I love my role as a mother, but it's not the most fulfilling one either

Fairly often, you can find me singing the praises of motherhood. I love it. I have always craved this role, and anticipated it, and now that it’s here, I embrace that role with all of my being. I have a Cancer Midheaven, ruled by a Leo moon—I literally shine in this area of life. But it’s not the role that brings me the most fulfillment. Not right now, anyway. It does fulfill me, but not as much as certain other roles I play.

One facet of motherhood that doesn’t thrill or fulfill me at all is the expectations placed upon mothers, whether spoken or unspoken, in regards to how they describe their experience of motherhood. If you don’t completely love it, then you’re ungrateful or neglectful and the subject of much criticism—how dare you complain about an experience you signed up for? If you love motherhood too much, you’ve somehow forsaken your identity as anything other than a mother and are a subject of pity or ridicule—you’ve lost yourself, do you even remember who you were before you had children? I can imagine it’s shocking for some to hear that motherhood, especially when I’m so fresh into it, doesn’t provide me all the fulfillment I need. But I can also imagine that it’s reassuring for far more people to hear. It’s actually okay to get more fulfillment from your job and wish to return to it. You should probably aim to be fulfilled in your marriage, if you have one, and your friendships. And furthermore, it’s okay if motherhood doesn’t fulfill you at all. What’s not okay is allowing that lack of fulfillment to become your children’s responsibility or develop into resentment towards them (but that’s a conversation for another day).

As parents, time becomes both a friend and an adversary. Sometimes we are praying for the day when a certain exhausting and relentless phase of parenting has passed, but we are also (sometimes simultaneously) praying for time itself to slow down or stop, so we can soak in our children in their current forms. We understand the temporal nature of each stage of raising our children, and the fleeting nature of our children themselves as they develop into new people with new bodies and new minds at an alarming rate. We know that the most active & demanding phases of parenthood, while grueling at times, are fleeting. In other words, we know that this is simply a season of life, and like all seasons, eventually it will shift to give way to the next one. We don’t get to be in this role for very long. And even through the different seasons within our children’s formative years, our roles as parents are multifaceted and constantly changing shape. In a startlingly short amount of time, as your title shifts from ‘parent of a newborn’ to ‘parent of a toddler’ to ‘parent of a teenager’ and beyond that, the role demands different things from us. 

The 10th house (where my Midheaven in Cancer falls in my chart) pertains to the roles & titles we take on in life. Sometimes these roles are thrust upon us, sometimes we choose them, sometimes we evolve into them without even trying. But one thing you can guarantee about almost any role is that no role takes the main stage 100% of the time, and many roles we play throughout our lives are not permanent. The impermanence of these roles does not diminish their importance; if anything, it highlights their importance, and more specifically, the importance of being able to both find fulfillment in different roles and be able to move between them on a regular basis. Perhaps it is due to the nature of my tenth house, being ruled by the moon who is always on the move and changing hats, that lends to my understanding of this. You are not going to be a stranger to the fact that I am a mother once you enter my space, let that be clear, but you are also going to quickly discover that Mom is just one of many titles I have, which are usually shifting on a day-to-day basis. Just like the moon.

While the moon has other significations that can link her to motherhood, I think she can also be a gentle and powerful guide for mothers (or all parents of all genders, really) who reminds us to embrace the ever-shifting nature of our role, and also embrace the fact that this is simply one role of many. I believe it is imperative to cultivate and embrace other roles in your life. They don’t all need to be as demanding as motherhood, and in fact, they can’t be, because that’s not sustainable. However, that doesn’t mean we should abandon our other roles or stop allowing them to bring us fulfillment—just as much, or even more than, motherhood does. If you made me pick one, I would maybe say that the most fulfilling role in my life currently is my role as an astrologer to my clients. But that’s always subject to change. Such is the nature of the hats we wear in life: they can—and should—rotate.

The moon moves quickly, and so do our children’s lives. The most Saturnine part of parenthood is a painfully renewed awareness of time and its effects on our bodies, but the moon can be a soothing balm that holds us in awe of temporality as we are swept up by the riptide. The moon doesn’t fret about her own speed, and she’s never too far from our bodies. It’s this compassionate consistency that we can both expect from the moon and also model parts of our parenting after, if we so choose.

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PS. An evergreen reminder: shame is not conducive to growth, so don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t perfect at these things. Nobody is or ever will be.