An instance of this was when I bumped into one of my bits of rough trade earlier this week. He is in a civil partnership, which superficially looks rather rocky, but I feel is probably just one of those really lively relationships. I bump into him at various turning points of his life, & although he knows I'm a witch, this just seems to go over his head and he seems to look on me as a shag. What amuses me is that he only thinks we've done what he thinks we've done: I'm never actually done the particular act with anyone! Now that I actually put this in writing I can see that he just can't process the relationship we have: I mostly serve the witch's function of holding up a mirror to him. He tells me things & I make him listen to himself.
What does annoy me is that he grew up & still lives in Dudley, & seems to have had endless same-sex partners there. When I grew up in Dudley I was firmly convinced I was the only gay in the village! This, of course, is down to changing times & mores, & it's gratifying that things haven't changed so much that the normals don't look shocked when he kisses me, let alone his customary greeting of grabbing me by the genitals!
Another way in which I hold up a mirror to him is in the area of his sexuality. He identifies as gay, yet I still think that if you've got two children you're probably not completely gay, even if that is your majority preference.
Yesterday a muggle at work held up a mirror to me by telling me that he is spending his bank holiday weekend clubbing. What I'm doing with mine is going to the Clun Green Man festival on .onday with a witch friend & his other half. Today I've had an outing to Kidderminster. Yesterday I gave some stuff to a charity shop, knowing that this exchange would make my desires come to me, & it's paid off: I found the DVD of the TV adaptation of Barbara Vine's A Dark-Adapted Eye in a shop. I have never seen the DVD for dale before, & am horrified to discover it is 20 years since I watched the original screening on TV.
This is a story which has influenced me in all sorts of ways, not least that the story is a ripping good read! It is about a superficially respectable family, in which the suppression of its secrets ultimately leads to one of the family being on trial for murder. It is exactly the sort of family which I have always felt is most damaging to its members (just for a change it doesn't really parallel my own family, but we've got family friends whose every interaction is like that family): silencing, prescriptive of the emotions you should feel, non-validating. In the book the outcome is that the son of the family begins a campaign of driving his mother mad, a campaign which wouldn't have had any effect if she hadn't been so strait-laced & not risen to him, culminating in him having sex with a male friend of the family.
I'm going to watch it this evening, with a mixture of looking forward to it & dread that the story will not satisfy me the way I remember it doing. Dread also at the thought that with my deteriorated relationship with my mother it will press buttons in me this time. At any rate returning to things after a period of years is always risky.
As is divination. No matter how many times I divine into my relationship with my mother, hoping that it's going to be different, I only ever see the relationship with her in which I am never allowed to grow up, & which I am no longer able to live with. 'When does your mother ever listen?' - a friend asked me, but it is difficult to choose between a relationship which has driven me to a nervous breakdown, or nothing.
People can never really be comfortable in the presence of a witch, they never know what's going to happen yet, & witchcraft done properly also ensures the witch can never really be comfortable in her own presence either.
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