My Three-Year-Old, My Former Self, and Magick for My Inner Child

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I like being read to, too. What’s My Point? is the podcast version of these blogs, where I read what I’ve written, wander through my journal entries, and follow the breadcrumbs out loud.

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Truman is obsessed with Halloween, which is funny because Halloween is my birthday, and I used to say the holiday was wasted on me. I hated dressing up. People were always busy. Sometimes my birthday felt like an afterthought.

Truman apparently has other plans. 😂

There has barely been a day since last Halloween and Christmas where one of those two holidays hasn't shown up somewhere in this house. He dresses up like a ghost constantly and walks around doing this tiny little:

“Booooooo.”

Christmas comes up constantly too, which is another holiday where I had kind of lost some of the feeling I used to have for it.

Truman has been keeping both holidays alive all year.

So now I’m sitting here beside twelve little ghosts while I write about some of mine.

Okay. 😂

Magick for the Little One Inside

I’m working on something kind of big right now.

Well, big for me. 😂

I’m working on a five-part series right now about ceremonial magick, the LBRP, my album ANYMALS, and something I’ve been calling Magick for the Little One Inside. I’m looking at the ritual, but I’m also looking at what happens inside me while I practice it. My reactions, old patterns, feelings, beliefs, and the parts of myself that show up along the way.

It didn’t start out as an album about the LBRP. It started much smaller than that. I was writing conversations with the little one inside me, with a different animal showing up in each one. I chose the animals because I like the under appreciated ones.. like skunk, porcupine, seahorse, coyote.

Then, once the animals were there, I started noticing something.

The structure of the LBRP was showing up too. Each animal represent an element. I could match each one to the guardians on the ritual. So I started writing and structuring the album to follow LBRP movements and correspondences.

And somehow these animals were giving me a way to look at the emotional side of the ritual that I hadn’t seen quite like this before.

I’m still figuring out exactly what I think is happening there. That’s a big part of what the five-part series is about.

And I’m nervous about it because the LBRP is old. Well known. People have spent their whole lives studying ceremonial magick. There are people who know way more about it than I do, and I want to be clear about where I’m coming from when I talk about it.

I’m a practitioner. I’m a student. I’m a peer sharing my notes.

If somebody hears me talking about the LBRP and wants to really study it, please find real teachers. Read books. Learn the traditional ritual. Learn what other people have said about it.

What I’m interested in talking about is a little different.

I want to talk about what happens when I actually do it. What is it doing in me? What happens when I turn, speak, move, picture something, face a direction, set a boundary, come back to center?

And lately I’ve been trying to bring all of that down into really simple language.

I keep calling it Magick for the Little One Inside.

Basically, I can study something in big adult words. Cool. Then I want to bring it home and explain it to Sarah.

Sarah was my old name. She was me before I became Joy. (Loui is my artist name.)

And if Sarah needs a dictionary, we’ve gone too far. 😂

But before I get into that bigger series, I wanted to make this one first.

Because here’s what has been happening in my house and in my head this week, and somehow all these little things keep bumping into the giant thing I’m writing.

Could I Explain This to Sarah?

I even cleaned out this tiny closet so I’d have somewhere quiet to record.

I put a mirror in here. I put up a picture of me when I was little, Sarah , with my granny.

So in my more recent work and practice, my direction has been more:

Could I explain this to Sarah?

Could I say this in words she would actually use?

Because I know big words. Sometimes I even like big words. 😂 But there’s a difference between understanding a word and actually talking that way.

I want this to sound like me.

If I wouldn’t say it to Justin in the kitchen, I want to look at it again.

Cool! Choreography!

My husband was the one who introduced me to ceremonial magick. He had practiced quietly for about ten years. he never showed anyone.

I was the first person he shared it with.

And when I first watched him perform the LBRP, I remember being fascinated by it.

My reaction was basically:

Cool! Choreography!

😂

While I was journal about that this morning, I wrote something like:

“Sarah thought it was cool when she saw Justin perform it for the first time.”

Sarah.

I hadn’t really been saying it that way.

And that tiny change got me.

Because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Sarah as somebody I survived.

I wrote her a funeral.

I wrote a song called “Sarah” last year during the first few months I was making music. Then, without really planning it, that started turning into writing this whole album called FVNERAL of False Selves.

At the time, I thought I was burying parts of myself.

Lately I’m starting to look at that differently.

That’s part of what this five-part series is becoming.

ANYMALS is brand new. It isn’t even streaming yet. I wrote these songs, started looking at what the animals were doing, and now the art is changing the way I see parts of myself I once tried to bury.

So I’m following my own breadcrumbs to see where they go.

Apparently I’m going to spend the rest of my life pulling apart my own songs and going:

“What the fuck did I mean by that?”

