Becoming a mother is the witchiest I have ever felt

For someone who thought she had peaked as 'Most likely to own a black cat' in Year Four, nowadays the witchy levels are truly on another scale.

I was a kid who donned a bin bag on Halloween, face smeared in pearlescent green face paint, to carry a twiggy broom up the neighbour’s driveway in the hope of free sweets. The Wrong Witch, Hocus Pocus, Winnie the Witch, The Worst Witch—the nineties was an abundance of witches. I loved them all. Then, witches became cool. Harry Potter was full of them. Boring, incurious people are skeptical of magic. It’s the witchy ones who are full of life.

There’s a difference between feeling ‘spooky’ and ‘witchy’. For me, feeling ‘spooky’ is jumping at creaks, holding a torch beneath your chin, and hollow pumpkins. Spookiness is an outward thing. Witchiness is different. It comes from inside, from whispers and intuition, from careful observation. It’s an awful, gentle, consuming power. It’s not there to perform. Witchiness is a living thing, hidden in every person, but never have I felt it more than now.

This isn’t an essay on the history of women and witches, nor is it an exploration on the way that misogyny led to the systematic torture of women who were a little bit different, or a little bit brilliant (if you want something on that, The Manningtree Witches by A K Blakemore is perfection). This is about the witchiness that motherhood has brought into my life.

The way that women use magic in literature is a reflection of the way we navigate every day life. Molly Weasley uses it to simultaneously wash the pots, keep check on where her family are located at any given hour, and to kill a woman who tries to murder her daughter. She is vast in her magic. It sharpens and softens her in a hot second.

Yes, motherhood has a terrifying bigness to it. When I’m out and about with my daughter, my identity is subsumed by hers. I understand why this is. She is incredibly precious and looks like a Cabbage Patch Doll. In public, I am her bodyguard and PR, organising her diary and making sure she has snacks on demand. When I’m at home, I metamorphose into seven or eight different roles, each a bungee cord back to the person I am at my core. Parenting a small person involves a lot of incessant Googling in the early days, but when that’s done with, the magic creeps in.

For me, it’s when I bend over her little body to feed her, my back arched like a comma.

It’s the way I watched my own mum calm her down by whispering into her ear, the sound like an incantation.

It’s the way I dangle her feet over rosemary and sage when she’s hurt herself to stop her from crying.

It’s the way I sway with her in the night, drunk from fatigue, my lank, witchy hair dangling over both our faces.

It’s the way my skin prickles to tell me she’s hungry before she let me know herself.

It’s the way she crawls under my skirt, tugging it over her face to surprise me, as though I’m not conscious of where she is every second of every day.

It’s the way she follows me around the kitchen—hands slapping the floor—like a pendulum keeping time.

It’s the way I dab eucalyptus oil on her sleeping bag when she’s ill.

It’s the way I hide carrots, balls, and scrunched up paper from her, revealing them with the flourish of a magician holding the scruff of a white rabbit.

It’s listening more deeply than I have ever listened before, to her breathing, her shuffles, her sucking sounds.

So often, it’s living in the limbo-land between sleep and consciousness, reading prophecy into dreams.

She is my Horcrux. Part of my silly little soul is in her body and as I watch her, I constantly learn about myself.

And you know what’s wild about motherhood? When you zoom out a little? The coven-like way that women find each other, to exchange advice, to congregate in community halls with babies tucked in slings and propped on shoulders. I have talked in granular detail about nipples and milk and periods and hair loss and pain—oh my God—so much pain. But with this comes a power. I don’t think I have ever felt so powerful. As someone conflict-avoidant, it surprises me to know that now, I would throw an anvil at a wolf if it meant keeping my daughter safe.

I have ridden the craziest waves of tension and tightening during birth. At one point, I felt like I was hovering over my own body. Whilst nursing, the sharp, toe-curling pinches and pangs gave me lock-jaw and I hummed through it. The dull ache and stiffness of holding the same nursing position for ten hours a day made me crone like. Power doesn’t feel like an explosion. It’s sustained, persistent endurance.  

I used to think I had a low pain threshold, according to wax strips, rolled ankles, and paper cuts. When I gave birth, I went somewhere hooked between our world and elsewhere, that wibbly place that isn’t quite conscious, that pulses in waves like a blind jellyfish. There, I tugged on the tether between me and my daughter, yanking her earthside from wherever she had been waiting for me.

Y’know what? That’s pretty witchy. This year, I’m simply going to dress up as myself.