Your beautiful dangerous assignment

trauma, astrology and parenting

I had an astrology reading with a dear friend the other day. He pointed out the way the constellation of stars above and below the horizon at the time of my birth create the globe of who I am.

At some point, he put my daughter’s chart next to mine, pointing out the ways our stars align. I told him right at the beginning, though, that if there were any written-in-the-stars disasters on her horizon, I’d rather not know.

There’s so many things to worry about as a mother. Sometimes it feels like I spend my whole life scanning the sky, looking for anything that might break the atmosphere.

I spent a lot of time in early postpartum reeling from the realization of just how high the stakes now were in my life. In those early days I found myself obsessing over how to prevent her harm. Not just the harm of falling down and scraping your knees, but the harm that brings you to your knees. The kind of world-shattering asteroid impact we call trauma. How could I spare her?

Looking at my own astrology chart, under the guidance of such a talented reader, I was shown how the traumas that have affected my own life are—in one way of thinking—literally a part of my inbred cosmos. It doesn’t mean that everything in my life was prescriptive, or even fate. But it does mean that I came here to learn certain lessons, gain certain understanding and have things fall apart in a particular way, so I could learn who I was by putting myself back together again.

It reminded me of something I’ve been orbiting recently. Something I’ve been coming to accept, slowly slowly, like the Earth accepts the light of the milky way every evening.

We all experience trauma.

It’s inevitable.

It’s just a part of the starchart of being human.

The trickster astrologer Caroline Casey calls trauma our “beautiful dangerous assignment”. It’s the disruption that opens us to our purpose. The crack where the light gets in. The reason why we come here. The initiation that begins our true journey.

And so, it’s not actually a question of whether your child will experience trauma or not…but simply when, and what kind.

When my daughter was new in the world, this thought absolutely terrified me.

But now, watching her begin her own life, with her own constellation of interests, desire and destiny, embracing this fact has felt profoundly clarifying.

What if my job wasn’t to prevent my child from experiencing her beautiful, dangerous assignment? But to give her the tools she needs to meet it? To be there for her whenever the assignment arrives. To have walked so far along the path of my own beautiful dangerous assignment, that I can turn around and say “here, hold my hand. I know this terrain.”

I read recently in a parenting article that children are stronger and more resilient—not when there hasn’t been any kind of rupture at all (like mis-attunement or mis-attachment)— but when there’s been a rupture, and then a repair.

I had to read it again.

Children are stronger—emotionally, psychologically, and in their own ability to attune and attach—when ruptures happen, as long as they are repaired.

It felt like an echoing truth. Like witnessing a galaxy within a galaxy. The ground of all existence in that one little phrase. Everything from our human origin story to the mundane every-day reality of raising a child…

We leave the oneness and are born into this life. But through living, we remember who we are.

Humans disconnect from the Earth that is their home, but when they return, all of creation is stronger because of it.

We experience a trauma, life as we know it tilts on its axis, but through learning to heal we find our true mission in life.

My daughter asks me to look at what she’s drawing, but I’m distracted, and she melts down. I come over to hug her and apologize for not being present, and we draw a baby and mama bird together.

There’s the big bang, and out of the disaster, the universe is created.

When I can remember this, it feels like resourcing myself in the cosmos itself.

It’s not our job to prevent every rupture. It’s not even our job to lament them.

It’s just our job to be available for the repair.

I don’t always have to know how to fix things. I don’t need to know what exactly the repair will look like.

I just have to make myself available for the healing to happen.

Like wrapping myself in a blanket and sitting outside under the winter-sharpened stars.

If you sit in presence long enough, it will arrive…

A streak of light, a benediction, a shooting star that says—this is the way you heal.

This is the beauty—the dangerous and wholesome beauty—of being alive.