The Witches 

Dec 27, 2024

*I posted this – an earlier much shorter version – ages ago, but returned to it for a local arts publication and basically fell in love with my amazing friends and the telling as it expanded and deepened, got more honest and complete. Thanks for reading, and for telling your friends about this blog, if you are inclined to do so!! I write to empty out my HEAD, and because I have always been a writer, but knowing there are readers out there is heart-warming, sweet and makes me laugh because really, we’re all just such messes, ain’t we, struggling to be heard, to be seen, to live, to make sense – including to ourselves?

There were two of us at the beginning, meeting monthly to discuss our dreams, as well as love, sex, family, money, magic. The good stuff. Life. We talked about life. And then there were three of us, when Madeleine joined us, and then four – Leslie – and finally, short of a decade in, we were five, with the addition of BLG.

We were all, by then, barely in our thirties, coming together monthly to talk, eat, laugh, and support one another, an alchemical combination of five personalities and lives that lasted three years until one witch disappeared into the ether. Kelly. She’d been there from the start with me, yet when our friendship imploded, she abandoned the whole lot of us without looking back. I was glad of this. It made the break easier; there were no choices to make, no loyalties to test.  

From that point on we were, and remain, four, like the four directions, four elements of the zodiac, four humors of the body, remaining together as friends through thick and thin and all the in-betweens. We recommend books, we text baby pictures and doggie pictures (one grandchild so far, five dogs total at present); we share our joys, troubles, and favorite memes; we reminisce about times past and piece together where the hell he or she went, or was from, or who met who, where and when, exactly? And did you really date him for that long? Goodness. 

There are two ex-husbands we keep track of, vaguely (one – TBH – while hoping for an obituary), as well as seven children and two step-children between us. All of our parents are gone. Many of our dearest friends and colleagues were lost in that other pandemic of our lifetimes: AIDs. We have been to funerals, wakes, and memorial services together and in support of one another, including, last year, an open house and memorial for BLG’s ten-and-a-half-year-old son. Terrible losses either break you, or break your heart open. We don’t say there are now only six children and two step-children between us; we hold on to that other, truer number. Seven. She will never not be his mother. 

We’ve hosted and attended bridal and baby showers, and multiple weddings, including two for one of us because love – and first marriages – are often blind. What a train-wreck! We all saw it coming a mile away. She has moved on to a better, loving marriage, and man; I introduced them. The obituary we wait for belongs to the wretched ex. We never speak his name. 

We have been best friends for four decades, and we know what we know what we know about one another and have forgotten almost as much, probably. We have gone into all kinds of spaces hand in hand: emergency and rehearsal rooms, retreats, spas, abortion clinics, surgery, and chemo. We have traded info on sample sales, IVF, acupuncturists, therapists and gynecologists, psychics, grief counselors, caterers and florists; we are women of a certain age and have been through the wars, although our wars have been softened by privilege, and, especially in one case, multi-generational wealth of a kind unthinkable to most. We know this. We know how lucky we are. 

We read cards and consult the runes, for fun and as a way in, into the discussion, into our hearts, although one Witch did study astrology at Oxford over a hot summer in the eighties. Did you know how seriously the Brits take their astrology? They really do. Relax, folks: #NotAllBrits 

We compare diets, cooking styles, and exercise tips while discussing injuries from years ago that are taking a present toll on our aging bodies. We adore one another’s partners as needed; we never give advice unless it’s asked for, and reluctantly even then. We listen to one another without judgment, an essential quality of true friends, new or old. 

We made a pact after Kelly left the group, a pact we’ve kept concerning sharing tales or news outside our regular sessions; we met once a month for years, until Maddie went all left coast on us, dammit. She returns every summer, Persephone-like, and we merge in person during those too-brief hot weeks, but now, more often, we rely on Zoom, Facetime, and texting ‘chats’.   

