A Goodbye of Sorts

December 30^th, 2016

This is my 101^st post.  Wow!  I can’t believe it, and in a way it is the end of this blog.  Oh sure I will post when the fancy strikes, or when I need to say something important, but for now I think this blog has worked it’s magic. 

Those of you who have been following along have no doubt noticed that I have only posted a few articles this year.  There is a reason for that, I have been working on my first novel and completed it in November.  We are now in the editing phase and I hope to self publish by this summer, Goddess willing.  Of course I will post when it is available.  It is called, “We are all a little broken.”  It is a really good book about two women’s struggle to overcome their abusive past and find their voice with the help of a loving family, as they come to terms with what their mother has done to them.  It is set here in Northwest Louisiana.  I think you will enjoy it.  I hope to start major work on the next book next week. 

As for me and Jay, we are well.  Jay is trying to get his sugar under control, it is out of wack again.  I told him I think it is the stress, and hustle and bustle of the holidays.  I think it will calm down after the first of the year.  His sugar had been doing really good, but I think he is frustrated.

Team Ilsa is currently in hiatus, every time I start back up, I get sick.  Team Plaisance never got off the ground.  But I am still busy, cleaning house, and doing my thing. 

Our food trailer, Garson duBayou, is doing great.  We are busy, and making good money.  Working lots of events and I have been helping out a lot.  In September we were in the local food truck rally.  We were ecstatic to take home second place, especially since it was our first year to enter. 

This fall I started putting in applications for work.  I have started with a state program called Louisiana Rehabilitation Services.  They help people who have mental and / or physical disabilities get and keep a job with the accommodations they need.  I have had my orientation, my intake interview, been sent to a specialist, and at the moment I am awaiting to hear back on whether or not they can help me.  I am hopeful, but I still fear that my past will come back to bite me.  We will see. 

In December of last year Juno left us.  She fell in love with a nice man on line and one night he drove down from New York and came to get her.  I have not told you this, because I didn’t know how the situation would end, and if she would come back to Kay.  So we waited.  Juno is happy and has yet to come home.  We wish her the best.  Kay remained in the house and in October we asked her to leave.  She did.  The house that was already falling apart, is now beyond what Jay and I want to deal with and we are in process of tearing it down and turn it into new and better things.  I will let you know how it turns out.

In late September we made the heart breaking decision to put Princess down.  You can read about all that went on here, in Homage to Princess.

In May I made the decision to go “No Communication,” with my mom.  You can read about that here in All her sins laid bare.  It has not been easy, and there are times that I miss her, or the idea of a mother, greatly.  I was not sure what would happen between me and Daddy.  It took seven months before I got a response from him, and it was only to ask for my change of address.  He didn’t want to start back a relationship with me.  On the phone messages he left when he said, he loved me and he wanted to visit with me, it was as if they were after thoughts.  As I always do with these types of major events and decisions in my life, I sought the council of those wiser then myself, as well as searched my own heart.  For what I wanted, and what I needed to do seemed to be a step too big to take.

I know threw now fault of his own, my mother uses my dad like a spy.  He told me so himself.  In those two and a half years that mom and I did not speak, about nine months in Daddy came back into my life.  We would go to dinner, and visit.  Just us two.  Dad told me he had to come home and give mom the report on what I wore, how I looked, how I seemed, what we talked about.  Everything I told him I might as well have been telling her.  I made the heart breaking decision to sever my ties with Daddy, for my own mental health, until she is either dead or he leaves her.  In my letter I spoke to him as if it was the last thing I would ever say to him.  It was one of the toughest things I have ever had to do.  My pain is still great and it is not easy to talk about.  Sometimes what we want is not good for us, and it is best for me to stay away.  Self care is an act of survival, not selfishness.

