teach and help us heal the world. Those ruled by the King really don't like us at all. Most individual fae go on a person by person basis. 

I don't know if any of this is fact. Faery are trixie by nature, it is a good story though.

I do know that people with that faery can recognize each other almost instantly. They have sparkly blue lights that dance around them. They might do magick, they might not. 

They all dream in vivid colours and this feeling. A longing for a person or place. They have manners and morals not taught by human parents. They dream of grasslands that seem endless under the huge sky. Or rivers dark and smooth and deep, with green mossy banks through huge forests. They dream of waterfalls and shining seas, of castles that grow out of the rock. They dream of dancing and music. They dream of regal mountains and just sometimes, just sometimes they dream of dragons.

  

  

Keening

Keening

Where do you go from that? My mind became numb and only my body and spirit kept me alive. It was raw and animal. It was primal and full of rage. Yet I knew, I had to keep living.
Of all the things her death taught me, that I MUST live was the greatest blessing. There were other lessons. That I can endure. That I have to do it my way. I could not grieve in some quiet, modest English way. I was a Banshee. I cried almost constantly. Until I was bloated and swollen and almost unable to see. I would sob so violently I would throw up. Yet I kept the house, went shopping, look after my daughter. If I tried to keep it in I simply couldn't carry on. I had to bleed it out of every pour.
I have had physical pain, sexual pain, spirit pain but this, this was soul pain and was like no other.
While I looked like a crazy person I was healing. Washing my open heart wound with salty tears and slowly, slowly it began to heal. Losing a child is like losing a leg. You have to re-learn everything.
For a while the people around me (lets not call them friends) were supportive is uncomfortable. My keening grew quieter. I was able not to cry, but strange things would set me off. In time those people grew impatient with me. Some after a month, some three or four. Some at six. Coming on a year I could almost pass for normal but in my grief I had missed what was going on around me past my immediate need to eat, feed and love my Witchling.
For me to discover I was about to become homeless again because our "friend" was kicking us out, shocked me back to myself.
We lost much again. I had surgery the day after we were moved into the to awful temporary accommodation and I was physically very ill. It became a huge abscess and then I almost died.
I woke to myself again to find my husband was very ill. He was in fact crazy. It was a dark time. I was still potty training Witchling (I did try before but I couldn't keep myself together enough).
I lost my daughter and to kick me in the soul the love of my life was unrecognisable. As warmand kind as he was he was now cold and hard. As smart and generous he was, now cruel and full of rage.
I could barely move my arm and had the district nurse coming a couple of times a day to re-dress and see how I was healing. I did yoga for half and hour twice a day and I slowly regained the use of my right arm.
It felt like forever but in the end we got moved to more perminat housing.
Ken slowly returned and I fell deeply in love with him all over again. I think I fell harder this time than the first.
I had learned I could endure. I would survive almost anything. I could heal from almost anything too.
I began to keep my keening to myself for fear of upseting Witchling or K. That was a mistake, but one made out of love.
I began to put myself last. It would be years before I began to myself first again.
In the mean time, I cried in the bath. I sobbed to loud music when alone.
I know why the Banshee keens. It is the grief and pain. If she is the fae speaking then the land it's self is in pain. Her soul is torn and she can not contain the howling pain.
She is washing her clothes in tears and water, for they are one. I had seen women craddling there dead children on the news before, but now I knew. That open-mouthed-chin-tilted-up wail. You would turn back time, rip out your teeth and hair. walk through fire for those pains are as nothing. I think if we keened more we might all be healthier and more whole.

Death and the Maiden

Death and the Maiden

 I moved six times while I was pregnant with our first child. We lost the pub and travelled around trying to make a home for ourselves. K lost his carer he had spent seven years working towards. He was devastated. That was the first time the Demon D appeared in our lives. Even our wedding and child only lifted him for a little while. People had a lot of advice and very little actual help.

I needed him to “snap out of it” and “get a grip”. Rather than say anything to him, it was me they dumped all their “advice” on. Including whether or not to keep my baby. A lot of people felt they had the right to tell me I should get rid of “it”.

Yet she was my calm, my anchor, in a sea of stress.

We finally got somewhere to live and though it was small, it was a start.

I drew faeries all over the walls of the tiny room that barely fit the crib into it.(She still has wee-folk on her walls, but now they are Feegles).We never bought a baby monitor, the house was too small to need to. K got a crap job and was working split shifts so was barely home. I was alone. Just me, the dog, and when she came, my daughter. She was strange and wonderful. Beautiful, but not girly. With eyes that shifted in colour everyday. From navy, a strange metallic silver, to green and hazel. She was a miracle, all be it one that for four months didn't sleep. As soon as she began to sleep I began to do readings, mostly tarot. Even though the street we lived on was call Heroine Street by the locals, the dog and the magick kept us safe.

Not from the in-laws but that is a whole different story!

The cupboards would bang about from time to time and K was still sceptical of faeries at the time. They clearly believed in him however and until very recently they would move and torment him alone.

I wish we had never moved from there now, at least not were we went but hindsight is bitch sometimes. Once I got some sleep being a Mum was the thing I was amazing at and I loved it. We figured when Witchling was 8 months that if we started trying now, I'd probably be pregnant by Christmas. Two weeks later, I was pregnant, we had to move and worse, we could not take the dog with us. We were all devastated.

That should have been a sign. Yet we moved into a big beautiful house in a lovely area.

I did a lot of magick there. The garden was lovely. I began teaching two students. One baby at the table practising her letters (before she was 2), one on my hip or tit. Kara was a beautiful baby, not that Witchling wasn't. They were just as different as twilight and dawn. Witchling was cool and purple, mysterious and intelligent with wise old eyes. Kara was like summer, gold and oranges and pinks. I almost called her Summer. Ka, meaning soul, and Ra the Egyptian sun God, was Ken's choice. For a while things were better, though Ken was hardly well. I was happy.

Then one night I went to bed and the day I woke to would shake my life forever.

I was helping Witchling brush her teeth, while brushing my own, when K started screaming.

I ran downstairs and grabbed the phone from the hall. I dialled 999 and saw K move Kara's small body. She was stiff and blue.

I started to scream then. I could see she was gone. K kept breathing into her. The paramedics arrived. I don't remember when they told me she was gone, but in the back of the ambulance they gave me her tiny cold body, with her eyes half shut and the air that was breathed in making small bubbles from her lips.

The police went through our home and an armed officer guarded her body while we were there. I don't remember much of the day, except the last time I saw her. So cold and still.

I told them that I wanted her organs to be donated but they could only use her heart valves.

She was seven and a half months old, and she died on the full moon before Winter solstice the 9^th of December. I was an organised mess. They had to get a special child pathologist from Birmingham and it took weeks but we were finally allowed to bury her.

I planned a large Christmas meal for Witchling's sake. I did all I could to organise, and clean. Anything and everything, yet I burned salt marks down my face.

My sister and “Mother” turned up for dinner but my sister helped herself to the big desert that was to be the big fish of the meal. We got into a fight. I remember looking at the frying pan and thinking I was going to hit here with it. I went out to get some air.

My “Mother” comes outside and spends the whole time making excuses for my sister. That she is having “a tough time”. I had buried my daughter less than a week before.

Something in me snapped. My need for her approval or love, that unconditional thing children have for their mother was broken that day.