TW: I get prickly about trigger warnings, not because I don’t find them useful, but only because it often highlights how much of my life has often been something people would rather turn away from. When you are poor, homeless or very vulnerable in society, you become less and less visible. People want to look away and pretend you aren’t even there. In the past, I’ve nearly felt crazy with it. And trigger warnings…ironically trigger me into feeling that invisibility. But that being said, trigger warning, pet loss.
If you ask me outright, I don’t know how I really feel about astrology. Some part of me finds it a game, the equivalent of an ancient BuzzFeed quiz. But then some part of me feels a little reverent—my ancestors, devout German Baptists, wrote our births and signs in the big German bible and organized their lives around the zodiac calender. If I can take a man-made personality test as some kind of basis for truth, why would I ignore the stars and the planets? I can believe the stars and planets were made for navigation—both in the physical world and the spiritual one. And so, I find myself navigating the waters under Saturn.
I never really noticed my Saturn return. That is the Saturn everyone talks about. When Saturn returns to the same spot it was in the sky as when you were born, usually happening around 30, it brings an unforgettable influence. Saturn is the planet of boundaries, restrictions, responsibility. It is the domme energy. A ruler and wrecker and organizer. When I was born, Saturn was in the sign of Sagittarius (the centaur Chiron, a warrior, a poet, in my third house, the house of communication, travel and early education). Everything in how I communicated with the world was changed during that time. (Incidentally, my 2016 Instagram was wonderful, and after Saturn wrecked it, it has never been the same again).
My debut novel was published in the first few months of my Saturn return, and during it’s rule I razed my entire life and began again, with nothing and no one but my children. But it did not feel like Saturn, simply that I had reached the end of my ability to live on as I had always been. Life becomes a lot longer when you don’t die in your 20’s like you expected. My “Saturn return” has been over since early 2020, so it caught me by surprise when Saturn entered my sun sign in Pisces this March and I suddenly felt it’s presence in a way I never did before.
The language of Pisces gives me words for the part of myself that is a vast ocean, with both tranquil dreamy waters and deep, dark cold places where unseen things lurk. It is boundaryless. It fills every shape it is poured into and overflows. Saturn’s influence over those vast waters has been agonizing, a sudden demand for self-restriction, borders, and an aching realization that I end and someone else begins. It has been a lesson of boundaries and revelation of some of my most toxic traits—namely that I want, more than anything, to make the world perfect for the people I love. People commonly talk about Pisces living in a fantasy world, but in my piscean nature, it’s more that I want to build a fantasy for my loved ones on the sweat and labor of my own bent back. With Saturn’s presence, my fantasy worlds have been ripped apart and undone.
In some ways, this is also just the journey of being a woman, a mother, a partner in her mid 30’s. I’ve weathered my 20’s, crossed the threshold of my early 30’s and now I am in the mid-years where I feel, in some strange way, as if I am finally growing up. But growing up is terrible.
I am only a mother to my children. I’ve been a mother—to my siblings, to my own mother—since I was a child. It’s a role I resent as much as I feel responsible to bear. Mothering, as a concept, is inauthentic for me. I am not maternal or a nurturer—though I am disciplined and passionate enough to bend my will to the work of it. Being “mother” is also an easy role to step into when relating to any man. It’s safe without losing power. It’s stripped of sex in a way I often am not.
But when I am not careful, I find myself going through the world as only a mother. When stressed, I return to that hated role of mothering everyone. For who else will do it? How else will I be loved and safe? And then before I know it I am my partners mother, my boss’s mother, my team’s mother, my dog’s mother. I am mother in a way that makes me smaller and tenser and restless at night. How did I get here? I found myself wondering after Saturn came over these waters. I hate this. I hate myself. I want to mother my children and myself and no one else. And that is the boundary Saturn brought.
I cannot perfection my way into control of the outcomes. I know this, but it’s so easy to forget. I want to believe that if I just try harder, longer, in a different way, in a different tone, this time it’ll be different. But acting in accordance with what I know to be right does not mean the world is better, happier, easier.
We had to make the terrible decision to surrender our dog this week, after he bit our seven-month old. The bite wasn’t an accident, but that the baby’s foot was in the way was. It had been a long journey with the dog. I had poured my heart and money I didn’t have into making the world fit this dog, so that it would not end in heartbreak for the people I loved. He was supposed to be the dog we could keep. And after everything, I had to accept that I had not only failed, I had maybe even tried so hard that I ended up allowing the most vulnerable to be hurt. Perfection always has that effect somehow—you end up ruining the good in pursuit of the perfect. And now I have had to admit to my sobbing children that love wasn’t enough, work wasn’t enough, doing everything right wasn’t enough, and that in the end, we don’t have control over how things turn out. I cannot make the world right for the people I love. I have to accept that. And that too was what Saturn brought.
I end. And after that someone else’s experiences begin. Water is able to push into any fissure, any space, and work it’s effect. I kept pushing out, out, into the world, into any space I found. In my effort to make the world okay for the people I love, I panicked and pushed against their experiences of pain, trying always to wash it away. In doing so, I’ve denied the people I love their own realities, their own experiences. I cannot look at my sobbing child and make it better. I can only respect that I end and they begin. I must pull the waters back and only flow into the places where they invite me in.
I am not a worm. I am not a god. But something terribly mortal in between. This balance of simply being human is hard for me. I spent 32 years of my life under some kind of abuse—which both humiliates you and elevates you. On one hand you are crushed under the hand or the manipulations of another person, but on the other hand only you can forgive them, only you can redeem them, only you are strong enough to love them. You are destroyed as a victim, and then reborn as a god. It is all a farce. But even now, when things are hard, I find myself reaching for the earth so that I may be reborn with the power of a god. I want to lay down and be crushed so that I can rise up and be all powerful.
But as Saturn has moved over those darkest waters and churning tides, I have seen again that I cannot be those things. I must find the courage to stand in the terrible light of reality as I am—a mortal, soft woman with faults and flaws and always powerless in ways that bring me to tears. Try as I might, my anger and pride and drive cannot change the very nature of myself. When I cannot bear the truth of myself, I cannot bear the truth of others and that is what drives me so far from the people I love, the people I long to connect with and love. And that too is a great dividing of the waters that Saturn has brought.
Whether it is Saturn, or some divine work, or just the circling static of the abyss, these are the boundaries cleaving through my entire life right now, the reckonings beneath the surface of already treacherous waters.
I am tired.