Your saying to yourself, ‘well maybe he wanted to send you a letter.’ No, it was a tax bill he wanted to send me.  My mother is crazy about mail.  So once I gave him my address, she would have it.  She will hound you with cards, and packages of gifts that you don’t want, and then tell you she has no money for food.  Once you open that flood gate you can’t go back.  We have done this before.  I would tell Dad, “I only want mail from you.”  I would get cards from her.  I would refuse them.  Finally I told him, it’s not your hand writing on the envelope or inside.  So he would address the envelope in a card she had picked out, and then sent from their home, not where he was working.  No thank you.  I have been through this song and dance before.  It is not worth the anxiety every time I go to the mail box.

And then this little tid bit to just make the wound all that much worse.  I was telling this story to a family member, who said, and I will paraphrase here, “Oh I remember when you and your Dad would go to dinner.  Your mom bitched about it the whole time.”  Ouch.  It was not my mom was pissed off my dad was spending $40 bucks to take me to lunch once a week, it was that he was spending time with me.  It was not that they didn’t have money.  I know in those years he paid over $20,000 just in taxes off the money he made.  I didn’t ask for gold, or diamonds, or for him to pay my bills.  I just asked for time.  Time she could not even begrudge me.  Another relationship she is jealous of.  Every time I think she has shown me how black her heart is, she shows her contempt for me all over again.  Is it because I am Beau’s child?  Because I look like him?  Does she remember me before the surgery?  I still have no idea why she wants to do me like this. 

When I think about her I am always reminded of a scene from Ever After.  Cinderella asks her step mother, “Was there ever a moment, even in its smallest, that you loved me?”  The step mother responds, “How can you love a pebble in your shoe?”  Loving her is exhausting and gets me nowhere.  I just end up chasing my tail.  Even a beaten dog, still tries to please it’s owner.  Until the day it finally has enough and turns around and bites the crap out of the one doing the beating.

So 2016 has been a year of change, of emotional growth in leaps and bounds, and of goals accomplished I did not believe were possible.  I hope the next year is just as good, but not so emotionally taxing. 

So this is our goodbye of sorts.  I want to tell all of you that I love you, and send you all bright blessings no matter where you are on this big, round, blue, spinning ball, that is drifting through space.  In the end this blog produced 160,000 words in a year and a half, and laid end to end is over 300 pages long.  I would love to turn it into an auto biography, but who would want to read something so boring and trivial.  “It’ll never play in Peoria,” as they would say in vaudeville. 

But beside what it produced in numbers of words and pages, telling you my story, the whole story and nothing but the truth of my life, created the biggest impact on me and those around me.  It made me give my own thoughts and feelings validation, and I saw so many things from another perspective, and was able to give forgiveness where it was deserved.  It gave me the courage to establish new relationships, try again at others, and let go of several toxic relationships.  I think the biggest person I finally forgave was myself.  I began to see myself as a survivor, a thriver, a writer, a mother, a wife, a daughter to two great men, and an incredible resilient human being who is broken yes, but still has so much to give. 

So from all of us here on my little hill, we wish you a blessed Yule, and a Happy New Year.  Bright blessings to you and those you love,

Our love,

Ilsa

Pagan Commune

So the girls move in to the back bedroom in July of 2013.  A few weeks later D & K move in to a little trailer out back of the house.  Now forgive me, I know I am repeating myself.  I have covered a lot of this in Becoming Druid.  But I will cover it again for those of you who might not have read that article yet.  Hopefully I can shed some new light on things, I forgot to tell you the first go round.

I met D & K in our Druid group.  In about May or June they really began to attach themselves to me.  Why Gods always me!  Sometimes all 5 of us, Juno, Kay, me, D & K would hang out together.  Sometimes it would just be D & K and me.  They found out that I could sew and they told me they wanted robes. I told them if they bought the material, I would make the outfits for them, and they did.  I became their sewing fool.  I know I made two robes, at least one cloak, and a bag in the span of a few weeks. 

So we are all hanging out and getting on pretty well.  D & K tell us they don’t like the way things are going with the protogrove.  They have problems with Rovena.  D feels she is racist, because she dismisses her good ideas.  D is African-American.  I admit that I am not feeling particularly spiritually fulfilled at this point.  Somewhere in here we began to talk about putting Holda’s Hands back together. 

D comes to me one day and says that she has thrown out her husband (basically a friend she legal married) and their other roommate, not K.  I think she gave me some sob story about how was she going to afford everything.  She was going to school on line and cutting grass for a living.  She was living in a trailer, she owned, not far from my house.  She says she is going to rent out the trailer to make money.  Her mother owns a rent house in the hood and she does not want to go back to live in it.  She asks, if she buys a little trailer can she put it on my land. 

Me, ever wanting to please, ever wanting to make and gather family around me, says yes.  I never thought to say, “Well let me consult with Jay first.”  Yeh I’ve been a bitch like that.  I have had to eat crow and apologize to Jay a lot about things like this.  I think I often unwillingly and unconsciously make his life difficult sometimes, and I am very sorry about that.  I apologize to him frequently about all this stuff, more so since I have started writing my truth again.  Still he loves me through it all.  I will never deserve him.  For a long time I felt that just us living here, on this land, and us living by ourselves, with our farm and our animals was not enough.  I wanted to add people to our tribe, to make almost like a pagan commune.  For a few months in 2013 that’s exactly what I had, and it didn’t take long for that to wear pretty thin. 

By the Fall of 2013 six of us were sharing my little trailer.  The girl and D & K kept much different hours then Jay and I did.  They are also half our age as well.  Internet access became a big thing out here.  Most of them had not lived without it in a long time.  D had to have it for school.  She was in school on line, but K did all her homework for her.  What terrifies me is soon D will graduate with a degree in psychology.  The fact she is controlling and manipulative to almost everyone in her life scares me, and I think it should scare others. 

All 4 of them would leave and take off and go to Wendy’s for hours at a time.  When we were finally able to get satellite internet here, they would all congregate in Juno and Kay’s room.  They would leave me out here in the rest of the house.  There was literally nowhere for me to sit in there, so much of the conversations I missed.  I began to feel they were excluding me from their little club.  Childish, right? 

One of the things that really irked me was that Jay and I would cook dinner, clean the kitchen and go to bed.  D&K who had cooking facilities in their trailer, would come in and cook in my house at 10 or 11 o’clock at night, making lots of noise while we were trying to sleep.   Jay often had to get up at 4 in the morning.   Then they would leave their dirty dishes in the sink for me to clean up the next morning. I asked them not to do this.  I even started leaving the dish washer clean and empty for them.  Nope didn’t help.  Still got up in the morning, and there were dirty dishes in my sink.   Now I charged these girls no rent, any of them.  They would help out and buy me dog food, and share groceries, sometimes in exchange for rent.  Sometimes I would find Juno washing D & K’s dishes, but never D or K. 

I usually run out of propane in the early spring and then again in the fall.  When the tank ran out, I told D&K since they were cooking in the house, I wanted them to give me $50 to help fill up my tank.  I told Juno and Kay the same thing.  Not much I thought as it usually takes $300-$500 to put propane in my tank.  D&K suddenly decided to cook in their trailer. 

D  also wanted to drive my car everywhere, and I let her.  Stupid me!  D had a huge SUV.  She wanted to drive my car, because it got better gas millage.  She comes in one day and starts talking about me putting her on the insurance.  I started getting the feeling I was being used, all over again.

I was getting to the end of my rope about that time.  I was just overwhelmed.  I was suicidal.  Juno was having trouble with D then too.  She could get no peace and quiet.  They just walked into her room when they damn well pleased, never knocked, even if the door was closed.  My final straw came when I found out D was talking smack about me to Juno, in my own fucking house.  Something so bad that Juno has never had the courage to tell me what she said. Oh no I’m not going to stand for that!  Bitch you free loading off me and you going to disrespect me in my own house.  Oh you can carry your ass! 

