CW: References to, and vague descriptions of physical and emotional abuse

Note: I wrote this about two weeks before I published it. Talking about "familial estrangement" is hard, but only if you've lived through it. It does seem to be very common right now, especially with the concentration on toxic positivity/ "Brightness and Light" BS that permeates part of the Pagan-o-sphere. I didn't want to get into that, but still wanted to talk about what it might be to walk away from, to estrange yourself from, birth family.

Witchcraft is many things. It’s a way of looking at the world; it’s a way of interacting with the world, and with other people; it’s a support group; a moral framework; and for some of us, it’s a way to find family.

Family is a loaded concept for so many people. Even if you were raised in a healthy, functioning family, there are things that carry over in negative ways. Family often means something toxic, something painful, traumatic, even deadly. For many Witches, we went searching for something outside of our family of origin that would accept us for ourselves, in a way that our family didn’t.

For myself, I was raised Christian. Most US-Americans are, or at least, we’re “cultural Christians”, because that religion (Protestant and Catholic) permeate our society. Until I was about 12, my family attended what I would call a “mainline evangelical” church. Then my step-grandfather introduced my bio-mother to the IFB church (independent fundamentalist Baptist denomination). The IFB used to be the extreme-right-wing of the Baptist churches. It’s right there with Pentecostals and “no pants on women”. It’s pretty centrist for the GOP-Christian-Nationalist wing now, but in the 1990’s it was super extreme.

Because of that extremism, (and more) I am estranged from my mother, and both my siblings. My mother used religion as a reason to beat and abuse us, to lie to us, to control every aspect of our lives, and to gaslight us. She was very good at presenting one face to my Dad, and everyone else, and another face to me. She, like many people who show signs of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, was addicted to attention, power, and prestige. Anything that made her feel like she wasn’t the centre of the world had to be diminished. Any time she didn’t know something, or was surprised by information could lead to a beating for being “rebellious” or being punched, slapped, or hit with random objects laying nearby for being “a smart ass” or "being disrespectful".

She always favoured my sister (who looks like her) and my brother (the only boy, and the youngest). She would introduce us as “The pretty one [pointing at my sister] and the smart one [pointing at me].” She made sure I knew that my siblings were more important, more precious, and more loved than I ever would be.

When you are a child who is unloved by one of your caretakers, the love your other parent gives you is never enough to erase that knowledge. At the core of all of us, we want to be loved for who we are, by our parents and family members—that’s all, just love us where we are, for who we are. I didn’t have that from my mother, and from my maternal family. It was pretty easy to see that if I didn’t fit into the right box, if I had the audacity to think for myself, and to question anything at all, then I was unlovable and therefore I was unloved.

The last time my mother hit me I was 25 years old. She punched me in the mouth while she was driving on the freeway. She punched me in the mouth for telling her the truth, and screamed, “Don’t you dare lie to me!” I picked my eyeglasses up off the floor and put them in my purse, I thought she’d hit me again. “I’m not lying. You just don’t believe me. You believe [Brother], but how would he know anything like that?”

She had accused me of having an affair while I was separated from my now-ex. I wasn’t. When I said as much, she finally backed down.

She threatened me several years later; she told me that she was going to discipline my son for being a little kid, and being overtired, and just generally cranky. If I didn’t like it, she would “beat” me, too. Now of course I’m not going to beat my kid for any reason—let alone being overly tired and cranky! It’s naptime, not harm-your-kid time! At that point I had crawled back to myself, from an abusive relationship where my so-called partner had reduced my self-worth to nothing. But I looked at her and told her “If you so much as touch a hair on his head, I will kill you.”

I had never before that let her have anything to do with raising my kids, other than "nope, can't have that" type questions. I was pretty shocked that she would suggest beating my kid with a belt for being a cranky 5 year old. I was also instantly angry, and for probably the first time in her life, she knew that she had lost.

I knew that I couldn’t let another generation suffer from abuse in the name of Jesus. I’d left religion at that point anyway, but that was the moment I knew I was leaving my mother, too. I’d hoped that she would love me and my children, that once she met them, she’d fall in love with them the way she loved my nephews. When she turned her disdain to my sons and yet wanted to love-bomb my daughter, I knew that she was never going to be the person I hoped she could be. She was never going to be a mother, or a grandmother, worthy of us, and I’d drive myself utterly crazy trying to pretend otherwise.

So many Witches have been in that same place. We go into therapy seeking some mental health care, to manage our depression, to learn coping skills for our OCD, to get CBT or DBT. We start working through the co-dependency that was ingrained in us from infanthood, and we learn who we are without our parent, without our religion, without our abuser.

It was then that I realized that I didn’t have to try to make my family understand me. That I was probably going to be misunderstood on purpose for the rest of my life. I learned that being the black sheep wasn’t so bad. I learned that family meant more than blood relations. It meant being there, without expecting quid pro quo. It meant accepting people for who they are, not the person I want them to mould themselves into.

It meant that I could be myself, and not have to mould myself into someone “presentable”… because family loves you for you.

I chose my sanity over a relationship with my mother.

I chose love over a relationship with my child-hood religion.

I chose kindness over a relationship with the bigotry and racism that flows through the town I graduated in.

I chose to give up an entire side of my family in order to raise my kids with love and compassion.

I chose to create a new family, to show my kids that family is about love, not blood.

I choose, today, to live by the Blood of the Covenant, and say “fuck the water of the womb!”

I can’t tell you that you’re right or wrong to go or stay. I can only say that you know when you have to cut ties. You know when you have to choose yourself over the water of the womb. You know when “family above all” becomes a cult-like phrase meant to silence opposition. You know when family stops being about everyone, and becomes about 2-3 people who control, who terrorize, who harm. And you know when it’s time to tell those 2-3 people that you are worth so much more than they know.

Only you know when it’s time to leave your family of origin. But I hope you’ll take the time to create a family of choice first. The misfits, the outcasts, the weirdos—we make a great family!