a net woven of metaphors

When it becomes hard to parent, more often than not, it's because I have a need for being parented that is not being met.

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It can be very hard to face this unmet need square on, as an adult, as a parent myself. To admit to wanting to be parented and to explore, parented, exactly how? To want to be child, even though I am parent.

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It feels taboo. It feels unspeakable, because it feels unmeetable.

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It feels dangerous to name and to ask. To ask for nurturing, for validation, for support, for safety. To let it dangle, in the ether, speaking this need out loud, but to no one in particular.

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To myself. Being the one that hears me. And it's so hard, how can I catch myself, when I'm the one that's falling?

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This is Pluto and Saturn straddling my IC. This gift of shorthand. Astrology - one of its oft overlooked powers is just the way it says so much with so few symbols.

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I think air plant. I think rootball. I think of the stars infinitely falling through the dark of space. I think of other things yearning to be held.

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I think of wings unfurling, of blood pumping, of muscle firing. I wonder if when you're in free fall, do you want gravity to catch you? Are you afraid of the falling or of the landing?

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I think of what Andrea Gibson said, more or less: when something is unspeakably hard, you can sometimes speak it with poetry, by making it vast and beautiful, by putting it in ecstatic motion.

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I notice - that's what I'm doing now, snuggling into words like makeshift wombs, each metaphor a thread in a net I'm weaving, I'm figuring out how to be both the one that needs saving and the one that saves her.