D had accused me of being a raciest.  Continually told me how dirty my house was.  She took it upon herself to tell me how I needed to run my life, on several occasions.  I felt at the time, she pushed me to put Perro down.  She tried to break up Juno and Kay.  Treated K like a dog and never lifted a fucking finger to help herself.  She made K do everything for her.  She used her like a fucking slave.  I got to the feeling that I just wanted to kick D ass to the curb. 

We tried to work things out.  It didn’t work.  I finally made a phone call to Rovena.  I told her I needed to have an emergency conference with her.  Juno and I both went out to meet with them.  We told the everything D was saying about them, behind their backs.  Then I told them what was going on in my house.   I said I need you to help me make a decision.  I did not want to be rash.  I said, I am considering asking D & K to leave.  What is your impression of them?  I will never forget Boogie saying, “I think she is a pathological liar. I don’t trust her any farther than I can throw her.  She’s a lazy bitch!”  I was bit taken aback by that.  I thanked them for their wise council and left.

I went to Tami a few days later, told her how D was treating me, and what I should do.  Tami said, “I would tell that bitch to bounce.”  After finally talking to Barb I made my decision to ask D&K to leave.  I told D, “Some friends just cannot live together.  You have two weeks to get out.”  It was my intention to ask D & K to leave, it was never my intention to ask Juno and Kay to leave as well. 

Juno was furious with me.  She spent hours yelling at me, telling me what a horrible person I was, what a bad pagan I was and that she had loved me like a mother.  That one really hurt.  She finally concluded with “If she goes, I’m going too.”  Juno did not speak another word to me, although it took two weeks for them to move all their stuff out, for more than 6 months.    

With Juno, Kay, D & K gone, and our relationship in shambles I felt I could not go back to Druid.  So for the first time in my life I became a solitary witch.  I had burned all my bridges.  I had been threw 2 covens, started and closed 2 more, and now felt I could not go back to Druid because of who was there.  For the first time in about 8 years I had no community to practice with.  I felt utterly alone.

As the girls drove out of the drive way, I looked at their empty room and decided I should paint it.  I would go with the Chinese theme that Jay loved so well.  I should give Jay back his room I though.  So I went down to the Lowe’s and bought me some red paint and black paint and started to work. 

What D didn’t know is that the day I asked her to leave, Jay and I received a large oil well check.  It felt like confirmation to me that I was doing the right thing.  The check would be enough to buy our food trailer and start the food business that we had always dreamed of Garson Du Bayou.  I means Boys of the Bayou in French. 

I never seem to stay out of trouble for long.  In October of 2013, Paige would come back into my life. 

Ilsa

 

 

The Girls

It has been our great pleasure over the last few years to watch over and care for Juno and Kay.  We often refer to them as “The Girls,” a misnomer as they are very capable young women.  I have over the last few years served as their High Priestess, their friend, a kind of aunt and at times a surrogate mother.  They are a great joy in my life.

Juno and Kay are from a far away land called Indiana.  I hear the summers there are quiet pleasant and rainy.  You can understand how for someone from Louisiana that sounds like a fairy story.  But I am assured this place is real.  I have after all seen it on a map, but as of yet have yet to journey there myself. 

Juno and Kay have been together for many years.  For a large percentage of their lives they have lived with Kay’s parents.  Kay’s stepfather became attached to Barksdale, and so they moved here to the hell that is Louisiana.  I often admire them for being an open couple, and living their truth, in the buckle of the Bible belt.  A place that can at times be very homophobic.  When Juno and Kay walk in the grocery store holding hands, people look at them hatefully.  Just makes me want to kick people’s asses!  You know that thing about Jesus tells us to love everyone, only applies to certain people, or so a lot of people around here feel.

