A Visit With The Dead Helped Me Forgive My Estranged Mother

When I pictured a full moon ceremony, I imagined my feet planted in the earth, circled by chanting women while baring our breasts to the sky.

It began with her leading us through the burning of incense and herbs, journaling, lighting candles, pulling tarot cards, and making offerings of gratitude and song. After all that, she rang some large bells and called in the spirits of the north, south, east, and west. Finally, around forty minutes in, she announced, “We are now between the worlds.”

I’d been a fan of Amanda’s for some time at this point. I followed her Instagram and devoured her beautifully written, compellingly magical memoir, Initiated. So much more than an LA crystal girl, she comes from a lineage of witches. After a brief stint pursuing a traditional life, she began doing ceremonies as performance art—emphasis on the art, less so on her abilities to achieve results through magic-making, alchemy, and spell-casting. But soon, these events began to have real effects on people leading them to seek out her help. I should also mention that Amanda is an academic, having studied and researched the history of priestessing and witchcraft all the way to the PhD she’s working on. Clearly, this legitimizes her as a serious, magical person. That’s Dr. Witch to you.

And while I appreciate all that, I myself am admittedly kind of an LA crystal girl. My interest in the supernatural comes from having had many inexplicable experiences causing me to go down my own rabbit hole (energy healers, flower essences, demonic entity removers, psychic-mediums, chakra adjusters, etc.), though I identify more as Witch-light. Yet, in all my dabbling nothing compares to what happened next.

Once we were officially between the worlds, she spoke on the major celestial event occurring that day: an eclipse. Historically, this is a time of great turmoil, where everything solid gets shaken up and earthquaked, making it a rare opportunity to get down into our darkest crevices, possibly exposing our greatest source of pain.

“Consider your deepest wound,” she suggested to the five hundred or so attendees.

Easy, I thought. My mother wound.

So much more than an LA crystal girl, she comes from a lineage of witches.

I was estranged from my mother. A choice I did not make lightly. Even though it was the right one, three years in, I still struggled with resentment while knowing it was doing me no good. I wanted to let it go. I wanted to forgive her. I just didn’t know how. The very thought of her led to a looping argument in my mind, and always, I lived with incessant rage.

“Then go to the moon and ask for her help in healing this wound. And call in your ancestors by name, and out loud to assist,” Amanda continued in a soothing voice. She proceeded to put on a Nasa recording of the sounds of Jupiter, found on YouTube.

I closed my eyes, and out loud in my living room, I began to call in my grandmothers, some dead friends, and the grandfathers I’d never met, all while simultaneously flying to the moon. I imagined myself reaching it, distant sunlight bouncing golden off its pale, pockmarked surface. With a tear-stained face and aquiver in my voice, I begged, “Please help me to forgive my mother.”

And that’s when my aunt Tawn appeared, laughing it up as she said, “You forgot to call me in!”

Whoa, I’m really deep in this meditation, I thought, and all that bunny stuff started, with the foot in my throat, etc. And then my grandma Jo showed up. Standing before me with the most sorrowful expression on her face, she asked, “Honey, are you able to forgive me?”

It was as if I’d left space-time when a montage of my grandmother’s entire life—all the choices she’d made and all the reasons behind them—played out in an instant. Immediately, I recognized her lack of understanding of the consequences of her behavior as a mother, resulting in my own mother’s behavior. She’d done her best with what she had. I saw it, and I knew that to be true.

“Yes, I can forgive you,” I said in earnest.

“You have to forgive your mother so she can forgive me,” my grandmother said.

Suddenly, a little girl in a rose-covered dress ran up to me.

“You have to forgive your mother, so I can forgive you,” said the girl, her massive brown eyes staring up at me expectantly. Hot tears rushed from my massive brown eyes, as soon as I recognized her. She was me.

I clutched the weird, dead bunny foot in my palm and sobbed just as the Oracle’s voice came back online, sending me into further shock by saying, “Quick like a bunny, grab your pens and pencils and write down what you saw!”

And then I was back in my chair, empty-handed in my living room. I grabbed my pen, wrote, and cried, wondering if my imagination was really that strong, vivid, and wild. But why did she say the bunny thing?

The next day, I spoke to a living aunt, another sister of my estranged mother and deceased aunt Tawn, and told her what had happened.

“Holly,” she said in a hushed tone. “Did you know that Tawn always carried a lucky rabbit foot with her as a child? In fact, she would throw a tantrum if she couldn’t find her charm. She truly was never without it.”

“What? No!” I cried, feeling a billion chilly prickles running from scalp to toes.

“I think you really spoke to them,” she said. And I felt it too. Such profound thoughts on this subject had never crossed my struggling mind. And I noticed the anger seemed to have gone missing—that desperate, murderous feeling. I searched for it over the next few weeks and occasionally over the years. It was simply gone.

I grabbed my pen, wrote, and cried, wondering if my imagination was really that strong, vivid, and wild.

It didn’t make me want to reach out to my mother. It didn’t change the sad truth between us, the toxicity, or the impasse that caused our estrangement. But it changed how I felt about it and her. My understanding of her and her choices deepened, and from a distance, I really was able to forgive her. Surprisingly, more importantly, my understanding of my own choices, personal history, and how I got to where I was deepened, and I was able to forgive myself.

I reached out to Amanda to try to further understand this experience. We discussed her trajectory to answering the calling of leading ceremonies. Her ability to help others in collaboration with goddess, spirit, and the other world has given her power in this one.

I asked her if anyone can be a witch. Do we all have special, magical abilities? Her short answer was yes. But to be good at anything, finding your natural talents and practicing is required. She told me now that I’ve connected with the moon and my ancestors, I can do it again. I can ask for help in my career, relationships, whatever I need. She explained the rabbit as an animal familiar, a guardian and a power symbol.

“It’s like the power of your female ancestors was somehow caught inside them, ensnared, and it was released through you. You are now being called to do something with that,” she said.

“And I pulled the rabbit foot from my throat, which is my voice. And now I’m using it in my writing,” I mused.

“Exactly.”

I’d always seen the women in my family as beautiful, mystical witches, and as I got older, it seemed to me they’d lost their powers or maybe just forgotten they’d ever had them. Overall, I believe this is why my mother and I don’t speak. For many years, I forgot, too, staying silent about so many of my experiences. But shortly after pulling the rabbit foot from my throat, I began to share my stories.

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