Agony Hound: My Mother in Law Refuses to Speak to me and my Husband Won't Help

 For some time I have pondered doing posts based on letters written to agony aunts and this is the first. I will be giving witchy answers creating hatred and breaking up families using all the subtlety at my disposal. Stop laughing.

The first is a letter from a wife at her wit's end:

“Although I’ve been married for 15 years, my mother-in-law still hasn’t accepted me. I think I could cope better if she was rude or argumentative, but she simply ignores me completely. It’s literally like I’m not there and she can’t see me!

“I get no support from my husband, who doesn’t seem to see it and sticks up for her every time. I know she’s getting older and that I should have learnt to cope with it by now, but it’s getting me crosser and crosser.

“So much so that I feel like refusing to visit her, and refusing to let the children see her either. Am I being petty?”

The source for this question is here and the non-witchy answer from their counsellor Fiona is:

“I don’t think you’re being petty by considering refusing to see her yourself, but I think it would be a mistake to involve your children. Aside from the fact that they wouldn’t understand, and that it would cause even further resentment, they really shouldn’t be used as pawns in this game. The one person who I think you should be taking more of an issue with is your husband.

“The next time you visit, ask her open-ended questions, in front of him, to see if she responds – make it hard, if not impossible, for her to ignore you. He should be on your side, and so if he cannot or will not stand up to his mother, you have every justification at being angry with him too.

“Make sure he sees just how upset you are and point out that he is putting his mother’s feelings before yours. I can see why he wouldn’t want to cause a family rift, but that doesn’t mean he can’t give you more support and speak up for you when his mother is being rude.

“He needs to know just how angry you are, and if he doesn’t want you to finally blow your top, he must find a way of getting his mother to accept that you are now part of the family.”

The Hound says:

You must be a saint to have been putting up with this nonsense for fifteen years of marriage and obviously your husband has found himself a real gem in you for staying with him despite this.

But why the hell are you putting up with this? Your husband is married to you and so his first duty must be to you and your children. I note that he has denied being able to see you being blanked which is I think a betrayal in itself.

If you really want to stay with him you can of course try the things suggested above, and Relate can offer counselling to try to open up this situation between you, and it would be with a neutral professional.

If you want to sweeten your mother in law, write her name on a piece of paper or get hold of a hair or nail clipping and put it in a jar of honey.

What bothers me, though, is that being sidelined and having your concerns not validated by your husband can have a longer term effect of eating away at your confidence and while you have put up with this and put him first, he is not putting you first.

My own opinion would be to get rid of this mummy's boy and take him for every penny hes got to teach him to pay attention to his wife.

If you want the Hound to sow confusion in your personal life you can contact me on the contact form below.

Putting Things in the Right Place

 

It is a commonplace among the fluffy bunnies and the white light crowd that you can't possibly engage in baneful magic because that disturbs the balance of the universe. I am probably caricaturing them rather but I understand this to be a misunderstanding of the idea of balance often found in martial arts. Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido put it as

合気道は天地人和合の道と理なり。
“Aikido is the Way and Principle of harmonizing Heaven, Earth and Man.”

 Source where you can read more of these ideas.

We also know that in magic thoughts are things and that things impact on each other in rather unexpected ways. What if the reality is that much of the energetic stuff we come across on a daily basis is in fact because of an imbalance? For example, if a work colleague is jealous of you, even if they don't say anything that would significantly impact on you. 

My suggestion would be that diagnosing and correcting these imbalances would be a major part of the witch's role. We are also of course priests and priestesses and so we have a role in divine correction of the universe's imbalances.

I suspect the fear of baneful magic, apart from being a doomed public relations exercise, comes from a worry about getting things wrong. That's easily dealt with - if you send something back where it comes from you'll see the correct source. If we don't put things in what I am calling the 'right' place it means someone whose business it isn't, carrying this weight, which is itself an imbalance.

Of course usually sending these things back doesn't involve drama. The event which prompted this post was that I bought an item of clothing from EBay (I do wear clothes sometimes). It took forever to arrive and was not as described when it came and I left feedback accordingly. The next day I got this message from the seller:

Mate.... 

Honestly be a human. The hoodie was fine mate. If your not happy send me a message rather than negative feedback and I’ll refund you rather than you paying for a broken hoodie? 

Let us know pal

Do I strike you as someone who might be his pal?! The simple fact is if you do what he did you expect the feedback he got - I suspect when a seller gets negative feedback eBay sends them a message saying (in Gordon Ramsay's voice), 'What the fuck do you think you're doing, you've upset the Hound'. And hesh now trying to get out of the consequences of his actions, so I know the energetic thing has gone back where it belongs. Going to the post office and sending back for a refund just feels too much like having the piss taken out of me by someone who can't be arsed.

Now you may say he won't learn his lesson and will just set up a new vendor account to start with no bad reviews, and of course he may do that. But I would put money on the same thing happening again if he does...

Ueshiba again:

「合気というものは、初め円を描く。円を描くこと、つまり対象力。相手に指一本ふれないでも相手は跳んでしまう。この一つのものをつくりあげるにも十年ぐらいはかかる。これからは大飛躍をしよう。」

“In this thing called Aiki, first describe (draw) a circle. Drawing a circle is, in other words, opposing powers. Without touching with even one finger your opponent will be sent flying. Just to be able to do this one thing takes about 10 years. Let’s try to advance quickly.”

Tarot: Modifying Decks

I can't claim to be an expert on modifying decks. I have done a couple of borderectomies in the past, with great success. This is the pocket size Rider Waite and I felt it wanted something done to its edges so I got a permanent marker and this is the result.

I looked at tutorials first - the only warning is you have to do one card at a time because if you try to do more the ink gets sucked between the cards and makes a mess. I am very pleased with this result and it seems to make the images jump out more.

Reading the Signs

One of the most ancient magical arts, and which has therefore been absorbed into the modern Craft is that of divination by signs and omens. Robert Cochrane gave crossing the Lethe, the mythological river of death, as another one and since it's the Christians' Good Friday I want to connect divining and endings or death.

Years ago a nun told me that Easter presents a problem in its celebration because we humans are not otherwise used to celebrating resurrections! I have no idea how the devotees of the many other gods who came back from the dead, celebrated this in the ancient world but it seems to me to present a real problem for most humans.

It is the exact problem that people have with the Death tarot card. It gets redefined to the point where it is hardly about death at all, but what is death but an inescapable ending? We cope with our fear of endings by tending to put them off or deny it completely. A good example would be the way half the world's population denies any forthcoming climate disaster and the other half are busy trying to put it off.

My own opinion is that it is very obvious that life on this planet will end at some point, even if we have to wait till the sun burns out. Of course it's quite likely we'll do it ourselves before then! My prediction is that if we don't end the world before the millenial generation get in control, it will then go better environmentally. I love the millenial generation for their strong sense of what is right and taking action.

The ability to face the omen rather than deny it may even be the difference between the witch figure and muggles.

This post was prompted in my mind by this article about a dead man who started breathing just as his organs were going to be harvested. I can't begin to think how difficult the situation must be for his family.