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On Mother's Night
13 December 2021 19:33I'm gearing up for Mother's Night, which by a chain of associations is about knitting to me
(where I come from, there was a secular tradition of spending the 23rd December finishing the knitting to sell in Town on the 24th; and that's tangled up for me with the weaving Norns, with Vairë the Weaver, with Frau Holle. The Fisher is a cluster of ideas that sort of includes: Odin speaking to the dead to gain their secrets; the Norns; Baba Yaga; the Crone; and the sea; you know, that saturnian cthonic monstrous feminine Thing that many people have a sense of, but I'm finding for myself through new words and images. And so it just feels right, that there would be this especially dark and dangerous day between the Feast of the Winter King on secular Christmas day, and the birth of the Lightbringer on the Winter Solstice, and the 1970s tradition of the Ghost Story for Christmas screening on Christmas Eve - this grandmotherly day where you stay up all night by the fire and knit and exchange somewhat unsettling stories and weird things come out in the weaving.)
(Yes. Yet again, I have conceptualised a festival day as something done in a Group, when I intend to do it Alone. Maybe I'll put on some radio plays.)
As chance would have it, I have just joined the community knitting club at the Old Age Hall. Where I live is impossibly isolated, and has an average age of 50; anybody younger has pissed right off to the city, as young people from post-industrial communities tend to do. We are here because we're disabled and broke, and can live in quite astonishing comfort and security that we have never known - for as long as we can tolerate the tradeoffs.
I like older people. I vibe with them well, and we can talk about things we have in common like old television, being let down by our doctors, and enjoying being at home with a book. So they very kindly welcome me to activities at the Old Age Hall, and it's nice - a rare opportunity to get out and meet people. I felt a little bad, politically speaking, about this association of the figure of a sacred old woman with the coming of disease and death, but here's the thing. My new friends talk about disease and death all the time. It's not a disrespectful association I've made; it's the dominant landscape of their lives, lost loved ones and poor health. And I'm disabled enough to vibe with that, so we all sit around drinking tea and clacking our knitting needles and griping about our dodgy knees and ill husbands and the rude receptionists at the GP. And so, quite unconsciously, this does feel like a sacred space to me - albeit of an unintentional kind - that Mothers' Night of my fantasy where through thread and speech, we weave a community.
It's also feeling like a place where I feel that womanhood is, temporarily, viable for me - it's nice to be welcomed as one of a group like this, with the vague sense of permanence it promises, that in thirty years I could be a crotchety old crocheting woman still coming along to the group - a sense of belonging. For obvious reasons, that sense of belonging is much-longed-for, but not possible, around single-sex bands of men. Aelfcynn and I have discussed this before, and they suggested that my dysphoria perhaps really does diminish around pagan things - because witchy models of womanhood are uncommonly appealing. I think there's a truth to that, and that also the idea of being an old woman is just kinda cool. Strong, cranky, skilled, powerful, established women who built lives with both hands. I'd like to be that one day, I think, or at least be thought of as that.
And at the same time, I'm aware that my growing comfort with goddess rites and even Wicca-flavoured fertility imagery is in great part being able to look at them anew from a male position, one which makes sense of them in my life that my previous position did not. So what does it mean that I'm still envisaging rites in my calendar that feel, well, deeply female-coded to me - a mothers' night of multigenerational women practicing handicrafts. It feels too simplistic to say, well, gender is bullshit, and Haptalaon you knit, you're at the knitting club, but also too limiting to recommit to the concept of Girl Festivals And Boy Festivals when there's really no need in the year of our lord 2021. I suppose, it's because it feels organically true. Old Age Hall Knitting Club will probably feel differently about men coming to their meetups, and almost certainly about transsexuals, and so there's a sense of fragility and grief to it as well; this will not last, this will past, this time I have with these women is temporary - which is also an old-age feeling, isn't it, that growing awareness that you need to really hold on to your grandparents' words and presence because things feel finite. And it's also an annual festival feeling, a seasonal passing, where things will always stay the same, and at the same time be ever changing.