In January 2013 we learned that Kay’s stepfather intended to retire, and return home to Indiana that Summer.  The girls were informed they were no longer welcome to live with their family.  If they returned to Indiana, they would have to do it on their own, and find their own place to live.  Jay and I graciously opened our home to them, as we knew they had no money to do such a thing.  As Tami was living in Momma Muriel’s house, I could not offer that to them.  They would be moving into our guest bedroom in the Summer, but until then the room had to be cleaned.  Our guestroom also functions as Jay’s man cave.  Juno and I chose paint colors.  The first time she had ever been able to do that in her life.  So our great plans were laid.

Juno, Kay and I began to worship with Rovena’s ADF grove at Imbolc 2013, and continued to hold our Holda’s Hand rituals here at my home.  Since I had been possessed two years before I had been studying books on how to Sit High Seat, or as the Wiccan’s say Drawing Down.  It was my hope to learn so this I might learn to control this ability, and that I would be able to teach Juno, so she could pull me out should something go wrong.  At our Holda’s Hands Imbolc 2013 I put myself in a semi-trance, half possessed state.  Pan came through again, and then the Mother.  I did not know until later, how bad I had scared Juno.  It greatly disturbed her.  I have never again tried to actively become possessed.  Jay hated me doing this work, but I persisted in my studying, after some time though I gave it up.   I have deiced that my mental health is already too fractured, I do not have the necessary training, and it upsets Jay too much.  I recently sold all of my books on the subject. 

So we rocked along.  Juno, Kay and I kind of stopped doing Holda’s Hands.  Goat Problems took up a lot of my time.  I’m sorry I have not talked about Jay a lot here.  My emotional adventures often overshadowed our lives and our relationship.  Jay was still working for Unifirst.  He had been with them for almost 3 years at this point.  Jay worked anywhere from 50 to 80 hours a week for salary, or basically for 40 hours worth of pay.  He worked in a panel truck, with no AC, that could easily reach over 120°F on a warm day, much worse on a summer’s day.  All of which we found out was perfectly legal, although we felt immoral.  Corporations’ could care less about their employees.  They are expendable and highly replaceable.  All they care about is their bottom line.    Jay was chronically sleep deprived.  He spent two nights a week away from me. 

In May of 2011 Jay went in for his yearly physical.  His blood work showed that his calcium levels were off.  We continued to do blood work on him threw out that summer.  It was finally decided that it was his parathyroid, and he should have it removed.  One of the things your parathyroid controls is how your body absorbs calcium.  In September of 2011 Jay had most of it removed.  It was many times larger than it should have been.  Other than that his life pretty much stayed the same, go to work, help me with my crazy, crash on the weekends, and then goes back to work. 

In July of 2013 Jay developed a pimple under his right arm.  We did not think much about it.  A few days after we popped that pimple he developed a mass the size of a softball.  It was hot and it hurt him.   We took him into our PCP.  Our Dr. took one look at it and said, “Jay you have a massive staph infection.”  We were quickly admitted to the hospital.  Jay would spend 5 or 6 days there.  They tried for two days with antibiotics to get it to go down, and it would not.  Finally he was taken into surgery to have it drained. It was over 30 cc’s. 

Jay was sent home on light duty, with drain tubes in his arm.  It was so gross.  I shiver just thinking about it, even now.  I had to change his dressing twice a day.  I was always terrified I would hurt him, or worse do it wrong and that it would come back.  A few weeks later he developed another pimple, on the same arm, only on his forearm this time.  In a few days it began to swell as well.   Jay went into his surgeon, who told him it was staph again.  He said that he could readmit him and drain this, or if he was tough enough he could cut it open, drain it, and pack it in the office.  Jay’s a tough old boy, so he chose the latter.  He said it was the worse pain that he had ever felt, and he’s been in three car wrecks.  He said the packing hurt the worse. 

We feel the second round of staph was left over from his first round.  Jay had been picking up dirty clothes from Flower’s bakery the week he first got staph.  It was a new stop for him.  We believe he picked up something there.  He had never had it before, and after stopping work on that particular route never had it again. 

Ilsa