Finding a Community

It’s been almost a year since I updated this blog! How’s everyone doing?

The Spring 2022 semester is almost over, which means I’m going to have a bit more time on my hands during the summer, so maybe that means I’ll be able to get back to blogging some more. I’ve definitely got some ideas about things to write about that have been swirling around in my head. I just haven’t had the time to sit down and write.

The topics I really want to write about are fairly unpleasant, unfortunately. Texas is further sliding into becoming a White Supremacist Christian Theocracy. This is something I’ve worried about for a long time but it’s really accelerating now. I’m saving that for future posts.

When I last updated the blog, I had enrolled my daughter in a Montessori school and I was about to go back to teaching on campus instead of remotely. Things were supposed to be getting back to normal.

That didn’t quite happen. COVID-19 wasn’t done yet. My husband ended up catching the Omicron variant from work in January and then gave it to me and our daughter. He was vaccinated but had procrastinated on getting boosted. My daughter is too young to get vaccinated. I was fully vaccinated and boosted, but caught it anyway from being stuck in a house with a sick husband and toddler filling the place up with their germs.

Fortunately for all of us it turned out like getting a bad cold. I give credit to the vaccines for that, and thankfully the common wisdom that little kids tend to get less sick from COVID than adults held true for my unvaccinated daughter.

But that’s not the good news I have to report. The good news is that the Unitarian Universalist Church that my in-laws have been members of for many years now has a CUUPS group, and I have joined it!

(Oh, that reminds me. Sadly my father-in-law passed away in October. After seeing the outpouring of support my mother-in-law got from the church, it made me even more determined to go ahead and join that church, even before I found out they had a CUUPS group in the works.)

I’ve written here before about my difficulties in finding a community, but this is looking promising for several reasons.

First, someone else is running the thing! A woman from the church got this CUUPS group all set up and official and all I had to do was join! I do plan on helping out and becoming more active in it as soon as I can, but the whole thing isn’t depending on me. If something comes up and I can’t make it, they can go on without me. This is definitely not a “if you want a pagan group, why don’t you start one yourself?” type situation where the whole thing is resting on MY shoulders. Thank the gods!

Also there seem to be at least three or four people who are committed to making this work, maybe more, so it’s not dependent on just the woman who got it started either. This is a problem I’ve encountered before with pagan groups. One person (sometimes it was me) gets it all set up and pays all the money and makes all the plans and reservations, and other people maybe show up, but if something happens to that one person that does all the work, no one else steps in and the whole thing fizzles out.

I think it helps that this is a CUUPS group affiliated with an established Unitarian Universalist Church that has been around for decades. That means we have the use of church facilities and the people who are members of the CUUPS group are also members of the church in general. These are people who know how to run an organization, who are not against actually paying money and doing some work to keep things going, who are actually interested in building something that lasts, and I mean that both metaphorically and literally. A few of the members are people who were actually involved in getting the church building built to begin with.

We’ve had one Zoom meeting so far and then a physical get together in a member’s backyard in April. Children were welcome. My 2 year old daughter was the youngest child there. The rest of the kids were pre-teens, but no one seemed to mind having a toddler there. She is a really cute kid, of course, and was very well behaved! I was quite happy with the diversity of people there. Kids, parents of those kids, single people, seniors. That’s the kind of group I want to belong to, one that has people from all walks of life. (As I’ve written about before, I got kind of cut off from the pagan community when I had a baby because there were no baby-friendly things around.) I was also afraid that I’d be the only Heathen there with a bunch of Wiccans, but I saw at least two Thor’s hammers on other people’s necks and one Valknut t-shirt. I wore my Valknut necklace.

The plan is to do some events that are just for CUUPS, and some that are hosted by CUUPS but for the whole church. We were going to do a Maypole for Beltane for the whole church, but it turns out it was a little bit of short notice to plan out something good, so instead we’re planning on doing something for Samhain/Day of the Dead and maybe we’ll add Beltane next year. We’ve got plenty of time to plan something awesome for that, and hopefully it will become an annual tradition, and we could add more events later on.

I also plan to get more involved in the UU church in general. I was going to do it sooner, but the pandemic made them go all remote and watching a church service on Zoom didn’t sound that appealing. Then they went back to face-to-face, but only for vaccinated adults, so I wouldn’t have been able to bring my daughter. Then they allowed only vaccinated children, and my kid is too young. Now finally they have their childcare open again for children under 5.

It seems to be especially important right now to find some kind of community like this, with what’s been happening in Texas lately. I’ve got to find “my people,” and by that I mean people who don’t want to live in a society where white women are the property of our husbands and our only purpose to pop out as many white babies as possible, where people of color are second-class citizens or worse, and where LGBTQ folks are ostracized as perverts. It really looks like that’s what the people in charge want, so it’s even more important to find my people because there’s safety in numbers.

The minister of this church is a black woman who does lots of work for racial justice and women’s rights. The church members I’ve met so far, besides the pagans, seem to be a mixture of atheists and agnostics and liberal Christians who left more conservative churches but still consider themselves believers in Jesus. Sounds like exactly the kind of people I need to be associating with and making alliances with during these times.

Technically I haven’t officially joined the church yet, but I let the lady who is in charge of that know I’m interested. They have some kind of initiation or something every six months or so, and I just missed the most recent one. I think she said the next one is this fall. But now that they’re meeting in person again and I can bring my daughter with me I’m going to start going regularly and hope this works out. I’m optimistic that it will.