😂

Although maybe pulling them apart is the wrong way to say it.

I think I’m finding out that a song can hold more than I knew how to name when I wrote it.

I can write something, think I know what it means, live another year, come back to it, and suddenly there’s something else sitting there.

The song stayed the same.

I’m the one standing somewhere different when I read it.

Because this morning I pulled up “Sarah.”

There are lines in that song where I’m very clearly holding a funeral for her.

Then I say:

“She didn’t die, she transitioned.”

Okay.

Then:

“A living grave she rose within.”

Okay, Loui.

And near the very end I say:

“And now, you live in this room.”

And then I end the song with:

“Rest in peace. You’re free.”

Girl.

Pick one. 😂

You live in this room.

Rest in peace.

Apparently even while I was trying to bury Sarah, the song kept letting her back in the house.

And I think that’s part of what I’m only starting to understand now.

Sarah carried a lot of things that hurt. She also carried things I still have. She was curious. She was creative. She was funny. She loved people. She got angry. She wanted things.

And apparently she thought ceremonial magick was really fucking cool. 😂

That one made me cry this morning because I’m starting to remember her as more than the person who suffered.

The Big Thing Stays Big. The Apple Still Needs Cutting.

And this is kind of what I want these podcasts to be allowed to do.

I want to talk about something heavy, and then my kid needs an apple cut up.

I want to talk about Sarah and ceremonial magick and something that made me cry, and then Truman comes in and announces that he wiped a booger on the wall.

Because that’s actually what my life feels like.

I’ll have some huge realization about my former self, and five minutes later my son wants me to feed him apple bites while he sits in a black tote full of warm water on the balcony and pretends its a hot tub.

The big thing stays big.

The apple still needs cutting.

I like that.

Actually, on September 5th I wrote in my journal:

“I’m thinking about starting a podcast.”

I had Audacity on my computer. My husband said he had a microphone I could use. I was worried my computer would run out of space.

I wrote that maybe I’d try recording something in the next day or two.

Fingies crossed.

That was three days ago.

Now I’m working on a five-part series about ceremonial magick, inner-child work, ritual, ANYMALS, and apparently digging up my own symbolic graves to check whether I buried the right shit.

So.

That escalated. 😂

I’m still putting it together. Some of these connections are things I’m seeing this week. Some of them I’m seeing while I write this.

I’m studying. I’m practicing. I’m looking back through my own work and going:

“Wait. Has this been here the whole time?”

These are my notes while I find out.

I’m sharing something while it’s working on me.

Somebody Else Gets to Be the Sun

And while I’ve been doing all of that, regular life keeps walking straight through the middle of it.

My husband cut himself off from YouTube recently.

I’ve been really happy watching what happened to those hours.

He’s drawing again.

Like, really drawing.

He started this huge project with twelve koi fish. They’re mostly Christmas gifts, but we’re hoping to photograph them and maybe make prints too. He’s already talking about doing a large dragon piece next.

He’s treating the koi almost like a job right now. Clocking his hours. Sitting down and doing the work. Within a few days he already had five big drafts going.

And Truman wants in.

The other day I heard him running across the upstairs floor:

STOMP STOMP STOMP.

Then:

“I NAHNT TO DRAW WITH YOU!”

😂

I wrote in my journal afterward:

“It’s nice. It’s nice we are all creating.”

Because I’m always working on Loui Crow. Writing something. Working on the website. Making music. Doing whatever strange thing has followed me into the room that day.

My husband has been searching for that kind of fire for a while.

So hearing him and Truman upstairs laughing while he draws has been really nice.

And it gives me little pockets of more time too. Sometimes I work. Sometimes I clean. Sometimes I just get a minute where somebody else is the sun. 😂

Nap Strikes, Cat Videos, Pee, and Boogers

Truman is three and a half now, and lately I keep noticing how much his communication is changing.

He’s been on what we call a “nap strike.”

We started saying that when he refuses his nap, and now he’ll yell:

“NO! I’M ON A NAP STRIKE!”

And we’ll tell him, okay, if you get grumpy later, remember you’re tired because you skipped your nap.

Sometimes I’ll joke to my husband, “I hope we don’t get yelled at today because somebody’s tired.”

And now Truman jumps in:

“I’m not going to yell at you.”

😂

A couple days ago we were watching porcupine videos.

He knows Daddy has rules about YouTube Shorts, especially those cat videos where cats get hurt and people laugh.

We had literally just talked about it that morning, ironically. Totally out of the blue he just brought it up.

He said, “Daddy doesn’t want you watching short videos.” (“you” is what he often still says when he means himself.)
I said, “yeah, he doesnt want you watching youtube shorts, or videos where animals are getting hurt and people are laughing.”

I told him:

“I don’t like when people laugh at me when I’m hurt.”

