Looking to Tarot for answers
For what to do when you want to stay with someone but you want different things.
What do you do when you want to stay together but also want different things?
I am going to start with a little bit of context: in my 20’s I was indifferent to having kids. I thought it would happen, maybe, but if it didn’t, I would, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, I would share my love elsewhere. That the world didn’t need more people, it needed more tenderness, more softness, more love.
“One of the reasons people lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity is the belief that children are the way to fulfill your capacity to love. But there are so many things to love besides one's own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”
― Rebecca Solnit
But then we had a child. And I feel in love. I want to be honest here about the type of love that happened just to me. It was utterly out of my control. At the same time, biological and social. A love that helped me love myself more by caring for someone else. Everyone experiences motherhood differently, but for me, it is this profound sense of connection and deep understanding. The coding present is so complex and interwoven that M is wholly her own person and my masterpiece.
People have complicated reactions to the term muse. Yes, in some ways it takes away agency and perhaps objectifies a person or thing or place, I don’t disagree. But what happens when we expand the term muse to be more so collaborator-muse? The term collaborator is not quite enough, there is a distance, a less primal association that I have with that term. There is also an implied balance of power.
My therapist said that M thinks of me as a god figure. That the idea of god originated with how a child sees its caregivers. I had never thought of it that way. I think it makes sense though. The parallels from God creating man (without all that much explanation on the chemistry and physics required) and me making a baby. I really had nothing to do with it. My body just took care of all the details, the frighteningly inconceivable details. Like knowing all the stars in the universe and placing them just as they are, missing one small detail and the world as we know it would not exist.
This process of body duplication, I am learning, no one really knows that much about. When women are pregnant, they become superhuman. They no longer have food allergies, they grow hair, and their pee cures ailments. There is so much more. Literally no drugs have been tested on women. But think of all the ways women’s bodies self-cure with a hormonal shift. Making something from nothing.
I had my period last week, and I was telling M about it. She is definitely in the “why” stage. I told her it was magic that some bodies had. That they could make something without conscious awareness. Like poop, but everyone poops. That an endless amount of time had to happen, for us to learn and grow just like we did for this to be the reality that we are existing in. That I felt really lucky to be a woman and have this magic if I wanted to use it. And maybe someday she might be able to and want to have a baby. If she did, I would support her. If she didn’t I would support her. We shall see if I can keep this promise, I know I want to… but time changes things.
Before M, when my ambivalence was sky-high, I thought I would be able to live without a kid. I did it because Josh was less ambivalent, his father had passed a few years before we started dating and he was older than I am. He was in the stage I am right now, the one where everything besides relationships seem pointless.
We have danced into each other’s position. Both our wills and life goals changed. No one is at fault. I want a second child. He does not. I have been mulling over this for weeks now, waiting for the right moment to bring it up in therapy.
The question for me has become, do you want to stay with someone and let go of wanting a second child? For me, the answer is yes. I do. I think. I mean I do at this moment. But as I say this, an anger swells in my lower throat. And a feeling of deep loss dredges up in the back of my elbows. What we have, the family we are is enough, and yet, I still want more.
I had a reading with Sarah from The Side Woo today. She is an amazing Tarot reader. I hated what she had to say. The cards told me to wait. The only thing I didn’t want to hear. And I think they are right. When I think about tarot as a medium for self-understanding and re-framing complex situations, it is really a lovely structure. I don’t know enough about it.
What would it feel like to really read the signs? To know what the future should be? To feel the sense of comfort in being certain that you are making the right decision.
All of my life, I have been told that I need to put others’ needs first because that is what good people do. Last night, when I said out loud that I wanted a second child and it was met with curiosity, I felt a weird weight lifted. I still know what I want, but what I have is better than I could have ever imagined. Humans are such strange creatures.
“Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which you are not in control, because someone else also has rights and decisions; it is a collaborative process; making love is at its best a process in which those negotiations become joy and play.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions
Sending love to you, thanks for reading. I love doing substack and because you are here, it makes it possible.
I am in a waiting pattern too. It's so hard 🙏🏻♥️ I have had several tarot readings lately and they say the same thing: be patient.
I can get so stubborn in what I want, in what I believe is for me/destined...and when I push? Disaster. (Something I call Malignant Optimism.) I haven't yet learned to wait, to really trust that what is for me will not go by me (even though I know that's true). I'm trying and I'm getting better at that form of patience, but I think we've been told so often and forcefully that we *must* push and fight for what we want if we *really* want it. (Otherwise, we're sending mixed signals to the Universe, right? No.) But, when we plant seeds in a garden, do we push and fight for them to grow? Do we yell at a blade of grass or flower to be more than what they are in that moment? Of course not! That would be silly. And yet, what do we do to ourselves? Waiting is no fun. But you've planted the seeds, Carissa. What is right for you will grow. So glad you're here. xo