East of the Son/West of the Mom: The Day My Hair Turned Green

By Mysti Easterwood

Part I – Saturday

When my son Taz turned 11 in 2007 he had an upburst of testosterone so powerful it rattled the kitchen cabinets. For several days I thought the boy was having an allergic reaction to our early spring, or was scoring steroids in the bathroom at school.

Mysti Easterwood.
Mysti Easterwood.

Taz is a triple Leo – Sun rising and his ruling planet, Venus, in Leo. I am a triple Cancer, with a splashy Mars/Uranus conjunct in my Cancerian eighth house. We do not, by way of understatement, argue nicely.

On this particular Saturday morning, no opportunity to act-out was left unexploited, no door went un-slammed (except the refrigerator’s); shoes, t-shirts, books were dropped in doorways, kicked along the stairs. He raged through brushing his teeth, used the remote by hurling it at the TV and things seemed to break just by being in the room with him. We had gone from zero to 60 before breakfast, and the energy had not yet peaked.

I called my creative partner – a double Taurus with Virgo rising — and described the riotous conditions. He lived 100 miles up the road, in a household of continuous mayhem. His method of dealing with it had been simply to acquiesce. “Let it be,” he said, his bottomless patience washing over me.

I had my eye on a lunar eclipse coming up later that day, and was determined to make a rendezvous with the event. My method would be to meet Taz’s onslaught with the �peaceful answer, which turneth away wrath.’ It would be an experiment, to see how hot and tepid intermingled.

And there was plenty of opportunity to mingle, if not tangle. My consort called back around noon, surprised to find me uncharacteristically serene. The kiddo’s temper ramped and flowed throughout the day. When I offered a homeopathic remedy for anger, it triggered a stomping fit that cracked the downstairs ceiling.

Five o’clock rolled around, and I wanted to be in visual range of the rising Moon. My bedroom windows faced north, and this required eastern sightlines. The living room was the only place in the house that offered this orientation. I dragged my cushions downstairs and plopped them in front of the TV.

“What are you doing?!” the young dragon screeched from the stairwell. “Meditating,” I said, “care to join me?” This invitation – like everything that day — was not well received. The neighbors in the adjoining duplex thumped the common wall in frustration.

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