Tower Tumbling Urania & Navigating Desire
More personal scribbles about my personal life, the cosmos, and unpacking these tumultuous changes in my social role(s) x career
Content Warning: mention of underaged pregnancy from SA; coerced abortion; su* ideation in past tense.
Uranus transiting your 10th house, ADHD, and anxiety do not mix. I knew I was scribbling too soon, lol.
I recently made a very big ask of my spirits, and that prompted me to think about what I'm doing/where I'm going, etc. etc., all the things I've been crying about privately and writing about occasionally. The initial churn of change that comes with deepening safety is...a lot, it's so much. That's saying nothing of the world. And then I saw a recent post from Chuck Tingle, and it snapped something together for me. He helped me realize that it's in the self-defensive wibble wobble -- this thing I've been surfing publicly and privately -- is where things I genuinely desire *always* lie.
I flip flop on my feelings and opinions about the subject of being a mother, regularly, for example. I know that if we had plenty of money and village support, it wouldn't be a question: we'd have at least two. When RB and I got together and I (albeit unconsciously, at first) realized I wouldn't have the excuse of patriarchy to squirrel myself behind on why I couldn't see myself having children, it caused a massive emotional earthquake. It's pretty easy (and understandable) to highlight material conditions as a justification for not leaning in to a desire for children. Or, alternatively, being fully cognizant and acknowledging the enormity and complexity of holding another being(s) through to becoming themselves *and* a helpful member of society, too. But...remove those things, create a world where those needs are met or can be met? And suddenly being confronted with the pain of that desire made me feel like I was drowning.
Per Alice Sparkly Kat, the 10th house and 4th house represent our caregivers, with the 10th house particularly emphasizing the birthing parent.
And I quote further:
"Before a Saturn return, the only times you have a tenth house year, the only times you’re defining the tenth house, are when you are nine and twenty one…When you reach mid age, your tenth house is supposed to be about honors and dignity and fame but I still think it’s about mothering. You might mother a biological child or you might mother other things. You might mother young people around you, a brilliant idea, some research question, or you might mother yourself. You might mother your own purpose into being."
The first time I ever had a serious conversation with my mother about wanting to know who gave birth to me, I was 9, and it went horribly, and I felt so much guilt for even asking. At 21, a year after both my adoptive mother and my birthing parent (unbeknownst to me) died, and I permanently shelved any desires I had outside of becoming successful enough to care for my disabled father and my sibling. That kept me going until my dad died when I was 25 (thanks, dad!), and until I was finally certain that my sibling's mother-by-choice, and her family, genuinely do love them, and that I have an ally in at least two childhood friends I didn't know cared about me, too. Oh, and I got a husband who loves being a housetender, is career oriented/Mr. Keep A Job, as well as being exceptionally financially responsible, savvy, *and* politically congruous with my values, and above all else, in all ways, reliable, and who also thinks I deserve everything the world could offer me. I also have a village who also adores me.
It is, in short, too much.
When I filter for the legacy of unmet needs and wants, the very first genuine desire I ever had was to become a mother. I did not care that the fetus was born of violence and neglect. I didn't care that I was "throwing away" a life I didn't feel I actually had. I didn't care what other people thought, even as I was keenly aware of how my adoptive parents would think of me, because my sibling was born to a 13-year-old Black girl who was also neglected, exploited, and failed by everyone around her. To the extent that I could understand, at 13, that babies were huge responsibilities and being a Black teen mom (with an unambiguously Black child, too) would have me met with horrible judgments and violence, all I could see and feel was hope. To have a purpose to build a life for *myself*, because I didn't have one, prior to discovering the pregnancy.
However, when I realized that my adoptive parents would probably take my baby from me after they were born -- I didn't even think about abortion -- that was when I tried to disembark from starship Earth, only to then survive that incident in a very spiritual, magical way, which then led to where I am now. But in the process, I ended up being coerced into terminating my pregnancy, which was worse - emotionally, spiritually - than if they had let me go through with it and taken my child away instead. I have spent years processing the grief of this, in all of its layers, and I'm finally starting to accept I will never stop grieving this cataclysmic, apocalyptic harm committed against me, and made peace with the fact that I do not owe it to anyone to pretend as if I will.
