By Sarah Taylor
In summer 2007, a couple of months after the birth of my son, I decided to demonstrate my commitment to my tarot reading, and my re-commitment to myself (having been fully immersed in matters family for the past year), and ‘go pro’.
I can see why I did this — I was keen to start re-asserting myself in the adult world and put my slowly developing tarot skills to the test. Nevertheless, it was also a fragile time for the very same reasons.
As a new mother, it was daunting re-entering the hard and bustling quotidian from the dreamlike limbo of feed-burp-sleep-play. I felt like I had to re-acquaint myself with the English language, having spent so much of my time communicating non-verbally. Even my clothes seemed ill-fit for purpose: rather more elastic than I was used to — rather more material than I was used to, come to that. Just walking down the street took up all my mental and emotional faculties. I felt like a rabbit in the headlights.
Having limited theoretical or practical tarot knowledge, I was primarily armed with my intuition, which was strong, yes, but inflexible and undisciplined. Crafted in childhood, it had served me very well indeed — mostly as a means of knowing when and how to pass under the radar when the shit was hitting the fan. It had helped me to see things that seemed completely bloody obvious to me but apparently eluded the adults around me. I could read my parents’ feelings like a book.
At the same time I learned it was dangerous to admit to this; I couldn’t even afford to admit it to myself fully. My intuition was more of a secret weapon than a tool. Thus, I was able to bring that honed sense of insight into my tarot reading, but the downside was that I had used it to learn how to avoid, subtly control or redirect circumstances rather than how to address or confront them directly.
And so I found myself embarking on my first professional reading with a questionable sense of self-confidence and what felt like a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-(elasticated)-pants intuition.