On the Magic of Self Care

So, roles within our family are always changing and evolving. Motherhood has done something awesome to my sister in that she now can think calmly and rationally no matter how pissed off she is at someone, a skill I lack in the utmost of capacity. So now our conversations about estranged family that is making all the badness with my uncle in ICU go worse go something like this:

Me: (screams a bunch of psycho rabid dog stuff about our estranged family)
She: (calmly agrees with what I said but rightly points out x, y and z as to why we need to get along with them)
Me: (begrudging agreement because she is now the saner sister)
She: Now go grind some meat* and feed Jow dinner. Also, jinx family member Z.
Me: . . .really?
She: Yeah I'm co-signing. Go make a doll and call him Fredo and do what you need to do.

When everything is falling apart hardcore, it's the little things that are pleasing. Just planning all the jinx-y inconveniences I would do to Fredo (syph! get caught in all his lies! Never drive a nice car!) made me feel better, better enough that if Fredo has any bad low level luck, well, maybe it's my fault in a low level Malocchia sort of way but not in a super intentional sort of way.

Self care, real self care (not just in the form of a pizza or whatever other comfort food you can jam down your throat) during a time of crisis is hard to come by, especially when you come from a family of do'ers who like to burn themselves out. But it's important, even vital to the process.

When contemplating self care, I also contemplate how maybe this time/energy should be put into magic. But the more I thought about it, past trying to do my japa practice, send reiki and make some heart felt petitions/novenas to Our Lady of Guadalupe, it just hasn't felt right. I'm a mess, I'm not thinking clearly and the world as I know it may be changing in drastic, permanent and sad ways. Sometimes, past prayer. . .in my opinion, magic just isn't the answer. A shocking view among us here on our corner of the blogosphere, I know. If I were a "proper" magic user (whatever that is right?), I wouldn't be daunted! Nay! I would gather my magical tools and beat god/dess/es in a show of SHEER FORCE OF WILL! I will win this, universe!

Except . . .I can barely manage to shower (fibro during times like this? Also not awesome), how exactly am I going to show the universe who's the bitch in this relationship? And here's another phrase that is supremely unpopular among magic users (including Jow on most days), I can't.

Yep. That's right.

I can't.

I mean for me, firstly, honestly, because I don't believe I can best the universe in a pissing match for it is much bigger than me but *mostly* because I don't have the will. And magic is all about will. Dorking out, in White Wolf roleplaying games, Willpower plays a role in your character sheet. If you're playing Vampire**, willpower is so important that if you lose all your willpower, you will immediately go into a vampire frenzy and will be unable to see logic or reason and kill everything in your path. And in WW's Mage, willpower can affect your ability to cast a spell. At the risk of sounding like someone who believes that D&D is truefax, I think it's true in real life spell casting.

In WW, you can regain your willpower points which helps you be more effective through various methods. I will share here some of mine:

- Sleep. Sleep works like whoa. Sleep makes you a lot more sane, calm and rational.

- Cooking. Even if it's baking bread in the bread machine, making something from scratch start to finish gives me a sense of accomplishment. I find also making a full meal with fresh ingredients and eating healthy foods help too.

- Bitching. Not to the point where it becomes word vomit but to the point where you can release it as best as possible.

- Exercise. It gives you a place to put your aggression.

- Mind Rotting TV. I always feel better after an episode of Intervention or 16 and Pregnant. My problems seem downright manageable afterward.

- Focus on things you can control. I personally focused on teeth whitening and self tanning as well as my spring looks.


Sometimes I feel like I could be doing something super awesome right now with my time but the truth is, it's hard enough to get through the day. And that's okay. Regaining willpower through self care is a necessary and dare I say sacred act and right now that trumps just about everything but what I am using to deal with my fam's medical crisis. It would be nice to be having a grand time of it right now, it's spring, sort of, I have ideas and plans for things I'd like to do and wouldn't it be fun to be dressed nice and go someplace awesome and do something spontaneous? It sure would be! But it's not where I am. And owning where you are makes it possible for you to get to the next place, which will hopefully be better. Where ever that is.


* When I went through my divorce, using my meat grinder attachment on my MixMaster was one of the few things that kept me remotely sane. It was weirdly therapeutic, I don't know, I guess the Sweeney Todd aspect of it or whatever. If you have a MixMaster but no meat grinding attachment, buy one right now. I mean it. It will change your life.

