Magpie
<< Sweetpea | Who's Who | Buck New >>
- Vitals
- female ~6-10 years old
- Distinguishing Traits
- Borrowing items that may be magically significant.
- Favorites
- Antiques, hidden compartments, closets, wardrobes, scrolls, artifacts, etc.
We've been wondering who had been taking things from our bioparents' belongings and why.
It's taken much background thought but we think we found her. We were thinking about how we would look for portals to Narnia, absolutely convinced that other worlds existed (not that we stopped, but we did stop digging holes in our wall looking for secret maps or artifacts that would portal us there...).
Magpie is a schizotypal alter, convinced that magic is right around the corner waiting to whisk us away to a safe place. She took items of interest from our egg donor, thinking that she was hoarding away the magical key we needed to get back home. Magpie would often return them after a while when they didn't work. Magpie would dig through our closet hoping Narnia was behind the clothes, would leave message scrolls ("Hi! Are you there?") inside of our sperm donor's sitting-Indian (Indigenous person) statuette, or inside a hidden compartment in his ship model expecting that after some time there would be a reply to her message.
Magpie was exceptionally active in a physical way in the hours between letting ourselves into the house (during our "latchkey kid" years) and when our parents would get home — or summer days and holidays when we were home for long stretches and both bioparents were out. She would rifle through things in the house, climb on furniture to get at statues and objects, dig through our bioparents' belongings, look for hidden compartments, and generally ruminate on how to escape this world. She was convinced that they were deliberately keeping us trapped here, but was much more focused on finding the key to escape.
Magpie was most interested in odd items that might be antiques, items from other cultures, ones that might contain hidden features or messages, etc. Our egg donor had a jewelry box with a very strange lock, so opening and closing the jewelry box was very interesting in itself, even when the items inside didn't change. But she would occasionally take an item to play with it just to be certain that an ordinary item didn't have magical properties. For a while, our egg donor worked with a woman making replicas of Egyptian museum jewelry pieces, and Magpie would like to play with some of the "rejects" that our egg donor brought home. Our egg donor also had a "junk drawer" with makeup, jewelry, and other odds-and-ends, so Magpie frequently visited the drawer to make certain that there was nothing new in it.
Both of our bioparents were "closet hoarders": in the case of our egg donor it was almost literal. She would fill up objects around the house with belongings, pile closets high with things, keep her craft supplies in an antique piece of furniture or a chest, etc. but you wouldn't see it with a casual glance around the house. Our father was careful about what he brought home, but he was a "pack rat" in that he would squirrel away odds and ends in the corners, the machine rooms, and janitorial closets around his job (he was a superintendent of a large building in NYC). Whenever a building resident threw something usable or fixable out, he would hide it away somewhere.
It's quite possible that Magpie is one of the people with reasons we have difficulty parting with certain objects. Apparently there is an OCD component to some Schitzotypal behaviors, and that may be one of the things that drives some of Magpie's behaviors and hoarding.
Magpie had difficulty understanding the "ownership" of items. There was a conflict between "real-world ownership" as in someone purchased something from a store and thus it belongs to them — and her ideas of reference or magical thinking where an item could have been spirited here as a gift to her from another world, or have been left by some magical being or place or power for her to find and use to leave. In which case, the item (regardless of "ownership") was really hers for the taking and using, by means of its "intended purpose" or it's inherent function.
Unfortunately, Magpie's "thievery" was sometimes observed and punished, and especially infuriated our sperm donor. We had trouble communicating internally, and didn't understand Magpie's behavior any better than our bioparents did, so questions about whether "I" had taken an item resulted in "No", questions about "Well, then who did?" resulted in "I don't know" or "Nobody" etc. and often we were accused of lying and beaten, spanked, or punished — which was usually being sequestered in our room which was more payoff than punishment. We weren't trying to lie, and when asked for an item, Magpie would often just surrender it — unless it was already found in our room. Magpie didn't intend to keep (but may have forgotten taking) any objects that didn't contain messages or clues as to how to escape this world. So Magpie unintentionally contributed to our abuse, and the punishments generally didn't work — Magpie wasn't the one getting the beating, or getting the lecture, and being sent to our room was a vacation in paradise when compared with dealing with our bioparents. We were supposed to be contrite and thinking about what horrible thing we had done, but instead would often talk to ourselves and play together. Being in our room, physically alone, with the door closed — that was a safe space for us to be ourselves together and not a punishment at all.
<< Sweetpea | WhosWho | Buck New >>
<< Sweetpea | Who's Who | Buck New >>