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witchscauldronMy parents
My mother is...frustrating. I love her very much, but there are times I just want to scream. I can only handle spending time with her for a few hours at a go.
Growing up, she was the one you went to if you needed something done. Sometimes it was simply a function of her being the one at home. It's a bit lonely now, though...she doesn't really remember much of us growing up. She had 4 kids by 1986 and says it was just all a blur.
On one hand she can be wonderful. She's often very generous, and very warm, as a person, and she's easy to like on that basis.
She has a decent amount of common sense, which I figure is where I get it from. She's usually willing to listen to you, when you need to talk. But at the same time, she gets very caught up in her own self, and isn't capable of changing her perspective until whatever is going on is 'resolved'. Sometimes that takes years. She does work hard and do nice things for others, but she's also got a martyr's complex a mile wide. Mom will listen, and loves to talk - but she's a gossip also. When I still lived at home, she hated everything I did - not because she nescessarily hated what I was doing - but rather she worried about what other people would say about -her-, because of what I did.
There are days where she -never- -stops- -talking-. As a person who spends copious amounts of time in total silence, and is not a talker, this is just exhausting.
She equates having stuff with happiness. I'm not really interested in 'having stuff', for the sake of 'stuff'. Her common sense totally evades her on the subject of money: when we visit she'll spend money like water, then complain she's broke ALL the time otherwise. She doesn't run on any sort of logic, that I can find - everything is based on her shifting emotions, so you can't really rely on her for anything. Trying to get a straight answer out of my mother is like pulling hen's teeth from the ass of a cow. And while she has copious amounts of love for her children, she is a worrier, AND she's clingy. Worry I can sort of get. Clingy is a character trait I generally don't tolerate at all.
We will never see eye to eye on certain things.
Despite the things that drive me spare about her, I still love her very much. We may have very different personalities, but I take her as she is. I don't ask things from her, I expect nothing from her, and I am never surprised when she's late, or changes her mind, or decides she isn't going to do something anymore. I imagine she does much the same from me.
My father. My father is a whole other bucket of worms.
To say I have mixed emotions on the subject would be an understatement.
Dad was raised by a single mother, and his grandmother. I get the feeling, althought he never talks about it, that they were poor, and struggled a lot. Whatever mark that left on my father I couldn't say, except that his life seems to be motivated entirely by wealth. His sister went into politics and then married a wealthy Irishman. His brother, apparently the black sheep, went out West and became a Hell's Angel.
My father has worked in banks and other financial organizations my entire life. We spent my entire childhood moving around and around because he kept getting transfered. I liked playing in the bank branches with the stamps, and the little cheque-stamping machine and the paper shredders...but that's about all I remember about it. Life was an endless series of moving and new towns and schools and banks. At one point, when I was 9, he was working 3 jobs just to try to keep things together. I never saw him.
My parents divorced when I was 12. Our relationship just really deteriorated from that point onward, and I don't talk about it.
There are things I love, or find comforting, that came from him - mostly certain foods, things that for him came from his grandmother. My love of Fantasy and Science Fiction started in his library. My education in 'Star Trek' started early thanks to him. But I don't have a whole lot of happy childhood memories associated with him. Most of them are him yelling at me for doing something he thought was stupid, or not living up to his expectations, or simply him being angry for nothing to do with me. (He still took it out on me.) Or him missing things in my life, simply because he was working, or didn't want to make the time.
In the end, every time I try I can't pull up one single event where I remember him in a good way. It wish it were different.
As an adult I've tried having a relationship with him, but it's always been rough at best. I feel like he's always looking for some sort of toehold in my life, somewhere, where he can get in deeper and try to micromanage. My utter indifference to money or houses or having a day job baffles him. We're simply motivated by different things - I have as little interest in business and finance as he does in art and music. There were a few years where things were ok, but that didn't last.
I don't like my father. I love him, in my fashion, but in the end I don't really know how much it matters, anymore. I've come to realize he's not the kind of person who I can like. I know my father too well. I don't trust him - he's a manipulator, and a liar, and not above doing whatever he thinks he can get away with. He doesn't apologize for things - or when he does, it's well past the time when that has any meaning or context.
Every time our paths cross I end up pissed off - I don't see the need to keep reopening wounds and poking around in them. I don't know why I haven't cut him out of my life entirely yet.
Deities
My experience early on with Deity was "What? Yeah...maybe" - sort of vague and handwavy. Raised by an agnostic and an atheist, that's hardly surprising.
I didn't have any strong beliefs one way or the other about Deity until I'd been looking at Paganism for a couple years. Other than my one experience where I had my 'God is a Woman' epiphany, I didn't have any strong or obvious encounters with any sort of god/dess until much later on in my path. I tried on the soft polytheistic "Wiccan" approach for a while, but it really didn't work for me at all.
As it stands, after much more time, and poking all sorts of pagan nooks and crannies to get where I am, I'm a hard polytheist, and also a panentheist.
Panentheism is a little like pantheism, with the difference that I believe that Deity stands outside all things, as well as within all things. This may be because of my particular beliefs regarding the Source - it being the universal lifeforce, a sort of deity on its' own, and yet the various manifestations of Deity are also separate from it, built from the same energy. The Source portions off a bubble of energy and sends out - poof. That energy still came from the Source, like everything else - but it's not attached anymore. There's not a cord that tethers it - it moves out on its' own, and becomes what it will.
To me Gods are just individuals who maybe got more energy from the Source when being split off.
I struggled with soft polytheism for many years, since it was presented to me as the only option early on. It wasn't until I started reading and talking to reconstructionists than I found hard polytheism was an option. So I'm a hard polytheist. For me the Gods are individual and distinct, unique beings. Soft polytheism makes no sense to me; there are so many contradictions between the Gods, between cultures and pantheons, that I have a hard time seeing them as a singular unified being.