** I want that 20th Anniversary Ed of Vampire: the Masquerade so bad I can taste it and I don't care who knows!

Pizza and Dead People

But first, real life. My uncle is in the hospital in ICU right now. This has been difficult for my family for a lot of reasons. a) If he passed, that would leave my uncle fatherless at 19. No one I knew who is part of the "dead dad" club who lost their father around that age came out unscathed. My cousin . . . is troubled would be the kindest way to put it and he has a lot of things working against him. He *just* started to pull his shit together a month ago. If my uncle passed, it would be a one way trip down the spiral, hard. We all can see it. (b) For Italians, we're a small family. We're still rocked from losing half of M.'s family two years ago unexpectedly. We only have (1) baby on that side. It would just . . .make us that much more inconsolable. There's only like 14 of us now total.

When we first got the news that he was in ICU, we had no information. Generally I take point in these kinds of situations, but my sister wanted to go and she's an adult now so I wanted to give her the chance. I wanted me to have the chance to stay behind and tend to the home fires and take care of her kid. I could be patient and calm and wait.

Wrong.

Apparently family roles exist for a reason. If it was a movie, it would almost be comical, me at home with her child screaming and inconsolable, me looking stricken and gasping in panicky breaths, pacing and pacing, at a loss with nothing to do but sit on my hands and try futilely to get the baby to calm down. She at the hospital, stricken and overcome by the sight of my vibrant uncle, hooked up to so many tubes and machines that she didn't know how she would handle it and didn't know what to do with my mother or the situation. Both of us whispering to each other through text we chose wrong, this isn't what we're good at, not at all.

Since then, we've gotten a routine. Every other day either she goes with my mother to the hospital two hours away and I stay home with her kid or vice versa. I grill the nurses, nag my mother. She does my uncles laundry and replaces household items.

We're getting there. He's getting better, little by little. We're not out of the woods yet but the outcome looks promising at least.

My sister and my mother are troopers. I'm not strong like they are, I've been sleeping til noon, exhausted. My sister cares for her kid, my mom goes to work. But I hope that when I take a little time to breathe and recharge, I can help them do the same, have a clear head to help find answers, make them take breaks, etc. The days are long, going til midnight every other day.

I haven't been able to light a novena candle yet, but I think about it a lot, Our Lady of Guadalupe sitting serenely on my altar and I think about Her prayer that I don't know by heart but know the gist of and lighting the candle in my head and hope that it counts, almost as much. My japa practice has become erratic, but I think about that a lot too and say a few mantras when I can remember. I think about the rosary in one of my uncle's mittens, prayed on by so many of my ex-aunt's family members. I try to pray before bed, try to go to my internal meditation space and clean that out since I haven't had the time to in my actual home. I think about asking to go to Umberto's tonight, my father's favorite pizza place out in NY. So much so that when he passed, a cousin ribboned a box beautiful and displayed it at his wake. We go there, whenever we go to the cemetery, whenever we go to a wake, sometimes when we're leaving the country out of JFK, sometimes just when we're visiting my uncle and we can be happy as a family. But mostly I think about pizza and dead people and how it's a part of our pilgrimage to visit our beloved dead, just like the shitty diner in south Jersey we go to when we visit my dad's grave where we always order pancakes and burgers.

My mom is my family's keeper of the dead, I guess that's where I get it from but she's hardcore. She specializes in what I call "drive by cemetery visits". She's got a wreath in her hand, twine, scissors, whatever she finds around the cemetery to help hold up wreaths, flowers, palms, she's the MacGyver of the Cemetery. She knows where everyone's buried and has inscrutable markers in her brain that helps her find whoever. She does drive bys because she'll decide on a day's notice that that is what she's doing and then gets put out when I can't decide on a whim (and really, who decides to drive two hours to either cemetery on a whim? Fran [our last name], that's who.) to go visit all of our beloved dead. Sometimes I think I'm too soft and squishy because I get all emotional and shit about this kind of stuff, but when it comes down to doing, I can get through it all nice and neat like my mom does, once I'm there. It's just getting there. But I'm learning, or at least trying to because some day this will be my job. We have the same organized brain though and the same black humor. We talk about where everyone's buried like normal people talk about files. I explained my eventual plan to get everyone in one general area in a mausoleum all nice and neat and she laughs ("We'll just move Dad and put him like across the street from Grandma and Grandpa and then everyone will be organized, right Ma? Keep everyone close and nice and tidy!"). So I go with her and she tells me family secrets off handedly (it's the only way to get them out of her) and I try to figure out the bunny trail of our beloved dead. I'm learning. Slowly. And then we get a slice of sicilian and try the Arancini di Riso and head home, back to central New Jersey, back and forth between life and the dead as sure as an abacus.

