Chaos, Vows, and Magic in a Walmart Parking Lot
some ingredients to how I've become a mother witch
Six years ago today (Nov 7 2018), a fated argument in the Walmart parking lot ended in elopement at town hall. Me and my ex. Nelson. My daughter’s father. Our daughter was 1.
Later that night, we took our vows in an impromptu shamanic ceremony. We drank seawater, exchanged rose quartz, and, if my memory serves, ate salt crusted from the ground. The ceremony was held in the center of a medicine wheel, a portal I’d created years earlier in a public park. This story reminds me of how deeply I am rooted in the strange, the wayward, the untamed.
Ever since I was little, I’ve had this immense sense of the limitless and wildly untapped capacity we hold as humans to play with reality. I just knew we could make things move with our will, shape things to our energy. As a child, I exercised this in imaginary play or as I rode my bike in the wind, certain I propelled it. I’d scream WIND, and the wind would kick up. At the ocean, I’d scream WAVES, and they’d rise as if answering me. I could watch flowers open as if they felt my gaze, closing when I looked away. When I became a teenager, playing with reality took a different turn, but that’s another story.
I’ve always sensed that this is all a game. Even when I was being swallowed by the path I was “supposed to take”—even then, lies, drugs, sex, manipulation became my chess pieces, a way to wield some control inside the suffocating four walls pressing in. Those four walls that caged the wildness I knew.
It took me a lot of years of breaking and rebuilding and refining to end up here: at the helm of my own ship, sailing the seas of my own creation, ebbing with forces beyond me, yet somehow in my favor.
When I think back on that time six years ago, part of me wishes it were longer in the past because I’m mildly embarrassed it was so recent. But mostly, I think about the adventure of it all. The thrill of playing with life. All the things I tried and learned. The joy I felt, the ways I opened to life.
Things didn’t work out between me and my ex, but today we can laugh about it all. I mean these are MEMORIES that made us who we are as well as the beautiful daughter we share. All the things we did together: getting smuggled across the Bolivian border in the back of a truck when I was pregnant, getting detained then benevolently released by corrupt Bolivian cops, 2am walks through sacred ruins and whispering stone, hitchhiking through Peru, moving to Ireland with no money, no plan; living in five countries in five years; busking in parks in Spain. I could fill pages with these memories. They exhilarate me to this day.
Doing these things has been my way of playing with reality as an adult, breaking free from all the “supposed tos” and “shoulds.” Much of it was probably insane and dangerous, but this era of my life liberated me, shaping me into the wayward, wild mother witch I am now—one who very much lives in a reality of her own making.
And despite the many ways I could drag this man’s name through the dirt (and I know he’d be fine with me saying that), the chaos of these years taught me so much. The chaos of that relationship made me grow up. And as batshit crazy and even traumatizing as a lot of it was, I don’t regret a single bit of it.