Tales Around The Campfire
27th February 2008. It’s the middle of a dark English winter night, not quite 1am. The moonlight is creeping through the edges of the curtains, and I’m nursing my first baby, trying desperately to stay awake. I didn’t co-sleep with this one, because I was terrified that my husband might squish her and she’d die, or that she’d roll out of bed and die. I was terrified of a lot of things.
So I’m sitting up, nursing, stroking her little soft head, when suddenly I feel it. The bed, moving. The very faintest vibration, a rattle in the room, a deep, deep movement rolling up through the floor from the bones of the earth. I’d never experienced an earthquake before, and I have no particular desire to experience one again, thankyouverymuch. The overwhelming sense of wrongness, of the sheer helpless instability of the very ground moving beneath you, was a perfect metaphor for the absolute shakeup to my inner and outer world that was having my first baby.
🎁 Welcome to Tales Around The Campfire, September edition. This is usually a paid-subscriber-only love-note, but since it’s birthday month (as I may have mentioned once or twice before 😬) I’ve decided to gift it to everyone. If you fancy giving me a birthday gift, you could consider becoming a paid subscriber and joining the regular Campfire Community. 🎁
It’s very rare to feel earthquakes in England. Although apparently there are 20-30 a year, this one was out of the ordinary – 5.2 on the Richter scale, significant enough to shake up walls and chimneys across the country and rattle things around a bit. For me at that time, Pluto had just stepped over the threshold of my first house, and things were about to get deep.
Pluto is the planet of death and rebirth, intense transformations, depth, and concealing and revealing. He left my 12th house of foreign lands, which was in Sagittarius, that centaur of the springy legs and distant vision, and I left my life of freedom and world travel to take up the mantle of Capricornian responsibility, order, and structure, which beautifully entwined with baby number one’s arrival. Here, in no particular order, are the lessons she taught me and the questions I’d be asking if I was around the campfire now, leaning eagerly forward to hear you tell me how we’re the same, how we’re different, everything you know and think about all of these things.
1: Structure
My baby NEVER slept.
Anyone who’s had a baby knows all about structure – the need for it, the lack of it, the desperate attempts to impose it in order to ever. sleep. again. Over this last 16-some years, I have had to set up multiple structures within the family unit, many of which have been sprung from my first house self – the part of me that used to be free and easy, and now had to figure out self-discipline, in order to provide stability for my babies.
Getting the baby to sleep was THE MOST ESSENTIAL THING for her first months and years. I”m not sure anything has ever consumed me as much as figuring out how to get her to sleep through the night did – and I’m the kind of person who gets fully obsessed with stuff. Mastering structure was a tough lesson, but it stuck with me – I can confidently say I’m now close to expert status with setting up and sticking to schedules. Until they change, of course.
For what it’s worth, she’s still the worst sleeper, but at least I don’t have to sit up with her through the night any more…
What is/was your sense of family structure? How did it change as you changed?
2: Transformation
To say I was transformed by parenthood is an understatement. I was shredded to pieces, ripped apart by a storm of emotions and hormones and the traumatic physical brutality of labour and birth (and I had a straightforward birth experience!) and left exposed and vulnerable, in charge of a tiny human who was utterly reliant on me to keep her alive. Transformation was inevitable. I had no choice but to get my shit together.
I know everyone changes all the time. (Well, actually, I don’t know that, because I think lots of people don’t change, for one reason or another (we could riff on that for days), but I think if you’re here, you’re the kind of person who’s interested in self-development, which is a kind of continual transformation.) I have changed bit by bit throughout my parenting journey, as I’m often reminded. “I was never allowed to do that when I was his age!” Regularly heard in my house. By now I have a variety of responses ready as the situation requires! I used to get asked this question a lot:
“Which was the biggest change, one child to two, or two to three, or three to four?”
In the politest possible way, I would say – “Duh. Zero to one.”*
No transformation in my life has been as huge as having a baby.
Tell me, if you’re a parent, how did parenting change you? Who were you, before?
3. Authority
It’s only from this perspective that I can claim and own some of my authority – but I guess that is only to be expected, since it has taken every one of the past 17 years to grow and develop my sense of who I am as a parent. For a lot of that time, I’ve felt like I’m winging it. (Still do, regularly; you too?) But under the surface, I’ve been building up my authority. I’ve been learning to trust myself, because these little people have to be able to trust that I know what I’m talking about, even if it starts as a case of fake-it-til-you-make-it. It worked. Thank god. I learned from my baby that if I pretended to know what I was talking about, it made her feel safe and secure. She could relax, knowing that mamma was the authority on almost everything, whether it was about not eating biscuits for dinner, or how to navigate a break-up. Admittedly, I had a few years’ growth before I had to master the art of authority on that one…
Do you feel like an authority in your life, or are you winging it?