My 10th house is in Taurus: Venus, the planet of the sensual, domain of the Empress. Fertility, not mothering, despite the association of the Empress in Tarot (corresponding with Venus), to the mother. Beauty, lushness, luxury, the arts. The symbiosis of gestation: a foot in the grave, a foot in the river, heart in the cosmos, head on a swivel, arms full of squishy people, big or small. Between the feminine spirits of the traditional planets - the Moon, Venus, and Saturn - desire is made mortal and vulnerable, both passionate and tender, irrational and purposeful. If I could let myself glance over the horizon of pain I hold about my first experience of desire, I could let myself become familiar with the sensation of desire itself. How much I wanted something that the world told me I should be ashamed of, but I wasn't: the self-reliance, truth, bravery, and conviction that required, however stupid. I would have awakened and gardened the desire to mother and flourish in all aspects of my life, on my own terms, but instead that savage ferocity was put into the hibernation of grief.
Until the time I started consciously preparing for my Saturn Return, I very much struggled to bring myself to validate my own desire, let alone actively pursue them. I was forced to be proficient in the art of building boats out of thin air with whatever I was handed, to borrow from my sister Graeme's description of me once from a long time ago, to make things right or better. It had nothing to do with deserving, or worth, or value: it has had everything to do with the behavior of other people trying to impose on me the idea that either my being, my desires, or both, rendered me undeserving, worthless, or not entitled to life. I became - at some point in this journey - so accustomed to disappointment, and the constant drumbeat of exhaustion, cynicism, rage, and sadness seeping into everything, that I put myself into neutral and let myself coast as I burned away those layers of pretense.
And then, quite literally overnight, my entire world changed.
My Ancestors - and freakishly noted in my stars, too - brought my husband into my life. My Saturn sits at 0* Aquarius in my 7th house of partnerships and commitments, so often associated with the secular and divine marital vow, and by the time he arrived, Saturn was 2/3 of the way through this domain of my life. RB was, and continues to be, everything I could not let myself openly want at the time. I feel like I transmitted my desires to my mother-by-choice, Dominique, to name and see for me instead: a magical, mutually healing, mother-daughter symbiosis of belonging with each other, because ideally your mother should love you with such clarity that she could be trusted to find you someone(s) to grow your own family with. Family was (is) a healthier wall, a more brave and vulnerable garden to hide in when it comes to my desires.
Our shidduch was messy and weird and not at all what I was anticipating, but there he came, and with him: no more “real” excuses. This poor man, a true and pious tzaddik before he even receives his smicha, lol.
It was Chuck Tingle challenging the idea that we must preface the vulnerability of our love that really landed. I haven’t read any of his books (because I don’t read romance or horror, or a lot of smut…the latter I have read in the past, I just haven’t read it lately), but his writing on social media is plenty for me to know he is the real deal buckaroo, and a historically significant, important voice. Chuck really drove it home that it is a symptom of a fascistic, authoritarian culture to denigrate one’s sincere joy if it doesn’t conform to obedience, production, and compliance with harm. To shrink myself is to obey those who hate me in advance.
To that end: I desire to be a dominatrix, not a coach or a business advisor in the vanilla, girlboss way. I equally desire to be a well-rested, well-groomed, beautifully nested, writer and artist, dancer, pianist, astrologer, and degree-collecting, polyglot scholar, who has a more private life and practice of a spirituality that reflects my complexities, and who serves as a priestess when I want to, and primarily for my loved ones and immediate community.
I have known this since Uranus pulled into my 10th house in 2018, when all of these desires started to reveal themselves with the structure and determination of my Saturnine pursuits. The more I examine and meditate on my natal chart, the more and more layers I see these desires dance unambiguously. It's not at all a question what the next arcs of my life are: they are clear as day, as bright as a night sky filled with stars.
I have been fucking around, faffing about, making all sorts of nonsensical excuses, trying to reinvent this wheel. Trying not to be these creative things because all of these things are so viscerally dangerous when empires are falling and fascism is rising: anything but an artist and the embodiment of my own explorations of beauty, value, and the sensual, primordial, divinely paradoxical and undefinable feminine, baby. Anything but that. Anything. Anything but the call to get to work. The more worried I get, the stronger and clearer the desires (not wants, which are, in my opinion, things that are actually needs for us, but because they're not "survival necessary", they are disregarded and minimized) become. They're not grasping, or grabby: they're calm and neutral, warm, sure, confident.
I am in a Uranian tumult, my inner tower(s) are crashing in a breathtakingly rough display of grief and released, because I know I have no idea what lies on the other side of this change. I know I will be imperfect. I know I will suck. I may very well be a criminal, unless something changes. And I am so used to being in pure, adrenaline-driven rage-survival, I am scared I will lose my edge. It's very agitating and terrifying to feel the pull to be myself. The timing is very inconvenient.
But rather than forcing myself to grind through the terror, in another Uranian twist: I'm just gonna take this one little baby step at a time.
No matter much pressure I feel to rush.
No matter how scary it is navigating the finances in the short-term.
My desires are sacred, and I deserve to feel safe in their presence.
