Years ago, I heard the wonderful Caroline Casey posit the theory that you can tell all about your mother, her mother, and basically your family’s entire matriarchal back story just by looking at the Moon in your own chart. A Moon with difficult aspects to other planets represents not just your own challenges, but challenges faced by a long line of women in your family.
I was reminded of this today when, on this pre-Mother’s Day Saturday full of maternal tributes on Facebook, I saw a post expressing the need to examine the other side of the motherhood story: that mothers can be awful and damaging.And well, yes – some mothers are horrible. But most are just human beings doing the best they can at the incredibly difficult job of crafting worthwhile human beings from scratch.
Sometimes, of course, they fail. Some women are bad mothers; others are not, yet despite their best efforts, raise flawed children. So it can be tricky, as an astrologer, to know how a difficult lunar aspect is actually playing out in someone’s life – just who or what is represented by that misbehaving Moon?
For example, astrologers looking at my chart for the first time invariably note the Gemini Moon square Pluto in Virgo and assume that my mother was harsh, critical, and mean – a Momzilla. When I assure them that the exact opposite was true, and that I loved her dearly, they assume that I’m in denial. But anyone who knew her will attest that my mother was loving, inclusive, forgiving, brave, and indomitable. And while it’s true that there has always been a one harsh, critical, and mean female presence in my life, that presence has, in fact, been me. I can’t lay the harshness of that planetary aspect at the feet of my mother; on the contrary, she showed and tried to teach me patience, forgiveness, and transcendence of my own nature.
That Moon/Pluto square does describe my mother, though in quite a different way than one might assume. She overcame a series of horrific, Plutonian life events – childhood polio, the death of her beloved father at a young age, the sudden death of her husband when she was only 35 years old with three underage children, crippling arthritis – without letting them turn her bitter. She was an exemplar of Moon/Pluto strength.
Mom died in 1997, and since then, Mother’s Day has been a time when I think about her with great fondness, and with sadness that she’s gone. And with sadness, too, that while I have my virtues, I’m simply not the person I could have been had she stayed in my life awhile longer, to help me smooth off a few more of the rough bits. I suppose we’re all our mothers’ little magna opera – ambitious symphonies that they nurture, refine, and must eventually leave behind, unfinished. I’m trying to finish myself the way she’d have done it – I just wish I were half the musician that she was.
