The Book of RaRa Part 1: Major Arcana

Chapter 2: The High Priestess

Okay peeps. Now we’re gonna cover ages 1 to 2. The time in every young girl’s life when she really comes into her own and figures out her power in the world. Yeah, totally. 

So, we’re starting to enter the time where I have more memories, and with every new chapter, we move further and further from the abstract feeble memories of my youth and into the very concrete, tangible memories of my young adulthood. 

From what I’ve been told, my mother wanted nothing more than to be a stay at home mom and raise a baby girl. That’s where her hope lied with my conception and birth. However, things did not go according to plan. They hardly ever do. So, the main reason things did not go according to plan this time, and for several other instances down the road, is because of the man, the myth, the legend… ladies and germs… Sperm Donor!!! 

Yes, you read correctly. He messed everything up. How else would he have earned the most honorable title of Sperm Donor? The following memory is the first of many I have of him screwing everything up. Here ya go, happy reading!

My father was a corrections officer. That’s the first red flag right there. It is my personal belief that someone has to be very lost and directionless in their life to end up in a position like that. According to my mother, he was very smart, but he could just never figure out how to apply himself, and he always ended up blaming everyone and their mother for his problems. He was god, everyone else was just a stupid mortal. That narcissistic, bipolar god complex personality of his made him the perfect candidate for corrections. 

From my knowledge, his speciality was in prisoner rehabilitation. Oh yeah, with his stunning sociopathic persona he could whip a prisoner into shape in no time! Surprisingly, he was so bad at his job that he got in trouble big time! What did he do exactly, I’m not sure. Either no one in my family actually knows what he did, or it was so bad that they don’t want to speak about it. I bet the latter. My family is well known for sweeping things under the rug. Because pushing problems deep down into the depths of your soul and never letting them see the light of day ever again will surely make them disappear, right?

So, Sperm Donor gets in trouble and has to leave his job. The thing about corrections officers is they are so buddy-buddy with each other that even though he did something terrible, he essentially got away with it. Instead of being fired and reprimanded for his crime, his good pals at the corrections office let him go into an early retirement. Nice one guys. Really keeping everyone safe out here.

Surprise, surprise! When Sperm Donor loses his job, he blames the world! The system! God, probably! How dare they let him off with an early retirement. He’s a highly disrespected corrections officer for god’s sake. From this point forward, Sperm Donor will remain lost. Swimming around aimlessly with a broken tail or a double tail, just desperately trying to find that egg. Will he ever find it? Who’s to say? Not me. I don’t know, and I don’t care. Anyways, let’s move on with my story. Too much sperm talk for a gold star queer woman such as myself.

With Sperm Donor out of a job indefinitely, it was up to my mother to provide for the whole family. I think she was crushed. All of her hopes and dreams of being a picture perfect stay at home mom were dashed in an instant when Spermy made one of his many dumbass decisions. She went back to work, and I went to daycare, I think. I may have gone at a later time, but we’ll just say for now that I started daycare around 1-2 years old. Also during this time, we moved houses. We moved from one reasonably sized house for a family of 5 into an old Victorian farmhouse that was way too much house for us to handle. Why did we move into a too big house down the street you might ask? Well, take a wild guess. Sperm Donor was all about the show, the presentation, the performance of wealth. If he were a time period, he’d be the gilded age. All flash with no substance. He believed in his nonexistent heart that a bigger house was absolutely positively necessary. So, move we did. The main parts of the move I remember were the cream colored rugs being installed throughout the house. I think there may have been an issue with this, perhaps some delay in the installation. I have a distinct memory of one of my siblings running barefoot up the uncarpeted grand staircase laden with nail heads. The sacrificial child chosen to retrieve valuable upstairs items for the cowardly downstairs residents. 

I also remember hiding in cabinets and dressers during the move. I think one of my relatives has a memory of finding me in a drawer or an armoire. I’ve always had an affinity for small spaces. They make me feel safe. Like I’m in a cocoon. Completely protected from the terrors of the outer world. Maybe that’s why I love being in a spacesuit. Feels like home. 

The last memory I have of this time and, arguably, the most important, is my hyperfixation on The Wizard of Oz. There would be several hyperfixation movies and other forms of media to follow, but this one was the first. I couldn’t get enough of it. You would’ve had to pry the young Judy Garland, Toto, and Munchkinlanders from my cold, dead, 2 year old hands if you tried to strip them away from me. You could’ve taken the Wicked Witch of the West though, she had no place in my heart. Anyone who scares the shit out of me with their presence is not welcome in this here life of mine. What a bitchy witch.

The High Priestess had me wrapped in her veil from day one. While Sperm Donor was out here cosplaying as the Gilded Age and my mom was juggling shattered dreams, I was tucked behind my own little pillars of mystery. Closets, cabinets, dresser drawers, serving toddler realness like they were temple gates. My obsession with The Wizard of Oz was my first moonlit initiation into a world of magic and make-believe. The High Priestess is all about intuition, hidden truths, and power that doesn’t need a spotlight. Trust me, even at two years old, I was already holding court in the shadows, turning chaos into quiet, divine knowing.