today is the day of my exact Saturn return. it is also my son’s first birthday.

there’s been a lump in my throat ever since I discovered that these two events would be occurring on the same day. I’ve been crying all day. I’m crying as I write this. how can time be so exact, so perfect, so synchronistically tender? this is what happens when you become an astrologer: you cry about the alignments of planets. 

this Saturn return is occurring in my 5th house of children, creativity, and pleasure. my entire life, as soon as I learned about Saturn returns, I knew I would become a mother during mine. before I knew about astrology, before I had ever looked at my birth chart, I felt an affinity towards Saturn that I couldn’t explain. when I was 15 (Saturn opposition), I started writing poems about the moon. what I’m getting at is: it’s always been there. even when we aren’t conscious of the astrology that’s happening, it’s still happening. 

my son was born 6 weeks earlier than anticipated, which threw off all of the chart predictions I had made for him, but also meant he came out with a natal chart eerily similar to mine. when I anticipated a Pisces or Aries sun with a strong Jupiter influence, what I got was an Aquarius sun with the same Saturnian overtones and 4th house emphasis as me. and now here we are, a year later, and these two momentous milestones are happening concurrently. there’s no way I could have planned this, because nobody ever expects that their pregnancy will be cut short, but every time I think about today, I am humbled and brought to my knees with the synchronicity of it all. 

every cliché they tell you about having children is true. you will never be fully prepared. you will experience a love beyond words and beyond worlds. babies do arrive exactly when they’re meant to. you will lose sleep but you won’t remember that part; you’ll remember the ocean of oxytocin and the small, quiet moments that you wish you could rip a hole in eternity just to revisit over and over again. and you will have many moments of fretting, internally or externally, that you are failing your child in some way.

the birth of your first child will split your existence into two phases: before and after. you will be pushed to the edges of your comfort zone (and often far beyond it). I’ve said before how early parenting is an extremely Saturnian experience no matter how old you are when it happens to you, and this is part of it. becoming a parent to a child is taking yourself to the edges of your reality thus far. it can feel isolating, and your own needs are overshadowed by another’s. if you’re the birthing parent, you may feel like a foreigner in your new body with its new rings, large and slow-moving. 

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with your saturn return, life is similarly split into a before and an after. before saturn entered aquarius, my life looked drastically different than it does now. at the start of my saturn return, I was extremely alone and extremely directionless. I was surviving and life was beautiful despite it all, but I was very much untethered. I had nothing and nobody to keep my feet on the earth. nothing to keep me here. I had been intentionally single since December 2016, but realized that I had been keeping all forms of intimacy at arm’s length in a way that was becoming damaging. nobody could get close to me besides a couple of dear friends. I was Saturn, in a way: floating on the outskirts of everything, surrounded by barriers, observing my own life from a detached and distant perspective. 

then, something happened. in the late summer of 2020, I fell in love. I wasn’t looking to fall in love, but I had cracked open the door just a smidge with the thought, “perhaps I could try dating in earnest again.” 

it only took one date. 

the thing about me is when I fall in love, I do it with my entire being. I have never had a casual relationship in my entire life. once I’m in love, I want to blend my life with this other person’s life and build something of value together. in this case, I fell in love and knew immediately that this was the person I was going to marry and have babies with. and when I am certain of something, I waste no time solidifying my intentions. so, in 2021, we blended our lives together even further by moving in together, becoming pregnant, and getting married. it was the easiest series of decisions I’ve ever made. 

the other thing that happened during my saturn return is that I gave my life over to astrology and never looked back. prior to 2018, I was just a casual astrology fan, and prior to 2020 I had never actually opened an astrology book or gotten a professional reading. one day, in a fit of frustration about my employer, I built a website and started offering tarot readings. I have been reading tarot cards for myself since I was 12 and had never actually given a paid reading to anyone before that point, but I was at the end of my rope with not having control over my income, so I leapt. and thank god I did, because little did I know that an incredibly difficult and disabling pregnancy was in the cards for me, and the ability to make money from home became a necessity for my little family. now, I am fully self-employed, both as an astrologer and as a freelance accessibility services provider for astrologers. but most importantly, I wake up every day and am filled with gratitude that I get to decide what to do with my time and who I work with. my Saturn return is, in a way, a story of my world becoming (seemingly) incredibly narrow and cold and unsupportive and the way I finally got sick of it and forged my own pathways and foundations out of sheer determination and exasperation. 

so, here we are. three short years later and where I was untethered, I now find only roots. I relish in these new identities, wife and mother and astrologer and business owner, and I relish in the ways Saturn has hardened me. I don’t have any concrete list of lessons from my Saturn return, but one shift that’s already apparent is that I have accepted that I will never move as quickly as I would like to, ever, and I am free to enjoy the view while I’m on the way. I no longer want to rush through life; I want to go slow. like Saturn.