Witchy vibes have really helped me to think more positively about ageing.

As a teenager, I was Wiccan for a while, and whilst that’s no longer the case, there’s a bunch of conceptual motifs that I took from it that still play a part in how I think. In this case, the notion of the triple Goddess: the maiden, the mother and the crone.

I am certainly past my maiden stage — not just in literal age, but headspace. I don’t feel the need to accept every invitation I receive in a quest to explore what I want and to figure out how to best situate myself in the world. I know what I value, and now the challenge is in cultivating it.

Something interesting about this framing is that I’ve spent a while lately pondering “what does the mother era mean for someone who never plans to be a parent?”, because certainly fertility and motherhood are big components of the mother aspect. When I found myself thinking about my maiden era having come to an end, I kept slipping into wanting to skip forward to my crone era, because I didn’t have a sense of what the mother era would mean. Don’t get me wrong, I (and many other women) have long aspired to be forest hags, but I don’t want to poison my current era with excess wistfulness for the future.

In time, I realised that I can channel mother energy in a bunch of ways. For example, I like to host parties in my home rather than going out, because I am able to control the space and ensure that everyone is safe and comfortable. In my early 20s, I experimented with a heckton of drugs because I’ve always been deeply curious about mind altering substances, and occasionally, I was a bit unsafe in how I did this. As a result of that, all of my friends know that if they ever want to try a particular substance, they can come to me to talk about relative risks, how to test drugs for adulterants, and for a safe space in which to try them (because a trip sitter is pretty important for safe, first time psychedelics use)

Mildly NSFW:

!Another aspect of “mother” energy that’s just come to mind that isn’t necessarily something that I’d initially have thought of as fitting into this domain is that recently, I went to a sex party type thing, but I turned up too late and many people had gone home. I didn’t want to end the night without getting laid, so that led to me lowering my standards somewhat when it comes to the general vibe of a person. I went into one of the playrooms with a dude, and before long, it became clear that this was a scenario of “no sex is better than bad sex”, due to how he was so keen to slip straight to the “main event” without any foreplay (and of course, trying to do that is a great way to make the main event painful for some women who need to warm up). At the first instance of pain, we stopped for a moment so I could recover, and I decided “nah, I’m too old for this shit.” — having had plenty of bad sex in my maiden era, I could see where this was going. I told him that I wanted to stop, that I was not in the correct headspace, and apologised for the abruptness. It was pretty empowering actually, because a younger version of me would have implicitly felt like giving my consent was an irrevocable act, and I would have prioritised social niceties over my own comfort and pleasure.!<

Edit: added spoiler tags for mildly NSFW part

Have you considered stopping eating the kids? It might help with that “witch” part.

Oh hell yeah.