Bridget Foster Mother

St. Bridget Spreads Her Cloak over Ireland by artist Cynthia Matyi

As an adoptive mom I have long identified with the the Christian Bridget's role as foster mother.

Medieval legend goes that Bridget, the goddess of welcoming hospitality, was at the inn where Joseph and Mary stopped - only to be shocked when they were shuffled off to the stables.  Bridget worried about the young couple,  having been magically whisked there from the shores of the Irish Sea.  In this aspect, Bridget is Miome Chriosde, midwife to Christ, banchuideachaidh Moire, aid-woman to Mary.  In the Scottish Highlands version, she sees a lamp in the stable and goes to help deliver baby Jesus.  In multiple Irish and Welsh tales, she is Christ's later foster mother, a hugely important role in medieval Ireland and Wales, where foster mothers took on the education of their foster child at the age of seven.  In these stories, Bridget becomes a sacred teacher in the medieval tradition, guiding her foster child into apprenticeship and miraculous career.  Dennis O'Neal in Passionate Holiness:  Marginalized Christian Devotions for Distinctive Peoples notes that no other non-Biblical Saint has been connected to both Jesus and Mary as Bridget has.

Since I've been a mom, I've lived in a different culture, one quite uncomfortable with foster parenting and adoption.  Common questions I've heard over the years include, "where did you buy your children?" and "are those kids really yours?" and "don't they want their real mothers?"  At the same time, schools have refused to enroll my daughter, lawyers told me I would never get custody of my children during my divorce, and even old friends from church questioned if I had a right to parent as a single mom after the divorce.  "It's not like they're really your children," said one Christian friend.  The sacredness of Bridget, as Christ's foster mother, is lost in modern America.

Now with two college kids on my hands, and one high schooler, the questions over the years are somewhat moot.  My kids can tell you who I am, that annoying person insisting they do homework and finish semesters.  Their friends think my dreds are cool and I am all together an embarrassment.  Proof of real motherhood if there ever was one!

But in my work in West Virginia, I am often solving one crisis after another.  As schools around the country become increasingly punitive, sending kids with special needs to juvenile detention and foster care is more and more common.  The same schools refuse federally mandated special education programs, and blame parents when children don't want to attend school.  At the same time, I drive up hollows to rural areas where no other service provider will go, working with wonderful children whose only crime is living too far off of main roads.  I am not a foster mother to these children and teenagers in the modern sense, but I am often working to secure safe and nurturing education and services for babies, preschoolers, kids and teenagers.  Along the way I have made some wonderful connections to so many families.  I love parents in West Virginia who work their asses off to get the best for their children that they can.

So in that sense I feel like Bridget foster mother.  From playing with a ten month old who is suspected of being on the autism spectrum, to coaxing a bullied teen with asperger's out of bed, I am working with kids who need someone who is professional and can advocate for them and for their parents.  Most of my work days I see amazing changes every single visit:  the ten month old smiles when I coo in her face; the teen sits up and talks about archery; the parents who worried about their children laugh and cry to see their kids learning and growing.  Watching families and kids change and relax and remember how to care for one another is a truly sacred experience.  

I remember back in the dark days when I started my counseling program, and again when I worked in crappy internships with punitive supervisors who had no idea how to play and teach real children.  It was scary to think that to support my own adopted kids I had to work in programs that mostly harmed kids.  I wanted so much to somehow continue giving other children and teens the freedom and support I give my own.  The professional world seemed stacked against me.

Sometimes I really did wonder if Bridget had somehow forgotten me, our contracts, my puja.  Or maybe she was busy with others, and had no more time to follow my little problems.

But now I feel awed and amazed at my work, and I can see Bridget the foster mother to Jesus in the lives I am touching.  I can name teenagers who are not in jail because of my reports, count toddlers who never talked who are now talking, list children who had no accommodations in school who now have supports.  I have helped families get better services, helped new kids start homeschooling, and helped other kids find better schools.  In Celtic society, a foster mother helps guide a child into apprenticeship and vocation, and I am helping kids make eye contact, speak, study things they love, and get everything from computers in their schools to parents who allow them their video games.  A teenager with greasy hair who makes eye contact and smiles and thanks me for having their video games back is a sacred thing, too.

So, I feel a lot of gratitude for Bridget.  Maybe she was busy with others while I suffered through my internships.  Maybe she did forget me while I was busy studying for certification exams that seem endless.  (One more in August.)  But somehow, all that difficult time led to doing this work now.  Dirt roads and nasty schools and isolated hollows and sacred children, sacred families, and the sacred work of protecting and mentoring children.

May the blessings of Bridgid the bright
Rest upon us, this day, this night,
I will kindle this fire as Bridghid, foster mother of Christ would
The Foster Mother's Name be on our hearth
Be on our work, be on our households all.

(Carmina Gadelica, Carmichael, 1900)

Crafting Magic

I have never been able to separate my craft life and my magical life.

Crafting IS magic.

Take spinning, something I learned as a girl. The first revolution in human hertory was the string revolution, the process of twisting fiber into something strong and useful, and at the age of 8 I joined that herstory with my early attempts on a spindle. Twist fibers together in your fingers, build a spindle, find a spinning wheel, and you are making a magic that is associated with Fates, Spider Woman, Loki, Bridget, Frigga, Athena, and all of your grandmothers and grandfathers stretching back through millennia. Learn to spin and you are connected to spinsters, one of the earliest - and highly esteemed - jobs for women. Learn to spin and you are creating the fates.

