Inside Our Children's Hearts

When I learned I was pregnant with my first child one of the things I thought about was how I was going to introduce and teach that child about our beliefs. My husband and I are pagan so there really isn't a book that is handed out that outlines how to raise your kids in your religious system. There are many, many different belief systems that fall under the umbrella term of pagan just as there are that fall under the term of Christian. The key difference is that Christians all belief in a singular God where pagans all belief in many different things. Some belief in many gods, some belief in the idea of a god and goddess alone and so on and so forth. There are too many to list and many that can contradict each other.

To be honest I felt overwhelmed by not having a playbook of sorts and was jealous of the Christian faith and their Bible that laid out a path. Not to mention the sense of community that you get by attending a church and the benefits that come with that. Now I have too many issues with Christianity and there are many reasons that I feel paganism and Witchcraft are right for me and my family but a sense of community is something I lack.

My husband is in the United States Coast Guard and we move every four years. We were at our first station in a very small town that barely qualified for the term city when I had my daughter Emma and I knew two people. I was completely isolated. Add in the military which isn't necessarily friendly to other religions and the fact that my husband is Asatru which is not a large branch of paganism it makes for a somewhat solitary life.

We have not found a group or kindred in our 10 years of marriage or being in the Coast Guard but we did find a group of friends briefly at one of our stations in New Orleans through the Society for Creative Anachronism. While in New Orleans I found a need for friends because I found myself pregnant and subsequently suffering a miscarriage. It was one of the deepest pains I had found and that is saying something because I had a rough childhood. My family still grieves for our baby boy. We found through testing that we were having a boy and what had caused the miscarriage. We had told Emma about her soon to be sibling and we had to tell her about his death as well. We named him Rowan Avery and found some solace in that naming.

It was her first experience with death and at the age of four I think she handled it as well as she could. She is a very expressive and empathetic child. Four years later she still talks about him from time to time. It was also the first time we really talked about our beliefs and how it related specifically to death. We spoke simply as we could because she was four but also clearly about how we feel that our souls go to rest with our ancestors. That Rowan would be with those who had already died and would be there when we died.

As I mentioned earlier my husband is Asatru but I'm more eclectic in my beliefs. I hold no closeness to any pantheon of gods. I feel more closeness to the fae and prefer to practice witchcraft more as an actual practice not Wicca but more as healers and hedge witches used to. I like to add in magic to gardening, cooking and crafting. A long time ago people used to be more close to the spirits that roamed than they really did to the gods but that was very long ago and that's more how my world view is. I do however belief in a form of reincarnation and that's a conversation that came up with Emma when I was driving home with her and my 2 year old Abby. I explained about the Buddhist viewpoint and then I explained mine. That I feel human souls are reincarnated into human bodies that there are lessons that need to be learned and when they are fully learned the souls may rest in the afterlife.

There are many lessons that I continue to try and teach our kids. Some pop up naturally and some we bring up on purpose. It's hard to know what to teach because there is no guideline. I try to learn what I can from the past and integrate it into what exists right now. I have to learn how to take a belief system that is based in nature and mix it into an increasingly high tech world. I do belief that there will be hiccups along the way but we will find our way somewhere along this rocky path.