My essay ( the first of 3) has been published on Witchvox, but I thought it was worth reprinting here.

When I first began to acknowledge to myself that I was indeed on a pagan path, I began to have vivid dreams about my children being in danger. Sometimes the imagery would be obvious. Once they were swimming in murky water filled with snakes that they couldn’t see, but that I knew were there. Other times, the meaning would be a little more hidden. I remember one dream where my mother was trying to get my daughter to teach Sunday school at her church.

It isn’t easy to step off the beaten path in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

My father is a Baptist minister. I grew up in a very Baptist, very strict household. I wasn’t allowed to wear shorts or make-up. We went to church three times a week, world without end. There were also countless “revivals”, “watch night services” vacation bible schools and fifth Sunday “dinner on the grounds”, and Friday night “singings” that had to be attended. I was a true believer in all of it.

I didn’t question any part, other than “had I truly taken all the steps I needed in order to be saved”. Granted, I do remember amusing myself as a child by looking at all of the pretty colors around the people in the church. But as I’d never heard of auras, this didn’t trouble me at all. This was my life until I was 20 years old. Then I began to question.

By this time I was married. My husband and I were offered jobs as paid choir members in the Episcopal Church, in one of the larger cities in Alabama. It was amazing to be around “church people” who drank alcohol and used swear words. Some were even openly homosexual.

It was so refreshing to combine spirituality with accepting others for themselves. My personal spiritual questions weren’t as frightening when I saw others on their own spiritual paths. Others who didn’t quite fit the mold of the ones I had thought would be the only ones in heaven.

I considered Wicca for the first time at this point, but found I was just too confused about life in general to settle on any one thing at that time. I just let circumstances take me where they would. I continued with my church job and my unorthodox spiritual views and didn’t trouble myself.

In 1997, I became a mother. My husband and I had her baptized in the Episcopal Church, where we were members at the time. I went to church because I thought I should and because, after all, shouldn’t children be brought up in church? But many times I would find myself passing the time looking at the auras of the priest and the choir members.

Something was missing. In 2000, we had our second child and dutifully had him baptized as well. But church was becoming less and less fulfilling to me. My children certainly were not getting anything out of it. And I often had to give them an alternative view to what they had been told in Sunday school.

Then one day my daughter mentioned ‘the devil” and I knew it was time to rethink our family’s approach to spiritual education. I finally just allowed myself and my children to stop going all together. I told myself I would “home church”.

My husband and I are hardly typical Alabamians in any case. My children have been taught from their earliest memories that “god” is the same thing everywhere; people just call “him” different names. And some people are happier thinking of god as a “she”.

Their catchphrase from the time they could talk was “we are all connected in the circle of life” from the Disney movie. They have always known that sometimes girls marry girls and boys marry boys; that just how “god” made them. Once, at age 4, my daughter started to pass by a tree, checked herself, and stopped to give it a gentle pat and a smile. So I slowly started to introduce pagan knowledge to them.

That’s when the dreams started.

It was one thing for me to endanger my own soul to eternal brimstone, but quite another for me to take my children with me. It’s scary enough being a spiritual searcher. It’s scary enough being a mom. But admitting to myself that I was pagan and letting my children see me hold stones to balance my chakras, and teaching my children about the properties of stones and herbs, well…

I started slowly. At first, I began to leave my Wicca/Witchcraft books on the coffee table, instead of hiding them away so my children wouldn’t see them. My daughter was 8 at the time and has never met a book she didn’t want to read, so this was quite a step.

Then I openly began to read Tarot for my closest friends. I told my children it was my “guess the future” game. I began to tell my children about how stones were very old and had lots of “god energy” in them and that we could use that energy to make good things happen.

I gave opals and topaz to them to protect against bad dreams and to help them learn to listen to their hearts. I showed them my runestones and told them how I combine them with some of the herbs from the garden to help me focus on something important. They heard me tell my pumpkin plants that I desperately wanted to grow: “Pumpkins, Pumpkins grow to me, you will be cherished, you will see. As I will so mote it be”.

The dreams have gone now. I have peace with showing them my path. And peace with letting them go to church with their daddy, who is still Episcopalian, but very accepting of his witchy wife. I even let them go to church with my parents if they wish to do so.

They are old enough now to understand that people find “god” in different ways, and that it’s best to leave everyone’s spirituality to their own hearts and souls.

Now when my children see me outside with my candles, lifting my arms up, throwing my head back and saying rhyming couplets, they just say, “Mom’s praying”.

Sometimes they even join me.