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Christine Grillo

Give Me a Break

March 12, 2019 by Her Mind Magazine

After a year of mishaps, a fresh start doesn’t cut it   

By Christine Grillo

Last year was rough. Everything around me seemed to be breaking. I spent thousands of dollars on my house, but not the fun kind of dollars where things look prettier when you’re done. This was money spent on a sump pump, exterminators, mold removal, new wiring, a toilet flange. I barely got one thing repaired before I needed to pull money out of thin air to fix something else. At one point, my 13-year-old son and I stood in the basement during a storm and watched in horror as the walls oozed water, like that scene in The Shining, where the elevator oozes blood. 

“Holy crap, Mom, what’s wrong with the house?” he said, holding a bucket to the wall. 

My fight-or-flight instinct kicked in, and I opted for flight. A do-over seemed like it would be a good thing, and I started looking at houses with a realtor. 

On the road, it was worse. I developed some sort of superpower whereby every time I was in a car, one of the vehicles nearby would break down or worse. A city bus died as it crossed in front of me, shutting down an entire southbound thoroughfare. At rush hour on a busy street with an ambulance trying to get through, the car next to me sputtered to death, trapping the ambulance. 

My 15-year-old daughter, whom I drove to school each morning, was an eyewitness to my superpower. One day we got stuck in traffic radiating outward from a car that had just driven into a brick wall, and she said, “You’re really extra today.” 

One of the high (or low) points was the night I drove home through southeast Baltimore during a storm and had to turn around in the middle of the street because there was a building lying in the intersection. It turns out, a tornado had come through. 

Fight-or-flight kicked in again, and I fantasized about flying. I wondered how I might trade in the car for something newer, maybe a compact with good fuel efficiency and no demons•and why not a pair of wings for good measure?

I began to wonder how I could use this superpower for good, but concluded after many thought exercises, that there’s really no way to use a power like that for good. 

I started to feel like some sad X-Men character: the one whose mutant superpower is to make things around her fall apart. Only instead of being cute and young, as X-Men tend to be, I was Basic Mom. Indeed, the bad things weren’t just happening near me, they were happening because of me. I worried about injuring someone with my bad juju. 

I used the same dutiful coping strategy employed by billions of people all the time: fix what you can; hire people to fix what you can’t; and keep your chin up, because at some point the bad stuff has got to stop. But keeping my chin up got harder, and it became obvious that I had been overrun by bad spirits, dark mojo, negative energy—whatever you want to call it. I pictured mischievous, frenetic sprites clustering by the hundreds in the corners of my house, and because I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, I assumed they were not so much evil as haplessly causing trouble. 

One night, I burned white sage in the basement and in every room. “You don’t belong here,” I said. “Time to go now.”

I whispered to the ceiling corners, “This is not the place for you. Move along. You’ll be happier somewhere else.”

A friend advised me that it’s not always enough to get rid of the bad things; you have to invite the good things too. An acquaintance with a spiritual bent suggested that some deities were trying to get my attention. They wanted to tell me something, she said.

“Tell me what?” I asked.

“About the new beginning,” she said. 

And there it was: the new beginning. The crossroads. The Upright Fool tarot card, usually depicted as a naïve vagabond, full of beginner’s luck, perched on the edge of a cliff, about to jump. I wanted in. I wanted to jump—or fly. 

In this country, freedom and the idea of a fresh start are intertwined. Many of us are descended from immigrants, and maybe that’s why we romanticize the idea of beginning anew. But here’s the thing: I’m not a beginner, and I’m not Fool enough to think I have beginner’s luck.  

When I heard “new beginning,” my eyes rolled.

In my late 40s, I’m kind of done with new beginnings. Over the years I’ve realized that freedom is for people who don’t have children or lovers, and that sounds lonely to me. New beginnings are for people who don’t like to dig in and stick it out. 

I’ve invested so much in so many things and I generally like what I’ve chosen. The tarot card Fool falls off the cliff in search of adventure, but I’d rather see my investments flourish: my children, my writing, my garden, for a few examples. That’s much more appealing than a new beginning. 

Maybe the deities were trying to get my attention, but not because of a crossroads. Maybe they wanted me to slow down and just … notice. It’s possible that I needed to take stock of what I had and feel good about how I’d dug in. 

I’m too superstitious to say that things have stopped breaking. I would never want to jinx anything. After all, the dug-in life continues to be messy, every single day. But most days I like it. Even on days when I don’t like this messy life, there’s no alternative life I imagine liking more. I think the deities have done their job for now. Until the next tornado.


Christine Grillo writes about health, parenting, people and human rights for a range of publications. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, StoryQuarterly and other journals. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars she is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Filed Under: Her Musings Tagged With: Christine Grillo, fresh start, Her Mind columnist

Witchy Woman

November 27, 2018 by Her Mind Magazine

Crafting a future of homemade mushroom tea and monarch butterflies

By Christine Grillo


My 15-year-old daughter implores me to brush my hair.

