Today is Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Tonight, the waning Cancer Moon reaches last quarter phase at 11:30 pm EDT. On its way to squaring the Sun, the Moon squares Saturn. It’s urging us to feel any tension between how we feel about our relationships and their structures – and perhaps our parents’ relationship versus our own. It’s kind of a warm-up to the Sun conjunct Juno in Libra at the end of the week. When the symbol of Self hooks up with the archetypal wife in the sign of relationships and balance, the subject of marriage is in the air.
I recently received an email from a long-time best friend who’s been thrown by the news of her ex-husband about to marry again. It really seems to have sideswiped her; heavy baggage and shadow material from the last ten years or so is bubbling up. See, when she was diagnosed with MS a decade ago, she realized that her MFA in writing poetry was cool, but it was time to re-conceive how she might spend her remaining working years. She decided to go to nursing school. She’s a Virgo, by the way, and as brilliant, talented, compassionate, considerate and articulate as they come. Her husband couldn’t deal with any of it, and without warning, actually woke up in bed one day with the words, “I want a divorce” on his lips.
My friend is now a respected labor and delivery RN, madly in love with a man who sounds perfect for her and who moved with her to California. But all of a sudden, at the news of her ex’s marriage, she’s realizing how terrified she is that no one will ever want to stick by her when the MS gets bad and she becomes a ‘burden’. She’s afraid to ask her current partner for any accommodations; afraid to appear weak and needy. The scary disease had been bad news, but at the time she thought the person who had sworn to be with her forever actually would be – and she’s still carrying resentment about how unilaterally he decided to terminate the relationship. And yes, she wanted to be the one to remarry first; to be able to say, to herself if not to anyone else, “See? I’m not the problem here. Someone else wants to be with me, even though I come with a self-destruct sequence already programmed in. You might not have been man enough to cope with that, but other people are.”