Ex Penna

I haven't read this post in many years and the sight of it gave me quite a smile. Now our Gigi is 16 and as independent a Pagan thinker as ever. She's learned a lot, though we never did create an organized training system. I guess organic learning is my parenting style.

 Enjoy!

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In our home, we don't hide from the important issues and we don't create an information gulf between child and adult.  Sure, there's "grown up" stuff I don't tell the kids, but I figure that if a child's old enough to ask a question, they are old enough for a straight answer.  This has been especially true with magic.

Now, I don't believe that magic is an adults-only game.  Nor do I see it as a membership club where, by someone else's say-so, you're either in or you're out (more about that later!).  So I believe in teaching children as early as possible.  Our daughter, Gigi (11), was only a few years old and making it rain and healing the neighbor boy's hornet stings.  The little man (7) is an expert incensier  (that's my freshly minted word, by the way: incensier [in-cen-SEER] one who compounds incense.  Sounds about right.) and I love employing his little biceps at the mortar and pestle.  But, until now, their learning has been atmospheric.  I always figured that the proper time would come for them to be formally taught.  And now, I believe it's Gigi's time.

Gigi and I were talking before getting her to bed tonight and I mentioned this.  She was happy to and only requested that it be a "weekend thing."  Fine by me!  Weeknights are plenty full as it is.  So I asked her if there was something she was especially interested in learning.  Her reply--dreams and curses.  I didn't say anything for a moment.  She explained that she wants to know how to return to a dream or get a specific dream, and how to give someone a little curse--if you're really mad--like bad test scores.

That set me back a bit.  Yes, the first one's no big deal and they're both easily done.  In fact, I could teach her everything about those two subjects in a day or two.  But...should I?  The kids know that I do magic of all kinds; sometimes I'm nice and sometimes I'm not.  That's just the work of a witch for me.  When I have clients who request curses or people who write asking for information on them, I don't turn them away and I don't tell them their feelings are wrong.  So I tried to look at it from that perspective.  I surely can't tell Gigi that it would be wrong to curse someone at school.  I'd be making a liar out of my practice.  And I can't tell her that it's not for her to know, because that could make her either perversely intrigued in this forbidden topic or dismissive of magic altogether since her lessons won't provide what she wants to know.  So what should I do?

I've been thinking about this ever since she said it.  I told her at the time that we'd talk more about it when it was time to start.  I guess that's the best way to go--talk it out and get to the core of the issue.  I can't say that at her age I didn't have the desire to blast some classmates, but maybe I can reroute those feelings so that she's less inclined to do it to the whole class.

Cursing is just as valuable a skill as any other in magic, so she will be learning it sometime.  Like any other spell, there's a right way to do it and a wrong way.  I believe most of the people who shout about the dangers of black magic and say that curses will always rebound on the witch did it the wrong way once and believed that it was the only outcome.  Training would have changed everything.

So maybe I'll let her get her feet wet.  She's not blasting crops or poisoning wells, just spreading a little revenge.  She'd probably be doing that anyway, and much sloppier too.

Feel free to write in with your feelings on this topic.  What would you do?