The Wheel Turns

The Wheel of the Year is turning again!

I’m happy that the days will start getting longer again, but I am struggling with the season changing for my mom, as well as for me as a daughter.

You see my mom was originally put on hospice care the weekend before Thanksgiving 2018. In June of this year (2022), when Medicare’s rules changed, they took her off hospice and placed her on palliative care. Again, the weekend before Thanksgiving this year, they put her back on hospice care.

I feel like I have whiplash!

Mom seems to be slowly and steadily getting closer to her end here on this earthly plane, but with that ending will be new beginnings. No longer will Mom be the matron of our family. That torch will be passed to me.

What kind of impact will I make on our family? My mom’s Lutheran faith dominated her life, and then mine, for the first 17 years of my life. However, that was never truly my faith.

I found my way to my pantheistic eclectic pagan faith gradually over all the years of my young life. My father was a religious history buff, so I was exposed to his writings on the subject of comparative religions at a very young age.

“What will my traditions be going forward?” I find myself asking today on the Winter Solstice.

What have I done to create traditions for us? Not much, I must admit. My hubby grew up without any religion at all in his house. He didn’t even find out his family was Catholic until his mom let us know at our rehearsal dinner 24 years ago. As a consequence, my hubby doesn’t think any organized religion has a place in our house, so our son hasn’t grown up with anything either.

When I told our son that I’m a witch, the first thing he said was that I couldn’t be a witch because I’m not evil. Then, when I tried to explain the concepts of modern neo-paganism to him, he couldn’t understand magic that wasn’t “real,” like on his cartoons.

I felt like a failure as a mom.

So, what have I done about it? Nothing. Not a damned thing. What do I want to do about it? Start pulling together simple rituals our little family of 3 can do together, and then actually do them.

Problem #1: My own ADHD and serious brain fog from all my other health problems.

Ive got a huge library in the basement of Wiccan, Pagan, Ceremonial Magic, etc books and magazines I could pull from for reference, plus the inter-webs to search. However, I can’t concentrate long enough to do the research and pull things together, let alone…

Problem #2: Having the energy to do the basement stairs to get to my magical library, let alone…

Problem #3: Having the energy to actually pull the needed components together, and then…

Problem #4: Having the gumption to do the actual ritual work!

For someone with chronic illness, it’s more draining to do all that then what I’d personally get out of the ritual working, on a physical level.

However that leads me back to the issue that my son laughs when I tell him I’m a witch, and has no clue what kind of spiritual connections I have to the world and people around me. I have left him with no framework for any of the traditions we are trying to pass down to him and that makes me sad. Very sad.

Today I went to see my mom at her facility. I sang a bunch of holiday songs and carols to her and her roommate. This apparently took Mom back to Christmas Carol singing at her next door neighbor’s house on Mark Twain Street in Detroit in the late 1940s. The whole Carey family was musical and played instruments. My mom and her whole family, being too poor to afford instruments or lessons, had the one instrument everyone has: their voices.

And their voices were all beautiful!

So, when I tried to bring her out of the reverie she appeared to be in, I was told that she guessed we needed to leave the Carey’s house and go back next door to our own house.

She was back in that time, at that place, and she had taken me and my singing for her along with her, into her memories. I must admit, I was a bit envious that I couldn’t see us together in her mind, back at the Carey’s house for Christmas Carol singing.

But, I was so honored she took me along.

And the Wheel turns. Past, present, future. Turning, turning, turning…