I’ve taken down the original post. It was an autobiographical post about my mother and Marlene Morrow’s friendship when I was a young, vulnerable, and innocent high school student. All I wanted was a wholesome environment to grow up in, a mother who would listen to me, a family who cared. Instead, my mother and brother were cocaine dealers, Mom dated a steady stream of shady men (as well as underage teenage boys) and these dangerous partners exposed us to violence and deeply inappropriate even criminal, behavior. My mother worked with Marlene, who represented fame, attractiveness, and sexual glamour: the very things my mother conflated with self-esteem and happiness. After a time, there was no household: it was all Marlene, all the time. Marlene and her boyfriends, Marlene at the Playboy Mansion, the funny thing Marlene said to Hugh Hefner, Marlene's clothing...eventually, it felt as if the household disappeared into a Marlene Morrow Fan Club.
The damage this caused me and my siblings was indescribable. Children deserve a healthy environment to grow in. And whatever troubles Marlene had, or still has, are her responsibility to deal with. I wish her well, but never want to deal with this part of my life again.
And so I invoke Hecate to protect all those whose innocence was stolen from them (including men and boys, though I don’t mention it in the invocation):
Holy Hecate, goddess of the crossroads, protect all women and girls from the evils of this world. Teach us to love our bodies, minds, and spirits as they are, and not as the patriarchy wants us to be.
Holy Triple Goddess, Maiden, Mother, and Crone, you work in secret, in shadows, your cloak is the darkness of the new moon, your words the whisper of dry leaves--and you who come here, looking for someone else's story, gaze upon Hecate instead, and consider whether you have met her, a mysterious figure walking late at night on the side of the road, a shadow glimpsed from the corner of your eye, a whisper in your ear in the liminal space between sleep and waking, a tap at your window, though no one is there...
(statue of Hecate in her aspect as the Triple Goddess, third century AD)