One of us is a red-head; ages ago we committed to calling ourselves ‘The Goddesses’, because she asked, having been tormented on her elementary school playground for being a ‘flame-haired witch’. We do occasionally refer to ourselves as The Goddesses, and still more often as The Witches, as habit, or forgetfulness, kicks in. Plus – The Goddesses? It’s a bit much, isn’t it? Yes, yes it is. But we enjoy it nonetheless. 

We have and claim no special powers, other than those of women who have indeed survived the various wars, and of old friends who understand and accept and love and enjoy one another. The comfort of those we’ve known well and forever is great, like a bed we long to return to at night, allowing total relaxation, and healing of the kind gained having surrendered to deep sleep. 

We have names that were given in an acting class – or the business of – decades ago, names that one of us (not me) miraculously remembered: Brandy Snapdragon (the red-head), Dimples McSnakecharmer (guilty!), Frisky Fishbuddy (the Piscean), and Wilder Snowleopard (our resident Leo). We have so much collective history, and memory, perhaps we do have special powers, concerning love, healing, and humor. Our husbands and partners and exes and various family members have sometimes looked askance on this talk of witches, but the ones who have stuck and stuck around are wisely and appropriately humble in our collective presence, or when one or another of us reaches out because the need is great. The kids and their relatively new-ish spouses (two, so far) call us Auntie this or that, and know our bond is true, deep, and lasting; they say they hope for the same thing or something very like, as do we for them, with their friends. 

We all had complicated, difficult mothers. One of us (not me) puts it more bluntly: they were narcissists, unhappy, angry women who, like so many of their generation, were frustrated by the narrow road even the brightest women were expected to travel. One of our moms married a gay man, forging a very lucrative career in Manhattan real estate while looking the other way after the kids were born. Another was the first of four wives; she never recovered fully from being replaced by – you guessed it – her children’s nanny. And others. Still another left the alcoholic father of her two daughters when the girls were both under six-years-old, returning to her home country of France. She was set on marrying smart the next time around, and for money; she achieved that, for better and for worse. A few years later, not many, her ex – my best friend’s dad – set himself on fire in the hospital bed where he lay slowly dying of cirrhosis of the liver. Marriages, like friendships, end or survive for all sorts of reasons. The last of our mothers, mine, stayed married for life to her true love. It can happen. 

Three of our four mothers died of breast cancer, two as a result of radiation therapy that later returned as radiation poisoning. Doctors in the 1960s and ‘70s were doing their best, with much less research or funding for better treatments, largely because breast cancer was a “women’s issue”, minimized by male funders, male deciders. We Witches know that women, and their health, are not a niche, fringe issue; we assert and demand better, and more. We donate, nowadays, to the cause. The causes. Unlike our mothers, we have full agency, including our own money. 

My mother was lost not to cancer but to dementia and, ultimately, starvation, her dementia brought on, possibly, by anesthesia given during an abdominal surgery in her seventies. They wanted to remove and check a softball sized tumor enveloping her one remaining ovary; it was benign. She was never the same after that, mentally. Her other reproductive organs had been removed four decades earlier by two male doctors who decided it was for the best, because they believed she was not capable of making the right decisions about birth control as a Catholic, after four caesarians in under six years. 

My dad (not Catholic) was relieved and grateful, but what was that like, coming out of anesthesia at thirty-two years old to be told you were missing vital organs, taken without your consent or prior knowledge? All four of our mothers, without exception, hated their human, female bodies. Were they narcissists, or simply – appropriately, I would argue – hurting, angry, and in pain? 

We’re all witches, goddesses, and twisted sisters, ain’t we, girls, ladies, women? Doing the best we can. Sisterhood, wherever you find it, whatever you call it, is powerful, and necessary. However, whenever these vital bonds began, whenever they end (in other obits and memorials, I suppose), my gratitude to these three women is boundless, limitless, necessary. We lift one another, and will continue to do so for as long as we live.