Meet Melinda

I know I am back tracking her just a bit, but in May of 2010 Melinda entered my life.  I had found a knitting and crochet group online that she was part of.  It was called Chicks with Sticks.  At our first meeting Melinda, her daughter Vicky, and I talked about a great many things.  After everyone left the room I closed the door and mouthed the words to her, “are you a witch?”  If her friends did not know, I did not want to out her.  She looked at her daughter and then said, “Yes.”  I will never know if Melinda actually was a witch, or simply saw that as an in to exploit me.  Three years after the end of our relationship I still don’t know, nor do I know if anything she ever told me was true.

Melinda could be brash and arrogant, and both were infectious to me.  She was very bright, carried herself with a certain air, and had loads of love to give.  Melinda filled that gaping void in my life left by my mother and I’s relationship.  With my mother she freely gives loves, but you find out later there are always strings attached.  After my mother robbed me on March 31^st, 2012, (hang on we will get to that part eventually) Melinda became very much my mother.  It was an honor she would ultimately betray. 

By September of 2011 Melinda and I had been hanging out a lot.  We were great buddies and our lives were very much intertwined.  I had brought her out one night to meet the HP, both she and her son JB.  Kind of a meet and greet.  I did not know that Melinda, had at that time, said something inappropriate, and disrespectful to the HP and her wife.   I would not know that for almost a year.  We spent Samhain (Halloween) 2011 at the HP coven.  As the Mother had prophesied, the HP coven continued to grow.  That night there were over 20 pagans in that circle. 

I am all water sign, Pisces, Cancer, Cancer.  I am emotional, I am malleable and in many ways gullible.  I will often bend to the will of those around me, in order to please them.  A high ranking member from long ago had reentered the HP’s coven.  She became again the HP’s right hand woman.  They had been friends for many years. I became jealous, arrogant, cocky and snotty to this woman, who had never done me any harm.  I had been working and studying to be the HP’s right hand woman, or so I felt.  I felt slighted in thinking that this woman could just come in and steal all my glory.  I was the star pupil.  I wanted the HP to love me best and chose me.  I was petty and I was wrong, and I wonder if I was also not a little power hungry. 

We sat one night and confronted each other.  She was nothing, but gracious to me.  The goddess was telling me to take a back seat and I was not listening.  I was fighting with all my will.  I had, since I could remember, wanted to be a “shaman,” my word for a spiritual healer and spiritual leader.  I had been thru several paths, but now believed I was on the right one, and this woman was stopping that progress.  I felt I was being pushed out and ignored. I was so in the wrong.  It should have been about worshiping the Gods and it was not.  I never got to the chance to apologize to the HP about how sorry I was.  I hope she can hear me now.  I apologize to both of them in anything I may have said in thought, word or deed towards them. 

In November 2011, it was finally cool enough that we could have a retreat at the HP house.  A lot of things when wrong that weekend.  I felt slighted, that I, an initiated member, had not been asked to consult on anything related to the retreat.  Don’t feel that way now.  I had not seen Jay, but about 10 hours that week.  He was working 60-80 hours a week, and was out of town two days a week with Unifirst.  I was late getting to the retreat that Friday night.  Jay had been off working. My tent was huge and needed two people to set it up, and I didn’t remember how to do it.  It was hell trying to set up the tent, in the dark, at 10 o’clock at night.  I was also against a deadline.  Melinda, me and the ladies from Chicks with Sticks, were trying to make sure there would be enough blankets, for us to give away at the nursing home that Christmas.  I spent almost every waking moment working on those blankets.  That weekend included. 

I like many others, I consider handwork (crochet, knitting, spinning, weaving, embroidery, etc) to be a form of magic making, a form of spell work.  My HP did not see it that way.  She considered it disrespectful for me to be doing this while she was teaching.  Melinda and a friend, were due to come in later in the day and visit.  Melinda was snotty towards all those there.  She was apparently again disrespectful to the HP’s wife, something that would be kept hidden from me for almost a year. 

There were elements of the retreat I did not like and wondered why we did them.  When the HP asked if I had problems with the retreat I lied, and told her, “NO.”  I did not want to upset or disappoint her, which I kept doing, or so it seemed.  I know she did not like my relationship with some of those I considered elders.  She at one point considered me like a mole.  I would go to the elders and say, “oh how was your ritual.  We had 21 at our Samhain.”  Although I never told them anything else about the rituals or who was there, she felt I betrayed her. 

I was working at the time on trying to create a larger pagan community, that might one day work together.  Trying to get the groups around here to work together, must less acknowledge each other was a mighty task, and one I would eventually give up.  Nobody around here wants to play together, and when there are already so few of us, that is just kind of sad. 

She and I had it out, or so I thought early that December.  I was tormented.  She would dance around the idea of who this “Mole” was, but it was not until I said something on our private Facebook group that she acknowledged it was me.  A few days later I was removed from that group, a group I started.  They never told me they had.  I had to figure that one out for myself. 

Somewhere in here I had asked Maddie to give me a card reading.  To see if she could figure out what had happened to me in August and why it had happened.  Her reading strongly advised me to get into counseling.  And so almost 10 years since I left, I went back into counseling.  My first meeting with Barb was December 22^nd, 2011.  She and I would meet every two weeks until her retirement in July of 2015. 

I felt slighted by all that was going on in my HP coven.  I felt I was being pushed out.  That I was no longer wanted.  I was really kind of upset about the handwork thing.  It was so much a part of my life, part of my dedication to Holda.  Melinda and I had been back and forth about starting our own group.   At that time my nose was so far up Melinda’s ass I don’t know what I was thinking half the time.  We decided we wanted to start a group that had handwork as part of it’s center.  Where we could crochet and knit and worship the Gods and share stories at the same time.  So at Yule (December 21^st, Winter Solstice) 2011 Holda’s Hands was born. 

Ilsa