How May I Service You Today?

Today Thorn Coyle blogs about Service is Power which is something very near and dear to my heart. I've considered myself a v. service oriented person and all wink wink Secretary references aside, it can be challenging to explain how and why this is part of my spirituality.

I think service can be a difficult concept to our community because there are obvious services that many of us do not do. Helping at a soup kitchen or a domestic violence helpline, volunteering in Haiti, etc. If you do those things, you are truly an angel. But many of us get too bogged down in our daily lives and it can be challenging to get involved in a larger more global cause. To that I say two things:

1. Think globally, act locally.

2. What do you give a fuck about?

The first one is to indicate that you need to think about all the things you hopefully do for your more immediate family, friends and community. Maybe you don't volunteer at a shelter, but unfortunately, most of us have known friends who got themselves into a situation they can't get out of. And sometimes, for some of us, there is a light of some kind that we happen to be in the right place at the right time and the other person is in the right mindframe so that when you say, Honey, this has got to stop. Right now. The other person replies, You're right. And it's going to, right now. Maybe you don't volunteer at a soup kitchen but you take your unemployed friend out for dinner. Or maybe you volunteer your time and energy into your local pagan community and you make the feast or offer to do registeration for a larger pagan event. Think carefully about all the small kindnesses you do in a day - when you listen to a friend cry, when you help a sibling move, when you watch a cousin's baby for an hour, all of those services big and small that you do. And ask yourself, could I do more? Because . . .you probably could. Make your mom dinner one night, buy your friend her coffee for no reason, watch a coven mate's kid for two hours so she can sleep, all of those things that we do out of love and out of kindess are some of the best human experiences there are. And if you grit your teeth and do something nice anyway when you don't feel like it? The Jewish faith calls that a mitzvah and it counts even more. I believe that, I really do.

The second part is what my first year women's studies class professor very exasperatedly said to us when she had enough of us that day. And I find it guides my life. What do you give a fuck about? What is more important to you than anything? What do you believe in more than anything? What is your driving force? What gets you out of bed in the morning? It forces you to cut through the bullshit and focus on what is really important. You can't save all the starving orphan nuclear whales in Africa. So what is more important to you than anything? For me it was Hurricane Katrina. So important that I signed up for the Red Cross and was willing to go, even though I was shit scared and didn't know what to expect. I went to my training, I got all my paperwork done and I was ready to do it. I talked a lot to my exbf who was home from Iraq briefly and I felt stupid about being scared, I wasn't even going to leave the country. But he said there's always someone who got there before you, who managed to make an IV out of duct tape and a ziplock bag. That's okay. You'll be there when you go. I didn't get called, but I did fund raise for Katerina. And if abortion became illegal, there are a lot of things I'd be willing to do there. Where will you lay yourself on the line?

Finally, as Pagans and magic users, I think service can be sort of . . .pushed aside. It's not cool, it's not cynical, it's not furthering whatever your Master Plan for World Domination (tm) is, it's not something you can really sneer while doing. We're all adrift anyway, man. Service forces us to look beyond ourselves. Service forces us to wear our hearts on our sleeves. Service forces us to be sincere. And frankly, as a whole, these are things we are not good at. And we need to be. Service isn't v. glamorous, it's generally doing shit work that no one wants to do, but man, it recharges me way more than anything else, way more than ten episodes of Degrassi, way more than Drawing Down, way more than High Priestessing, way more than meditation. I would really honestly and truly rather be washing dishes in the back than leading a rite. Service really and truly is where my heart is, I feel like I am as close as I possibly can be to touching the gods when I am serving others. Honestly, I think at the end of the day, service is what binds kitchen witches together because it tends to be something we all do, no matter if we're a witch in the woods or a soccer mom with 2.5 children and a white picket fence. What's more beautiful than that to bind us all together?