Wrestling the Maiden
I’m going to have kids soon. This isn’t a pregnancy announcement, though. More of a status update of the collapsing timeline between my prayer to be the steward of someone else’s karma — to nurture and feed and hold life — and its manifestation in three dimensional form — warmblooded and staring back at me with eyes like mine. The prayer is so close to materialization that others tell me I’m glowing. I am more alive than I have ever been, buzzing with the potential of God answering prayer, in this and all ways, since the better it gets, the better it all gets.
It’s been quite a conflicted journey for me, as it has been for many women of my generation who were told that ambition only counts when it’s focused outside of the home, outside of your own family. Perhaps it’s all right to want to be a mother, but surely not just a mother. Not wanting more than that is a waste of your potential and a slap in the face to a free society that educated you and gave you opportunities in just about every industry.
I didn’t want kids until after I was thirty. Delayed perhaps by hormonal birth control, stagnating finances, the desire to experience more adventure in life. The maiden in my generation is strong, and she was strong in me, but biology was stronger. The more I heal from chronic illness, fake psychiatric diagnoses, the social conditioning of a sick society, the more I hear from my mammalian body. This body wants to be pregnant, to nurse, to nurture. Holding a friend’s baby, my heart flutters with yearning. I sing her a song to keep her from crying and I realize I’m high without any drugs. My arms tingle and ache when I hand her back to her mother. I realize I’m coming down way too soon. And so, over many years, the prayer grows louder than all the reasons to steward my own karma and stay detached from any needy babies who I might fail or fuck up, the way parents universally do.
Although I’m not yet a mother, I have entered the mother phase of life. I have given birth to certain projects (my work as an astrologer and tarot reader, my podcast, my wood craft) that I nurture and grow. They are not as important or substantial as children. They are ambitions orders of magnitude lower than being the steward of someone else’s karma. But I generated them with my body and spirit, and I tend to them with courage and discipline.
I remember giving my beloved friend Shae a reading last year. She is the person who introduced me to the Tarot, God’s picture book. Afterward her eyes were wet as she told me that she knows I’ll be an excellent mother, but to take solace for now that I’ve entered the Mother stage of life, evidenced by my gifts in nurturing and guiding others. It was good to hear, but difficult to process. Absent a human child, when does a woman know she has been initiated into the full moon phase of this triplicate goddess life? Women who never have kids certainly don’t just jump from maiden to crone. Nevertheless, I know many happily childfree women who don’t suffer from any kind of Peter Pan syndrome. They don’t compulsively need to escape reality through fantasy, or what in German New Medicine we call a Flying Constellation. They grew themselves up where before, their child would have grown them up.
Collectively, we used to have kids much earlier. To start a family at age 37 feels late even now, but most of the women in my field of frequency got started in their early 30s. This is really interesting because a 25-year-old woman, she’s barely finished cooking. Her prefrontal cortex just blossomed, so to speak. When she has a child, she matures by force. Responsibility lands in her lap and whether kicking or screaming or in total surrender, she pretty much has no choice but to grow the fuck up. And while many young women remain trivial, naive, directionless in spite of having a kid, they are still undertaking the most important work anyone on Earth ever does.
Without this initiating incident, developing maturity, selflessness, and discipline requires life to kick your ass quite a bit more in other ways. I thank God for the ways life has kicked my ass. All those initiating incidents have given me a powerful combination of lighthearted joy and sober clarity as I move through the world. I don’t take a lot seriously, and yet I’m a very serious person: the development of this trait I attribute to Saturn making a transit of Venus and my first house in Pisces since March 2023, and now squaring my natal Saturn and Midheaven.
As such I feel repulsed by unserious people. I resent the ingenue because I hate to find her in myself. I have wrestled the reins from the maiden’s hands in order to drive as the mother. The accountable one, who owns the truth that every situation she finds herself in, she had a hand in creating. But the maiden is not vanquished, not dead. She’s definitely still here.
The maiden in me appeared in my dreams a couple nights ago. She appeared in the form of a ghost. She looked just like a woman I know in real life: beautiful, mischievous. She tried to seduce me — she begged me to fuck her. “I don’t know, I don’t want to cheat on my boyfriend,” I said to her, as I reached between her legs. Rain started pouring through the ceiling — the ghost disappeared. I woke to the sound of a rainstorm beating against my windows.
Lying in bed I think “Here she is again, the maiden in me. I thought I killed her in order to live as the mother. But she reappears in my unconscious mind, showing me she resents her fall from power.” But at a certain point, if her presence extends outside of the dream realm, it’s sabotaging any chance at building the empire of the mother.
The maiden is so turned on by the fantasy of her rescue that she doesn’t hear the prince at the gate when he’s finally arrived. She loves her helplessness, her longing. She is terrified of that longing actually being fulfilled, because it would mean interdependence with another, worse, someone dependent on her. She wants adventure, experience, to be romanced, but never to be relied upon, never bound, not even to the prince she says she’s been waiting for. She wants to be free for whatever is on the horizon. It may be dragons, but that sounds pretty hot, honestly.
With Uranus squaring Venus right now, it makes even more sense to look at our commitments with a bit of skepticism, and I don’t shame myself as I witness the maiden coming up in other ways this past week. Venus, the goddess of beauty, loves an admirer.
Uranus and Venus tango-ing can feel like we want to break free. We may be looking for strange. Uranus, the chaos agent, wants to earthquake the garden you’ve been tending. With a sextile of both of these to Neptune, expect to see the maiden-provocateur in your dreams or in your waking life idealizations. Of course the ingenue wants to seduce you into your old self sabotaging patterns right now.
But I offer this essay as encouragement to my fellow 30-something women who have been wrestling their way into motherhood without the initiating incident of a real human child. You’ve been initiated elsewhere: in your career, in healing your family of origin, in trying to find your lane of genius and stay in it. Stay committed to this growth. But embrace the maiden when she arises, feel her romantic melancholy.
It’s OK to miss your ex. It’s OK to have given your youth to the guy 16 years older than you. So you tried on polyamory and kink to see if they fit. You traveled the world drinking magic potions and keeping a roster of possible lovers: the man bun yogi, the short king shaman, the vintage camera collector, and the one with the face tattoos.
The maiden had or will have her day in the driver’s seat, and wrestling her into submission is difficult because she’s had a lot of time to train. When she comes to you again, begging you to go to bed with the longhaired butch or to get a german shepherd dog, recognize her as the summer child addicted to her powerlessness, her novelty, her issues. But we’re not letting her sabotage the empire in progress, which can only be built on a foundation of commitment, containment, discipline, self-mastery. Lovingly remind your inner maiden that there are adventures more daring than she has the courage to imagine, or at least that’s what my mom friends tell me.
If you’re looking for support in initiating yourself as a mother, or in any other phase of life, consider booking a reading with me here. If you want to learn dream interpretation, look out for more of these emails or send me an email at jocelyn.teal.macdonald@gmail.com to sign up for Dreaming a New World, my six-month course in dream work.