4. Discipline
Mastering self-discipline has been as powerful for me as figuring out what ‘discipline’ even meant to me, and to us, within the family. Having the discipline to set my needs aside when they were tiny, so that I could meet theirs, had then to be balanced by developing the discipline to put my needs forward as important and deserving of time and respect. Both of these things were hard lessons to learn. The longing to do what I wanted when I wanted, as I had throughout my 20s (Oh blessed sleeeeep!) was strong, but I got a huge amount out of caring for the babies. But the realisation that actually I could be a better mother if I tended to myself, as well, really took some self-work. Still working on that one now!
Discipline sits with Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn, which also speaks to the restrictions and constraints that come with discipline. I’m Saturn-ruled, so discipline – particularly since my Saturn return – is something that comes fairly naturally to me, even when I push against it. I kind of like the guidelines, the boundaries, the guardrails. I know that when the shit hits the fan, I have it within me to pull it back together again. That’s discipline.
What does discipline mean to you? A safe, supportive structure, or a restriction?
5. Responsibility
It’s obvious but it’s true. With motherhood comes responsibility, and Pluto in Capricorn meant big, deep, heavy responsibility. Sometimes the responsibility of keeping these tiny babies and toddlers and little wild children safe and healthy and happy was overwhelming. Knowing that it was up to me to teach them everything they needed to know in life, from not licking the dog to why you shouldn’t use your toothbrush to clean the plug, from how to write your name all the way to what not to post on social media… it’s heavy, man. And there’s no escaping it! I don’t know if it was just Pluto kicking my arse here or Saturn joining in to have a go, too, but the fear that came along with this was enormous. (Side note: I’ve written a book about maternal anxiety, which I’ll be talking about in my new substack Inky Fiction; I’ll give you a heads up when it’s live.)
Does responsibility sometimes weigh heavy on you, too? How do you deal with it?
6. Death & Rebirth
The ending of my previous life/self and the birth of the new is an inevitable part of both becoming a parent and experiencing a Pluto transit. And as that baby grows and changes and matures, I too am having to transform, continually, to keep up with her and be the mother she needs, no matter which point of her growth she is at.
I have a late-degree Capricorn rising. It’s at 29°, so for those of you who keep up with what is going on in the sky, you know that Pluto has just moved retrograde to sit exactly on my ascendant. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the astrology terminology, this means that Pluto is now putting a lot of pressure on the precise part of my chart that is to do with me personally – it’s almost as personal as it gets, really, because it’s about who I am in this world.
Some of you will be nodding in understanding, as you realise that my recent post about identity ties in with this very neatly (and very coincidentally!). Our ascendant (rising) and first house tell us who we are. It’s the thing that identifies us from others. Your rising sign tells the world what they’re looking at – both physically (it can often describe certain physical traits people have) and energetically. It describes how you’re presenting yourself to the world and how you show up to do the job you’re here to do in this life time.
(At this point, if you were right next to me, hot chocolate in hand, I would be leaning forward and saying What are your Big Three? Sun, moon, and rising? Oh, wow! I totally see that in you! Tell me more!)
Pluto moving into Aquarius earlier this year demanded a new rebirth, and I have been working through that, sometimes unwillingly! As it retrogrades back into Cap for a minute, I get the opportunity to take some of that fresh new Aquarian perspective and see how it feels alongside the structure that is so familiar to me. It’s time for a new cycle to begin. It’s a little bit like another earthquake, but hopefully not a real one this time – there’s enough going on in the world as it is.
The Pisces lunar eclipse we’ve just had doesn’t allow me to feel like I can sail over the top of this storm (madly mixing my metaphors!!) without acknowledging the feelings that come from change. Transformation is scary even when it’s welcomed. It’s scary even when it’s necessary. The Pisces lunar eclipse (and the portal we’re now in) is bringing all the emotions out. It’s a time to look to the inevitable future, whilst acknowledging the endings that always come with new beginnings. If we were really around the campfire now, I would be leaning forward to listen to your thoughts on this. I would love to know where Pluto sits in your chart right now, and how it makes you feel. I would love to know how the eclipse has affected your dreams, and if you have sometimes cried in the shower for no reason.
I’m stepping gently into my future. I can’t see yet what it’s going to look like. I can only imagine, and maybe put a little bit into words that will themselves then shift and change. I’m changing, folks. I’m metamorphosing into someone whose form I cannot yet see. Thank you so much for being with me as I navigate this! Please please please, share your stories of transformation with me.
Take care until next time. Remember, if you want to join the Campfire Circle and talk about the specifics of your own chart with a like-minded community of starry-eyed wanderers, please consider upgrading your subscription!