That was pretty much the whole conversation. It was random that he brought it up because it had probably been weeks since it was last mentioned.

Then we left the room for a minute. Autoplay did whatever cursed little thing autoplay does, and when Truman came back there were cat Shorts playing.

He came into the kitchen and told me:

“There was short cat videos on TV. I wasn’t watching it.”

I asked, ‘what happened? You just walked in and it was playing?”

He told me he shut it off.

He remembered what we had talked about. He understood enough to make a choice on his own.

Then another night, he woke me up at three in the morning because he had to pee.

That was a first.

Usually he sleeps through it. Sometimes his diaper leaks. But this time he woke up. He knew what it meant.

And I keep noticing little moments like that with him.

Something happens in his body. He notices it. He finds words for it. Then he can do something.

And somewhere mixed in with all of that, our seventh orchid bloom opened on the seventh. Truman sat on the kitchen floor shelling edamame. Then he pointed his finger at the wall and announced:

“I wiped a booger on the wall.”

This is basically what my journals and my brain look like. 😂

But while I was writing all of this down, I went:

Oh, jeez.

This is what I’m writing about.

😂

I’m sitting here nervous about writing this big series about ritual, and half my journal is me watching this tiny space between something happening and what somebody does next.

And I’m watching it in myself too.

The Loading Screen

Because I’ve been reactive for a long time.

I used to wake up angry.

I mean that pretty literally. For as long as I can remember, anger was just there in the morning.

This was way before I became a mom.

I could wake up already irritated with the day before anything had even happened.

Then I became a mom.

And having a little kid means somebody needs something from you approximately 0 seconds after consciousness returns to your body. 😂

So there were mornings where Truman and I would blow up at each other almost immediately.

My husband has said before that he was tired of every morning turning into a blowout between us.

That hurts to remember.

And I also know it’s changing.

I still wake up with my brain going:

“What time is it? What does Truman need? Is his diaper okay? I need to get his bottle. I have to pee. What are we doing today? What do I need to work on?”

My brain browser opens 10 tabs immediately. 😂 I still get overwhelmed. I still get tense. I still snap.

I literally growl sometimes.

UUUUUGGGGGHHHHH.

That is apparently one of my quickest available forms of communication. 😂

Sometimes I catch the reaction before it comes out. Sometimes I catch it halfway through.

And sometimes the UUUUUGGGGGHHHHH has already escaped the enclosure and everybody in the room has been informed that Momom’s nervous system has filed a complaint. 😂

But the difference is real.

I snap less often. When I do snap, there’s usually less heat behind it. I stay mad for less time. I recognize what’s happening sooner. I walk away more. Sometimes I wait before I answer. I get curious about what Truman is actually trying to tell me faster. I come back faster.

This isn’t a story about how I learned to stay calm all the time.

I never want any of this to sound like I turned into some woman who calmly chooses every response while soft music plays somewhere behind her. 😂

That woman has yet to move into this apartment.

I still lose my shit sometimes.

The pause is something I’m practicing.

Sometimes I find it before the reaction. Sometimes halfway through. Sometimes afterward. And afterward counts too. Because afterward I can look at what happened.

Oh.

Here’s the growl.

Here’s my body getting tight.
Here’s the urge to control this.
Here’s the sentence loading in my mouth.
And sometimes the sentence still launches. 😂
But I’m starting to recognize the loading screen.
The pause feels less like something I either have or I don’t.

It’s getting bigger.

Somebody just heard UUUUUGGGGGHHHHH, and Momom walked away for a minute, and everybody gets another try.

Excuse Me. I Had Momom First.

And parenting gave that old anger plenty of places to go.

Truman has been telling Daddy “go away” for a long time. Probably since he was around two.

And it used to get me worked up.

“Why are you telling Daddy to go away?”
“You can’t tell him to go away.”
“Don’t tell him to go away.”
“I want Daddy here.”

It usually ended with Truman getting more worked up, then me getting more worked up, and suddenly everybody is worked up over a three-year-old wanting Momom to himself.

One thing I’ve been practicing is using “don’t” and “can’t” less.

And that started changing something in me too.

Instead of jumping straight into trying to control what he was doing, I had a little more room to look at it.

Eventually I started noticing when he said it.

A lot of the time, Truman and I would be having a really good time together. He gets most of my attention when it’s just us.

We talk constantly. I repeat things back to him. I watch what he’s doing. We make long eye contact. We’re really tuned into each other.

Then Daddy walks in.

And my attention changes.

My hubby and I get talking. I might still be playing with Truman, but now I’m listening to Daddy too. I’m looking at him. Maybe I’m rubbing his back or touching his hair while we talk.

Truman notices immediately.

Basically:

Excuse me. I had Momom first. Remove this man.