Weaving, something I also learned in elementary school (the better to make cloth for my barbie dolls), has its own magic. There is nothing as strong as woven cloth. Take warp and weft, and string becomes a usable fabric: the fabric of life. Fabric can be cut, re-used, patched, repaired, sewn again, and transformed into both shelter and clothing. Weaving is a magical connection to human existence, right up there with spinning fate: Feminists now re-weave the web of life. The web of life is magical.

I have already written of smithing as crafting. Take magical iron and forge it into steel, into pots and pans, into kitchen knives and votive offering. Stones become tools. Transformation is in our hands, eyes, in our arms as we hammer, and in the fire. Every strike forges a world. Magic.

And sewing is magic; patchwork is magic. I have sewn up the years of my children's lives, into quilts and clothing, into wall art and gifts and blankets. Every intentional stitch is a spell. Every spell is creating the future.

Crafting is sacred to Bridget and needs to be explored as intentional spellcrafting as well. I realize that lighting candles to Bridget is a spell, and so is cleaning one's hearth or one's stove is spellcrafting or prayer. Yet I find my greatest spells come when writing, when spinning, when weaving. Molding beeswax into candles is a spell; couching beads is a spell. Bridget wants us to create with our hands and hearts, and she wants us to shape the world. (As Christian theologians and thealogians would argue God wants us to participate in Creation. . .)

In the process of growing in devotions to Saint Bridget or Goddess Bridget, or whomever you worship, I hope you add this knowledge of crafting. Crafting with intention is a spell or prayer as strong as any ritual - and with Bridget, perhaps it is even stronger. Whatever craft you explore, every step can be worked into spells and prayers in Her name. Your final creation can add to alters, hearths, homes.

Crafting is magic. Crafting is spellmaking. Make it intentional. Spin fate; weave the web of life; mold inspiration; forge worlds; knit prayers; bead stories; carve spells. What spell is greater than creating?

Crochet for Bridget: Save the Ocean

All crafts are sacred to Bridget, and I have always had a connection to Her through my artwork. I was weaving and spinning (mostly for my barbie dolls) way back in elementary school, and my 1974 sewing machine is one of the proudest purchases in my life (earned by babysitting back in the day, for 50 cents an hour!) Every craft project, from a pie in the kitchen, to sewing patches on jeans, to building an arbor for your garden, to knitting a shawl - all are sacred creations blessed by Bridget.

(I love the word craft itself. Craft encompasses meanings of skill, cunning, intelligence, going back to old high german "kreftig," and old english "craeftig." Crafts require intelligence and skill. Craft itself, of course, is another word for witching. . .)

Crochet, however, can do more than show your skill. Crochet can help save the ocean.

A Cornell mathematician was trying to use paper to demonstrate hyperbolic space to her advanced math students, and couldn't get paper to work. So as a crafter (intelligent and wily), Dr. Daina Taimina pulled out her crochet needles and found the perfect medium to demonstrate how in moving away from a point all the surrounding space expands exponentially. Turns out, crochet was perfect for this - as any crochet crafter can tell you from all of us knowing what happens when you add an extra stitch without noticing! Turns out all us crocheters were doing advanced math all this time.

Crochet is perfect for demonstrating hyperbolic space and hyperbolic organisms in the plant world (like lettuce, for example). Two women at the Institute for Figuring, Margaret and Christine Wertheim, realized that hyperbolic crochet was perfect to model the growth of coral reefs. Given how endangered reefs are at the moment from climate change and pollution, the two women realized this hyperbolic crochet was a wonderful way to show landlubbers what reefs are, and how they grow. Thus was born the crochet project: The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. The two women started their reef in their living room; today it has grown around the world, with sub-reefs, museum displays, and a huge trash reef installation made from beach garbage and yarn. Like coral, and hyperbolic space, the reef project has also grown exponentially.

And you can participate. The basic reef pattern is here. The Institute for Figuring has its own online website for both crochet and hyperbolic plane information here. Pics of various crocheted hyperbolic coral here (way cool, too!)

And for newbies, some crochet links:

Learn to crochet

Learn to crochet videos

If you live near a JoAnn Fabric Store, there are often really good and cheap crochet classes and help available there (where I go when I'm stuck on a project!)

And remember how valuable crafts are next time you are scrapbooking or baking a cake or sewing for your kids. Crochet, that much maligned craft of doilies and granny squares, turns out pretty important. I think of my many crocheting great aunts, all of whom never went to college, and who always felt themselves uneducated, and who were unknowingly creating models of mathematical space on their front porches through long summer nights. So many of us have grandmothers and great aunts and great grandmothers who, without any college, created universes of hearth and home with their hands and needles, their spinning wheels and cooking pots, their loving hearts and crafty minds. The feminist belief that all women are thus witches stems from this truth.

So whatever your religion, go and honor the earth and Bridget. Try a little crocheted exponentially growing hyperspace. Let's keep creating this world, from great aunts' porches, to a saved coral sea.