We have our cups of tea and talk about old times, and knit; and it is ancient and sacred, though no prayers are spoken.
(where I come from, there was a secular tradition of spending the 23rd December finishing the knitting to sell in Town on the 24th; and that's tangled up for me with the weaving Norns, with Vairë the Weaver, with Frau Holle. The Fisher is a cluster of ideas that sort of includes: Odin speaking to the dead to gain their secrets; the Norns; Baba Yaga; the Crone; and the sea; you know, that saturnian cthonic monstrous feminine Thing that many people have a sense of, but I'm finding for myself through new words and images. And so it just feels right, that there would be this especially dark and dangerous day between the Feast of the Winter King on secular Christmas day, and the birth of the Lightbringer on the Winter Solstice, and the 1970s tradition of the Ghost Story for Christmas screening on Christmas Eve - this grandmotherly day where you stay up all night by the fire and knit and exchange somewhat unsettling stories and weird things come out in the weaving.)
(Yes. Yet again, I have conceptualised a festival day as something done in a Group, when I intend to do it Alone. Maybe I'll put on some radio plays.)
As chance would have it, I have just joined the community knitting club at the Old Age Hall. Where I live is impossibly isolated, and has an average age of 50; anybody younger has pissed right off to the city, as young people from post-industrial communities tend to do. We are here because we're disabled and broke, and can live in quite astonishing comfort and security that we have never known - for as long as we can tolerate the tradeoffs.
I like older people. I vibe with them well, and we can talk about things we have in common like old television, being let down by our doctors, and enjoying being at home with a book. So they very kindly welcome me to activities at the Old Age Hall, and it's nice - a rare opportunity to get out and meet people. I felt a little bad, politically speaking, about this association of the figure of a sacred old woman with the coming of disease and death, but here's the thing. My new friends talk about disease and death all the time. It's not a disrespectful association I've made; it's the dominant landscape of their lives, lost loved ones and poor health. And I'm disabled enough to vibe with that, so we all sit around drinking tea and clacking our knitting needles and griping about our dodgy knees and ill husbands and the rude receptionists at the GP. And so, quite unconsciously, this does feel like a sacred space to me - albeit of an unintentional kind - that Mothers' Night of my fantasy where through thread and speech, we weave a community.
It's also feeling like a place where I feel that womanhood is, temporarily, viable for me - it's nice to be welcomed as one of a group like this, with the vague sense of permanence it promises, that in thirty years I could be a crotchety old crocheting woman still coming along to the group - a sense of belonging. For obvious reasons, that sense of belonging is much-longed-for, but not possible, around single-sex bands of men. Aelfcynn and I have discussed this before, and they suggested that my dysphoria perhaps really does diminish around pagan things - because witchy models of womanhood are uncommonly appealing. I think there's a truth to that, and that also the idea of being an old woman is just kinda cool. Strong, cranky, skilled, powerful, established women who built lives with both hands. I'd like to be that one day, I think, or at least be thought of as that.
And at the same time, I'm aware that my growing comfort with goddess rites and even Wicca-flavoured fertility imagery is in great part being able to look at them anew from a male position, one which makes sense of them in my life that my previous position did not. So what does it mean that I'm still envisaging rites in my calendar that feel, well, deeply female-coded to me - a mothers' night of multigenerational women practicing handicrafts. It feels too simplistic to say, well, gender is bullshit, and Haptalaon you knit, you're at the knitting club, but also too limiting to recommit to the concept of Girl Festivals And Boy Festivals when there's really no need in the year of our lord 2021. I suppose, it's because it feels organically true. Old Age Hall Knitting Club will probably feel differently about men coming to their meetups, and almost certainly about transsexuals, and so there's a sense of fragility and grief to it as well; this will not last, this will past, this time I have with these women is temporary - which is also an old-age feeling, isn't it, that growing awareness that you need to really hold on to your grandparents' words and presence because things feel finite. And it's also an annual festival feeling, a seasonal passing, where things will always stay the same, and at the same time be ever changing.
We have our cups of tea and talk about old times, and knit; and it is ancient and sacred, though no prayers are spoken.