“I just brushed it,” I say.

“Are you sure, though?” she asks. 

I’m pretty sure. I mean, sure enough. The truth is that my hair never really looks brushed, and while she had moderate success getting me to experiment with anti-frizz products, she could never get me to commit to using one.

She takes a brush out of her bag, smooths my hair and takes a picture for posterity. 

My daughter recently suggested the possibility that I’m on my way to becoming a witch. She might be right. It wasn’t intentional, this transformation. Well, maybe a little intentional. She presents the facts. Exhibit A: I knit, crochet and fold origami cranes. Exhibit B: I am trying to build a frog pond in my back yard. 

The list goes on and includes such items as the fact that I make kombucha, and that I talk not entirely in jest about the feminine energy of oceans and the masculine energy of rivers, and how sometimes I need my energies balanced. I can usually tell you without looking up at the sky which phase of the moon we’re in, and I can always tell you how long it will be until a solstice or equinox. Also, I throw a winter solstice party where we burn pine tree branches to send sparks of light into the total darkness, which I refer to as the void. 

And of course there’s my hair; weekend garden chores often leave me with twigs and dead leaves tangled up in it.  

I’m tempted to tell my daughter that all of this is mild compared to what I have planned for my true dotage. The kombucha and the knitting? It’s Witch Lite. I hope to spend many hours during my golden years squatting by the outdoor fire to relieve the back pain brought on by a lifetime of sitting in chairs. I’ll be surrounded by beautiful hens, which I’ll raise in part for their eggs, but if we’re being honest, because they’re such beautiful and weird creatures. There will be goats, and I’ll develop a pretty good goat cheese game. I’ll grow mushrooms on lengths of tree logs, blue oyster and shiitake, and I’ll make delicious stir-fry and mushroom tea. The lawn will be long gone, replaced over the years with amazing mosses collected lovingly—but not in a damaging way—from various hikes.

In the spring evenings I’ll sit by the fire and listen to the frogs. On summer days I’ll listen to the cicadas and in the evenings I’ll listen to the crickets and katydids. In the fall I’ll collect monarch butterfly larvae by the dozens from my plots of milkweed and release them when they’ve emerged from their chrysalids so they can fly away to Michoacan, Mexico—assuming their habitat still exists. And, naturally, in winter I’ll burn pine needles to make the air smell good and send light into the void. 

I should probably learn some spells and figure out how to make witch’s brew. Then again, I might be able to accomplish this by humming a mantra as I meditate and learning to make homemade wine. The broomstick will be a challenge; I don’t have a whole lot to do with brooms. But I think I can follow through on the funny hat. As for wearing black, screw that. I’ve spent 30 years wearing black (and gray and beige and brown), and I intend to go down wearing colors like goldenrod and scarlet. 

My daughter dyed her brown hair black, and I was surprised by what a difference it made. She looks older and exotic, like a young Frida Kahlo. Someone at her high school told her she looks like a witch. I wanted to know more. How do young women think about witches these days? Are they warty, lonely hunchbacks living on weeds and bark, or are they counter-culture, independent beings living outside the patriarchy?

“Was that a compliment?” I asked.

She doesn’t know, and she doesn’t care. Apparently, the statement—be it praise or insult—washed over her like so much useless fluff.

“Maybe we can be witches together some day,” I say.

Already she’s forgotten that we’ve ever had a conversation about Witch Life. She gives me a look that says she finds me a little pathetic but also vaguely amusing. Usually in these moments she wants to film me and post the footage to social media, like those videos of kids still under sedation after getting their wisdom teeth removed. 

“You think you’re a witch?” she asks.

I hedge.

“Well, sort of,” I say. “You said I was.”

“Did I, though?” she asks.

“The kombucha, the frogs….” I say.

Now that she’s two inches taller than me, she likes to stand really close and look down at my head. 

“That’s so cute,” she says. “Look how short you are. You’re going to be a cute, short witch.”

And that, it seems, is that.


Christine Grillo writes about health, parenting, people and human rights for a range of publications. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, StoryQuarterly and other journals. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars she is a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Filed Under: Her Musings Tagged With: Christine Grillo, personal essay, witch

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Her Mind magazine reports on the accomplishments, the celebrations and the challenges that Howard County women are involved with every day. We offer readers insightful and inspiring stories about Howard County women in business, philanthropy, community service and the arts. Written and designed by women for women this unique blend of honesty, inspiration and information motivates the reader to be the best she can be. Learn from other women dealing with challenges similar to your own, become motivated to try new things, and become more aware of the powerful women in your community.

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