😂

Once I saw that, the whole thing looked different. He wanted the moment we were having to keep going.

Maybe what he was really saying was, “I want Momom the way I had Momom thirty seconds ago.”

And once I could see that, I had more choices in how I answered him.

Sometimes I have told him that I want Daddy here.

I’ve even told him that if Daddy leaves, I’m probably going to follow him because I want to see my husband. 😂

Now that I realize he just wants to preserve the moment, I usually give it a little extra time.

And over time, the whole thing has gotten softer.

Truman still does it sometimes.

I react less.

Sarah Is Parenting Now

Sometimes when I get really worked up, I’ve said:

“Sarah is parenting now.”

Maybe Sarah learned that when something felt wrong, she had to fix it right now.

Stop it. Control it. Get everybody settled. Make the room okay.

I’m still figuring that one out.

But it changes something when I can notice her.

There she is.

Something scared her. Something feels out of control.

What happens next?

And I think that’s part of why ritual has gotten so interesting to me lately.

Because “just pause” sounds really easy until your whole body is already going:

UUUUUGGGGGHHHHH.

😂

Sometimes I need something to do inside that space.

Stand here.
Turn.
Look.
Speak.
Move.
Come back.

The ritual gives those seconds something to do.

Ritual gives the pause a body.

I’m still figuring out exactly what that means.

That’s part of the five-part series coming.

The Black Tote

And then, because always Truman has excellent comedic timing, something happened this morning while I was writing about all of this.

I had just been writing about how much he wants to spend time with me. He really does want to do everything with me right now.

Lately he’s been playing outside in this big black tote we have.

It’s basically his little pool, except he likes warm water in it, so sometimes we call it his hot tub.

He’ll decide he wants to go outside and immediately start trying to take his shirt off.

Then eventually I hear: “I need help to take my shirt off so I can go play in the water.”

Then comes the diaper. “And my diaper too.”

Lately he can pull the blue tabs himself, which he’s very proud of.

So he climbs into this black tote, and waits while I fill it with warm water. Sometimes I slowly pour water over his hand, or his knee, or one of his toys, and he just delights in it. Squeals. Laughs.

He loves when I sit there with him. I make this little blue sun with sunglasses talk to him when he tells me “make the sun talk 10 times.”

He has me spray the plants and the bumblebees with a little mist from the spray bottle.

It’s so simple.

He mostly wants me there. He wants me to watch. Talk to him. And I genuinely love being there with him.

I also need breaks sometimes. I need to clean something. I want to work on Loui Crow. Sometimes I want five minutes where nobody needs Momom. 😂

But I know this part of his life is small.

He’ll stare straight into my eyes forever.

So I had just written all this stuff in my journal about how sometimes he tells Daddy to go away because he wants Momom, but that he does it a lot less lately.

Then I walked into the living room this morning.

Truman looked at me and said:

“I want Dad. Go away.”

😂

Apparently Momom Gets Bounced From the Club Too

I laughed all the way back to the kitchen.

He’s actually done that to me a few times lately.

And I love it.

And the funniest part is that while I’ve been writing all this out, he keeps coming into the kitchen to tickle my ear with a sunflower.

Then he goes back into the living room.

And I’m still banned if I try to come back in. He keeps telling me to go away because he wants Dad.
So apparently I have visitation rights. I can receive sunflower tickles. I simply cannot enter the premises. 😂

And I keep thinking about how different that feels. A year and a half ago, “go away” could start a blowout.

Today, “go away” sends me laughing into the kitchen because I’m thrilled my kid wants time with his dad.

Same kid.

Same phrase.

More room inside Momom before the next move.

He can want me all day. He can want Daddy. He can adore me and tell me to get out.

Both are great.

So I Guess Maybe That’s My Point

A lot of these things looked different when I gave myself another second to look at them.

Sarah looked different.

Truman telling Daddy to go away looked different.

Even my own anger started looking different when I could catch it happening instead of just getting swept up in it.

And maybe that’s part of what I’m finding in ritual too. Sometimes I need a little room between what happens and what I do next.
Sometimes that room is big enough for me to catch myself before I react. Sometimes I catch it halfway through. Sometimes everybody already heard the UUUUUGGGGGHHHHH and we’re working with what we’ve got. 😂

Sometimes I figure it out afterward.

But the room is getting bigger.

Sarah suffered. She also thought things were cool.

I buried her. She lives in the room.

I still react.

So maybe that’s enough evidence for today.

I’m still in it. I’m noticing sooner.

And I’m sharing what I’m finding while I’m finding it.

Anyway.

Apparently I’m working on a five-part series about ceremonial magick, inner-child work, animals, old funerals, and whatever else crawls out while I’m writing it.

So, you know.

Something light. 😂