My entire life has had three main themes throughout, my gender, my mystical approach to the world and my own primary “function” as a mother confessor or healer to wounded souls. In all three I long ago learned I’m different than most people. The gender “stuff” and my mystical nature I had been extremely closeted about most of my life…..early exposure to my father’s college textbooks on psychology left me hyper-aware how both could be used against me and most times I let either show to others in my life, I was proved correct. I’ve literally felt like an alien, an outsider, a stranger in a strange land, my entire life.
I was born at Grosse Pointe Farms with a plastic spork in my mouth. That is to say we were the token poor folk in the community, my father being a teacher at Grosse Point University School (K thru 12) We lived across the road from the campus and I attended nursery school, kindergarten and 1’st grade there with very wealthy classmates. My first grade teacher was Jean Harris, better known as the Scarsdale Diet Doctor killer.
As a very young child, I suffered from horrible nightmares almost every night and would awaken my parents literally screaming. I still remember many of those dreams filled with monsters coming up through the ductwork in my bedroom, out of drive-in movie screens and so forth. They stopped when I starting having a totally different type of dream, variations on the same one over and over…..a much larger than life woman in long robes who cradled and comforted me in Her arms. She would tell me things all night long that soothed me but I could never remember on waking, only the feeling of peace that came with it. After that, if the nightmares came back I practiced lucid dreaming and the monsters were turned into friends or allies. To this day I remember many of my early childhood dreams better than I do day to day experiences.
Both sides of my family are quite large with many cousins we had a lot of contact with. My father’s side of the family was mainly coldly logical, idealistic and very intellectual the cousins my age all male, my mother’s side the exact opposite, sensitive and mystical and very open to psychic phenomena and the cousins my age all female. Among my maternal aunts and uncles there were no fewer than four haunted homes. By age six or seven the open disapproval of my father’s side of the family to my non-masculine nature was crystal clear to me along with the general acceptance of the same from my mother’s side. I learned around then to “indulge” my inner girl privately and covertly and in parallel to my public male self which was largely an act to get me left alone. I had even acquired a Girl Scout uniform from a Goodwill drop-off when I was in Boy Scouts and found a girl willing to trade all her Nancy Drew books for my Hardy Boys ones.
By this time I was also practicing practical magick by way of getting peers to actually see animals I completely made up. Any wild area near where we lived was my home and I spent most of my free time in woods observing nature often with both our cats and dog along with me. To this day I bond easily with animals in a way I cannot with people and other than a two year period when I started college, have never been without animal companions who have always been there for me emotionally in ways I’ve almost never experienced with humans.
Still, by the time I was in my early teens I was “mother confessor”, even with my parents. My parent’s marriage was pretty rocky by then and both of them would come to me separately “as the oldest child” to unload about the other. My mother had been having a series of affairs (which she thought I didn’t know about) seeking the love, affection and respect my father never showed her and I privately completely approved of them.
The family moved from Acton, Mass to Mendham, New Jersey between sixth and seventh grade. Our seventh grade class was picked by the Today Show to document our class trip to Washington. My seventh grade science project was on the effect of hypnotism on psychic ability using the Rhine cards, I was flunked on it by the teacher who approved it in the first place because it “wasn’t real science”. Freshman year was at a regional high school, basically another total start over. That was also the first school year of my life I wasn’t routinely beaten to a pulp on a regular basis for being “different”. That November changed everything for everyone. That was when JFK was assassinated and like everyone else alive at the time, I remember exactly where I was, Ancient history class.
That summer came the next huge change in my life. We moved to India and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East to get there.