Experiencer

I often say that my mother raised my brother and me as anti-Catholic. To say she was a “recovering Catholic” would be putting it lightly. If there was one thing she was going to do, it was save us from a life of shame and fear. She was a pattern breaker, and I give her the utmost credit.

Anyone in a family line who breaks the pattern of trauma or abuse is a saint in my book. She did her very best, although no parent can save their children from trauma, unfortunately. Apparently, that is part of the deal of being human.

After my parents divorced, she took my brother and me back to the East Coast. In a year of transition, we moved into her childhood home with her mother, my grandmother we called Doe. This year at Oak Drive was memorable, to say the least. I will tell that story soon.

Much to my mother’s chagrin, my grandmother still taught at St. Mark’s School. My mother agreed that we would go to school and church there for the year, but she was always whispering in our ears, “Don’t worry about that,” “There’s another story there. I’ll tell you at home.” She did everything she could to keep us from being indoctrinated into a worldview of heaven and hell or sinning.

As you are probably deducing, my mother had spent her own childhood in absolute fear of hell. She was certain she was a sinner and pictured herself burning for eternity. As a true empath and deeply psychosomatic (like mother, like daughter), she was tormented. The nuns at her school were staunch disciplinarians whose main purpose seemed to be terrifying and beating the children into submission.

She would have none of that for her own kids. Her children would be raised not fearing for their afterlife, not imploding with the shame of human instinct. They would be free. They would be New Age.

In the early 1980s my mom moved us to Columbia, Maryland, a new city built for justice, equity, and peace. A city built to be “a garden for the growing of people.” There were only interfaith centers, no churches. Walking paths connected every village, and streets were named after poets like Wilde Lake and Faulkner Ridge. It was idyllic in many ways. I still thank her for choosing to raise us in this bubble of diversity.

My mom became an incredible dabbler in the New Age. She went to evening classes in metaphysics and came home with stories of what she had learned. She taught us astrology, how to read charts, and the poetry of the signs, the elements, and their myths. She showed us how magical it was that people all over the world looked to the stars for guidance, finding patterns and meaning in the sky.

Her lessons were alive. We stood against a white wall trying to see each other’s auras. We sent healing energy through touch. She showed us how to work with a pendulum. And when she read tarot, she did not recite memorized meanings; she saw movies in her mind, stories unfolding with every card. Some of my favorite memories are of her bedtime tarot stories, choosing a card and spinning a tale from it, showing me the deeper magic hidden in each symbol.

My mother loved the mysteries of life, the hidden threads that connect us to one another and to the cosmos. Her bookshelf overflowed with Jung, Joseph Campbell, and astrology. She was a seeker, a mystic, and her courage to keep searching spiritually is a gift I am proud to inherit. Every lesson, every story, was a way of seeing the hidden patterns and magic woven into life, a way to feel that we are never separate from the mysteries that surround us.

Although I took to the New Age quite well (clearly), I craved the ritual and community my friends’ religions offered. I would go to Hebrew School whenever I could with my friends or visit any church just to peek in and see what they were up to. I watched my Jewish friends bathe their eyes with candlelight in awe. I can still remember the smell of frankincense in the Presbyterian church. I was an anthropologist from a very young age, always a visitor, never a joiner. A blessing and a curse, but I thank my mother for training us not to be followers when it came to religion or anything else.

Ellen Kucera did not care for rules. One time we had to go to church for some reason, and during communion my mom whispered, “Go on up there and get some. I talked it over with the Father. He said it’s fine.” I went up, terrified that I wasn’t cupping my hands the right way. Would somebody call me out? My mom just smiled, probably pleased with her defiance. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized she was either flat-out lying or the “Father” she spoke of wasn’t the priest. Either way it was a good example of her anti-establishment ways.

One rule she did enforce, and strictly, was no Ouija boards. None. If I was ever at someone’s house and they brought one out, I was to call her immediately so she could pick me up, no matter the hour. I was never to be in a house where people were calling in random spirits for entertainment.

She had good reasons. For years she only explained it to us like this: “Imagine there’s a knock at your door at midnight. Without looking in the peephole or asking ‘Who’s there?’ you go ahead and open the door.” When she finally told us the whole story, it shook me to my bones.

As I have grown, I have found myself completely mesmerized and enchanted by both Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary. It feels like an ancestral call from the Catholic and Episcopalian lines of my family that go back for generations. I have been a goddess worshipper since college, and the Marys remain my most accessible goddesses.

Looking back, it makes sense. I had always known the love and protection of women in my life. It is natural, then, that I was drawn to figures who embodied power, mercy, and mystery. In the Marys I found not only echoes of my ancestry but also a reflection of the devotion and strength I had already experienced at home.

I carry these memories like sacred relics. The strong, feisty mother I knew in my childhood changed so profoundly in my teens. The secrets she had carried, the abuse she had endured, could no longer be tucked away in the corners of her mind. They rose up, filling her body and her days, and she became a shadow of the woman she once was. She tried to bury it all beneath the earth, but migraines and depression claimed her, confining her to a dark room for what felt like an eternity. I cherish that chapter of her life when she was wild and alive, radiant with fire. The pain that came after was almost unbearable to witness.

The story of her awakening, the unraveling and reckoning, is one I am not yet ready to tell. Perhaps one day I will be. For now, I hold onto the memory of my mother as she was in her prime, bold, curious, fearless, a teacher of independent thought and wonder at the mysterious universe around us.

I love her still, fiercely, and think of her every day, carrying her light as a piece of my own. It is no wonder that I have been drawn to the goddesses and the Marys, for I already knew the love, the protection, and the power of women from the one who raised me. In them, I see reflections of her fire and her devotion, guiding me as she always did.