Complinegs on your parenting

Also: What I mean when we say "witchy" 🌙

A witch wrote me:

“There’s something that's been eating at me that I wonder if fellow witches are also perplexed or irked by.

The situation goes like this:

• My little kids (2 and 4) are being whiny/sensitive/overstimulated, like being dragged to some family grown-up dinner where they are expected to sit at a table and wait forever for food that they are not going to like anyway, or they are having big emotions about something that seems very important to them, or just having a hard time waiting for... anything.

• Me: trying to hold things together and acknowledge their emotions and not lose my shit.

• Assumingly well-meaning (???) family member, usually someone on my partner's side: ‘You are so patient with your kids" or ‘I would not have had patience like that when my kids were their age’

• What I hear: ‘How do you tolerate your own terrible children?’ ‘Why have you not yelled at them to shut up yet???’”

Is anyone else annoyed by comments like this? Are they compliments or underhanded digs? Has anyone found a way to reframe them?”

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This question made me think of a time I took my boys to the grocery store with me, and some older lady came up to me in the produce section and said out of nowhere, “Looks like you have your hands full!” and I was confused because they were acting fine as far as I could tell. She was smiling. I was like, “Haha thanks,” and internally, I was like, “u bitch.”

I also remembered how hard it was to go to restaurants and have grown-up dinners with kids that little. It’s a roll of the dice, and sometimes it doesn’t work out great. I still remember how angry I was at a kind of nice restaurant in Maine at the older couple who moved away from us and our 3 and 6-year-old boys and also how much I didn’t blame them. Plus, sometimes ‘grown up” dinners can go on long past when kids should be in bed, but so it gets better as the kids get older and they can sit longer (and you can learn things like just ordering their dinner when they sit down and not wait for the old/slow-eater folks to enjoy their cocktail + appetizer first).

To me, these kind of comments are both a neg and a misplaced compliment at the same time. Like “Your kids are clearly hard (shut up, only I can say that), but at the same time, I see you working hard (thanks, I guess.)” We only want to be acknowledged when we’re making it look easy, I suppose.

I never nailed having any kind of response—usually something high-pitched and awkward and banally self-deprecating, maybe passive-aggressive depending on how mad/frazzled I was. That tended to work for me. I welcome other witches’ stories of getting compli-negged on their childrearing and if you said something cogent or just made a sound/face.

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Why ‘witches’?

I’ve been pondering how and why this is called “Evil Witches” as I work on a story about how newsletters get named. (Additionally, this Halloween marks 6 years of Evil Witches in the newsletter. Thanks to you true heads who have been reading for all/most of that time.)

It was a very off-the-top-of-my-head decision in 2016 to name a group of moms I could talk a certain way—basically talk shit about family life among people who didn’t need me to explain I truly do love my family and care a lot about my kids yes of course and yet…

I didn’t have a newsletter in mind when I called it that, and while I thought about some alternate names while launching the publication, Evil Witches still always seemed best. Even though the title doesn’t mention parenting at all and the newsletter barely mentions the actual practice of witchcraft.

At least over here, it’s a vibe where as a parent, you don’t need to worry about the fact that we contain the good and bad side (“I will do anything for my kids” and “I kinda regret all my choices sometimes” and “my personal bio contains a lot more than ‘‘mom to so-and-so’”) and proceed from there. And if you don’t like it, well, it’s right there in the name. Go subscribe to Sweet Mamas if it’s not your thing.

Reader Megan recently sent me this interview with her friend Kate who is teaching a course on Witchcraft Persecution in Europe. She said this about witches in an interview about her work:

Who do we, even now in our own society, in our own lives, look to? Who has the most information about the past to pass onto the next generation? It's always women who are a little bit older," she says. "Maybe they are the ones who hold not traditional kinds of power but traditional kinds of wisdom who, potentially, in new social circumstances could make them a disruption to the social order. When you look at this idea of the positive witch, this idea that you can have individual autonomy and be free and work without massive complications, that you can hang out with other women and be empowered by that, I think that is connected to the history of witchcraft and persecution in a way.

Anyway, I know for many of you, tonight will be all about making Halloween fun for other people, but I hope you can convene briefly with one or more of your positive witches, whether it’s on your doorstep, in the parking lot, online or whatever you need today. There’s a Jason Isbell song where he sings about “witches ringing around the moon; better get home soon.” It makes me think of a boy going home and noticing a bunch of women gathering together with their eye on everything. Maybe that will be some of us tonight. It’s a good night for summoning all our power.

p.s. Huge thank you to everyone who chipped into the giving circle to benefit Dems in Pennsylvania in this election. We raised $30K.

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End credits

Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Our Instagram, curated by Carly O., lives here. You can find the Evil Witches archives here. If you missed it, people really got into our issue from a few weeks ago on what we don’t do. Want to support this work/get fun subscriber-only chats and issues? Become a paid subscriber. Little discount for our anniversary, good only for today:

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One witchy thing

From a witch I went to college with: