Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I'm an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I'm going to give you your weekly horoscope and no-bullshit mystical advice for living your very best life.

Jessica:            Babs, welcome to the podcast. What would you like a reading about?

Babs:               Thank you. I'm so excited. My question is, am I using grief as an excuse? Recently, a very old and trusted friend told me that I'm not doing enough, that I am a leftist version of "thoughts and prayers." My kiddo died three years ago, and I'm still struggling to get out of bed most days. I love my community, and I thought I was showing up as best as I can. But this conversation has left me wondering if my grief has become an excuse not to do more.

Jessica:            Okay. There's so much in the question. And of course, I read the question, but hearing you say it is like there's just so much in this question. So, before we get into the deeper part of the question, I have a couple questions about this friend.

Babs:               Okay.

Jessica:            So this is like a dear friend? This is a person you trust?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            And when they refer to the "thoughts and prayers" comment, are they basically saying you're not engaged in activism; you're not engaged in the world in a critical way? You're doing spiritual work that doesn't land? Is that what—because that's how I interpret that, but I don't know if that's what they meant.

Babs:               A little bit. It's a combination of maybe not enough activism and just, also, I'm at this crossroads of intellectually understanding that I want to kind of move more plant-based vegan, and they've been vegan for quite a while. And them getting a little bit impatient with that journey, too, I think, is a big contributing factor. But it's also the activism and just showing up in the world in the moment.

Jessica:            So, specifically the veganism piece—have you said to them, "I want to be a vegan; I intend to be a vegan"?

Babs:               [indiscernible 00:02:05].

Jessica:            And they are mad, it sounds, and critical that you've expressed clarity about wanting to go in that direction, but you haven't done it; am I hearing that right?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            And is their comment, do you think, primarily about veganism, or is it more about any of the pick-your-many other things?

Babs:               I think, for them, they're all very intertwined. Liberation is a very strong value of theirs. And so they don't really separate—

Jessica:            I see.

Babs:               —what's going on from their veganism.

Jessica:            I see. And they project that value onto other people. I see. Okay. So I'm just going to share my perspective on something before we get into the particulars of you and maybe of this relationship. But I want to say that when a person is driven by their convictions, whether we're talking about liberation work or veganism or any number of things, it is very easy for us to get like, "My way is the way, and there's only one way."

                        And whenever people express rigidity about how other people show up to movement work, liberation work, I have a red flag that comes up. And I want to just say there's a lot in your question. There's a lot in this accusation, which—it kind of sounds like an accusation as opposed to the concern of a friend, right? So I want to just say there's something super rigid in either your friend and how they're communicating with you or how it's landing for you.

                        And separate from the very intense topic that we're about to broach on around grief and the loss of a child, there's not only one way forward, and there's not only one pace. In the practice of liberation work, there has to be room for showing up in some ways and not in others or having intentions and meeting them at 30 percent for now or whatever. And when our friends judge us and say there's only one way to be, that is usually more about them than really about us.

                        And so I'm not saying that there's not a value in having a conversation where a friend is like, "Hey, I'm concerned about you because you say you want to do x, and you're not doing x," and, "Are you really sad, and do you need help?" It sounds like this person is like, "Grief is an excuse." And if that is, in fact, what they're saying, I couldn't disagree more. And that doesn't mean that your grief isn't also an excuse. Maybe it is. But being aggressed upon or judged is not going to help you. And if they're your friend, I want to just express concern for you about why your friend isn't leading with a little more empathy. Does that track with your situation and with this relationship?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            I wonder—again, we're really going to focus on the grief part because it's the you part. But before we do, I just want to see, is this friendship—are you having questions about this friendship at all?

Babs:               It's a tricky one. We've been friends on and off, just in each other's orbits, since we were 14. So it's been a long minute. And we both watch the same church. We both have similar backgrounds and strict upbringing. And we're both very leftist, ahead of the curve. In the 2008 era, when this wasn't really conversations, we were having those conversations already, and we didn't really have other people to have those conversations with. So there's a lot of history and a lot of trust and knowing in all of that that makes it just very complicated when things like this come up that it's like, "I thought you knew me a little bit better than this." Right? Like—

Jessica:            Yeah. I mean, you mentioned church. And my experience—I'm not Christian. I was not raised, really, around very—I was raised around Christians because it's a Christian world, but I wasn't raised around the culture of religiosity. But my experience of it is that there's not a lot of room for grief within Christianity, within the church. It's like you be sad, you be pious about how sad you are, and then you turn your other cheek. You move on. You keep on being a good Christian soldier sort of thing.

Babs:               Yeah. There's almost this expectation of—you're supposed to now lead.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Babs:               Like you've gone through these things that have made you so much stronger, and it's like there's almost this expectation that you are now supposed to overcome and be above and know more than everybody else.

Jessica:            Well, it makes sense from a Christian perspective, right? The person who's died has probably gone to heaven. If they've gone to heaven, then you should be happy for them. They're somewhere better. So you're not supposed to wallow in your grief, because your grief is about you. So you had a hardship, and then you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It's where Christianity and white supremacy meets, and it's gorgeous. Okay. We're being sarcastic. It's not gorgeous. But it is a fucking mess, right?

                        And so when I hear you say that you lost a child three years ago—and you're young. You're how old now?

Babs:               I am 33.

Jessica:            So young to have a loss like that. I would not expect that you'd be cool now, because that's not how grief works. It's just not how grief works. And again, before we get into the stuff that's yours, I do want to say that whether or not your friend has a point, the way that they are relating to grief is worth having an exploratory conversation as people from a similar rigid background around religion because their expectation that you should feel a particular way, and therefore you should be acting like they're acting, is giving problematic linear thinking.

                        Okay. I'm just—I'm trying to not shit on your friend in any way. And I want to hold space for, if your friend had come to you and said, "I'm really worried about you. I worry that you're wallowing, and I worry that you're not trying to help yourself. And I'm seeing you not live in accordance with your values, and I'm worried about where that's going to lead you"—if they had expressed that, I would not be having this intervention right now with you about the friendship, okay?

Babs:               Yeah. And that hit my heart in a different way, too, just—

Jessica:            Of course.

Babs:               —the way that you said it. I'm like, "Oh, yeah."

Jessica:            That actually makes sense. That actually makes sense because for the first six months of grief after someone dies, our friends and family rally around us. The world rallies around you. And then, once we edge towards a year, three years, seven years, the world is like, "You're not done? You're not over it?" And that's not how grief works after death. It's not how it works. And there's the pain of loss, and then there's the pain of everyone around you not seeing that there's a hole in your chest.

Babs:               Exactly.

Jessica:            And having a bestie who really gets you to be like, "It's not a hole. Move on," is fucked up. And it's okay that you can hold space for their perspective, but I want to hold space for you to feel entitled to having people who empathize and care, even if they want to call you in. This was an aggressive call-out. It wasn't right. It wasn't correct, what this person did, I'm going to say.

And so there's something about this friendship that I want to encourage you to reflect on. Let me put it this way. A lot of times, the friends we make before we heal through our trauma are more a reflection of trauma than we realize. And this person is deeply giving—which parent is it? Is it your dad? I can't tell. Which parent is it that this person is reminding me of? It's one of your two parents.

Babs:               Oh. They have the same big three as my mom.

Jessica:            Okay. So it's your mom.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            So they're giving mom—and not the best parts of your relationship with your mom. The worst parts, right? And whether or not this is something you talk to them about, that's actually not what's important to me in this moment. What's important to me in this moment is that you give yourself the grace of recognizing, "Oh. This person who helped me heal from my relationship with my mom is now bringing up the exact same issues, telling me how I need to feel and what it looks like to be a good person and that what I'm doing does not allow me to be a good"—yeah. I'm—right?

Babs:               What a call-out.

Jessica:            Thank you. Thank you. You're 33. And the 33rd year is the Christ year. It's the apex to the Saturn Return. So the Saturn Return happens around 29, and then it's over. Could've lasted a couple weeks. Could've lasted off and on for almost a year. But it's over. And then 30, 31, 32, you're living your life. 33—boom, and you get confronted with whatever you did not fully heal or work out in that 29th year.

Babs:               Okay.

Jessica:            And this lines up, unfortunately, with the loss of a child or you. And so that 33 might be harder for you than 31 was or 32 was tracks for me.

Babs:               Yeah. I actually—when we hit the third anniversary, I posted that it's been so much harder recently than it was after I hit that first year. I was like, "Okay. I'm going to start putting my life back together and putting these pieces together." But the third year being more distant, he feels farther away. Life is moving on. It's another whole hard thing to accept.

Jessica:            It's another fucking horrible thing. And also, at the end of year one, you're like, "Oh, I can catch my breath. Oh, I can get out of bed." It's not like, "Oh, I'm healed." So you put things in place, right? You put things in place. But the problem with the putting things in place—it was not that it was a mistake; it's that it creates an expectation. And in the world that we live in, you put something in place; well, you're supposed to expand that, right? It's supposed to get bigger, right? You're supposed to do more, right? So you're supposed to be climbing a ladder and getting higher and higher and higher.

                        And when we are dealing with the grief of death, especially the loss of a child, every time you make a little bit of progress, it activates the grief. It tugs. It just tugs. And I don't know that we get over these kinds of losses. I think we learn to live with them. I have never encountered anyone who's cool and moving on and living as if everything is fine and nothing has changed after three years from a loss like this. And there's something super fucking wrong with our culture that we don't talk about it.

Babs:               Absolutely.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Babs:               It's very isolating—

Jessica:            It's so isolating.

Babs:               —to be in long grief. It's very isolating.

Jessica:            It is. It is. And then going and talking to other people who are grieving over someone you don't know actually doesn't necessarily make it feel better. I know there's grief groups, but that's not actually—the actual thing that we actually need is our friends to actually listen when we say we are fucking sad, and there's nothing to do, and there's no where to go, and it's not changing quickly. The grief is like a slow-growing tree that has dormant seasons. It's not like a car ride from here to there.

And your friend is really lacking in empathy, unfortunately. And maybe you haven't expressed what's going on for you. Maybe they just don't know. Maybe this is a blind spot in their own cultural and religious assumptions about the world. But I just want to say that that's fucked up. And it's okay that you feel hurt and mad because that's fair. You are entitled to feel hurt and mad. And that doesn't mean we're not going to also talk about the question that it's kind of scratched an itch on for you, which is hiding behind grief.

I don't accept the premise of hiding behind grief, actually, exactly. But—I do and I don't. But I think that there's an element here of the question of, like, are you wallowing—I want to hold space for that. But grief is monolithic and terrifying and isolating and all these things. So are you hiding behind grief? Nobody fucking hides behind grief. Do you wallow in the feelings of grief? Okay, maybe. And that's something we can talk about.

So, before we move on from the friend, I just want to check, do you have any questions about that, or does that kind of land?

Babs:               It really does land. We've had a couple previous conversations about the holier-than-thou complex that kind of lingers even after you leave the church of, like, "We're better people. We're nicer people. We're good people." So it all kind of resonates into those concepts that may be blind spots.

Jessica:            Yeah. And it might be worthy to ask your friend, if they are a close friend, to look at what other religious backgrounds and other cultures do in response to death and loss because, again, Christianity really doesn't offer much of a grieving plan. It's like, have a funeral. There's not a whole lot else after that. There was a death in my family not long ago, and it reminded me of a Jewish tradition of we don't put the gravestone in until after a year because the immediate family is not meant to confront the loss of the death for a year.

                        I'm not religious. I don't really care about religion too much myself. But I've always really loved that as an idea because, as a medium, I see so much about bereavement. And again, I've never seen anyone able to do much more than acknowledge loss in the first year. So three years, seven years, twelve years, I mean, you're still—it's still a conversation.

Babs:               Definitely.

Jessica:            So we have your birth chart. I can pull up your birth chart, but I actually don't think we need to go there yet. I guess I have a question for you, which is—okay. So this friend has said this thing to you, and it's stayed in your head. Do you have concerns that you're "thoughts-and-prayers-ing" things? Where do you resonate with this criticism?

Babs:               I think with so much going on in the world, there always feels like you could be doing more. None of us are sitting 24/7 doing activism and ringing the alarm.

Jessica:            Yes. Yeah.

Babs:               And there's breaks that are built into that. And at the same time, I am putting one foot in front of the other, and maybe I should be stretching myself more. Maybe everybody is also having a hard time. I'm different in that I've gone through this, but I'm not the only one to have gone through something. And it's kind of a weird space to navigate.

Jessica:            So could you name for me—and you don't have to, but do you have something on the tip of your head about three things that you could be pushing yourself to do more than you're doing, like something once a week, something once a month? Is there something in your head that you're like, "Oh, if I had more energy, I would be doing x?"

Babs:               The things that come up aren't so much like activism stuff so much as I really want to show up more for my people, my nesting partner. And being able to carry more of the weight there, to be able to build my own independence as we're getting further out feels like a big spot to stretch, and I feel like taking weight off of the people around me would be giving more to community.

Jessica:            I see.

Babs:               So that's kind of—

Jessica:            Wait a second. Wait a second. You're telling me that you have been feeling like if you weren't in so much pain and you didn't have so much need, that your friends and loved ones would be unencumbered to help other people? Am I hearing that?

Babs:               A little bit, yeah.

Jessica:            This is really interesting. Does it sound different when I say it with incredulousness—

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            —in my voice? Okay. Good. Okay. Good. Again, there's this value you were raised with. You should need nothing. You should have no emotions except for gratitude. You should be happy. And if you're not grateful and you're not happy, what are you? A burden? Ungrateful.

Babs:               Ungrateful is a big one.

Jessica:            Ungrateful. Yeah. I want to hold space for the beauty of gratitude. It is healing when we experience authentic gratitude. It is valuable to be able to share gratitude with others. But the guilt-to-gratitude pipeline is not a thing. It's not like a thing. Am I right? How often does guilt motivate authentic gratitude? It doesn't. It's obedience. What it does is creates obedience, right?

Babs:               Yeah. That's such a childhood word for me, is like, "Oh, she's so obedient."

Jessica:            Obedience, right?

Babs:               Like, I'm not a dog.

Jessica:            It's a Christian thing, right? Yeah. It's a Christian thing. I detest obedience. I am such a fan of willfulness and autonomy and mutual respect. Obedience is trashy, and I'm not into it. And when I say trashy, I know there's a word "trashy." I meant like trash-y, like just trash. It's trash. I want to hold space for you didn't say that you would be vegan if you weren't so sad.

Babs:               Yes, and I feel like I would get more plant-based. I feel like it's steps. I'm autistic and I have ARFID, so [crosstalk]—

Jessica:            What's ARFID?

Babs:               Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake.

Jessica:            Ah.

Babs:               So I eat a lot of same foods.

Jessica:            Right.

Babs:               So it's less that I'm happy that I'm eating the thing and more that it's like the routine food that I always eat.

Jessica:            Totally, totally, totally. Yes.

Babs:               And then the crappier I'm feeling, the more I'm going to lean into my same foods.

Jessica:            I see.

Babs:               So it kind of perpetuates a thing. So it's kind of—

Jessica:            There's a relationship there. It's on the route to maybe eating vegan, but it's like there's so many steps in front of that for you—

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            —which your friend should know. Okay. So let me just slow that down, and I'm going to actually have you say your full name out loud for me.

Babs:               Okay. [redacted].

Jessica:            The depth of your loyalty to your family of origin is really intense. You feel that you have to protect them from criticism. You have to protect family secrets. You have this very deep sense of duty to shield them from criticism. So you can criticize them, and you want people to be like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," if you're criticizing them. But you don't actually want anyone else to criticize them. And I want to just—

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            —name that, because it is a loyalty that you hold to their values system. It's not your values system, but it's their values system. It's appearances. What happened in your family and in your home life as you were growing up is not how it was presented to the world.

Babs:               Correct.

Jessica:            Yeah. And there was this sense of, like, "I know the world will be cruel if x or y is revealed. Therefore, I'm going to protect the family, as I'm meant to." Am I seeing that correctly?

Babs:               Yes. That's been a big thing I've been working on in therapy, actually, is—

Jessica:            Great.

Babs:               —that concept of, "Don't criticize my mommy."

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah.

Babs:               Like, she's my mommy, and also, that's my mom, and she wasn't always the greatest.

Jessica:            Complicated.

Babs:               That dichotomy is complicated. Yeah.

Jessica:            It's complicated. Was your dad like a community leader or something?

Babs:               Very close. So my dad was in the military for a long time, and then he retired and became a teacher. And he is still a teacher.

Jessica:            Okay. And it makes sense, also, that he's from the military, based on what I'm seeing energetically. Again, it's like there's how you are meant to behave in public versus in private. It's interesting how much you talk about your mom and you're not naming your dad. That's fascinating to me.

Babs:               My first therapist did not realize that my dad was in the picture until like two years in—

Jessica:            I'm not surprised.

Babs:               —which is kind of a reflection on her. I'm like, "You didn't ask where my dad was."

Jessica:            Right, right, right. But also, you didn't bring it up.

Babs:               [crosstalk]. Yeah. It just doesn't come up.

Jessica:            It's interesting. What this tells me, just separate from everything else, is you have historically been really good at living around elephants in rooms. You're like, "There's no elephant. There's plenty of room in this tiny room with the huge elephant in it. I'm just going to live in the corner, and it's fine." Right?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            And so, when confronted with the loss of your child, this is probably the biggest thing that you have not been able to live around in the way that you have other experiences. And this loss is—it's not just that it's changing you. It's that it's trying to change you. It's trying to help you to become a better advocate for yourself. Do you have other children?

Babs:               I do. I have one other child.

Jessica:            Child. And you said nesting partner. I've never heard that term. Do you just mean you're partnered, but you're not government-married?

Babs:               So I'm polyamorous.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Oh, so—

Babs:               So the partner that I live with is my nesting partner.

Jessica:            Nesting partner. That makes sense. Okay. And you have other partners as well?

Babs:               Yes.

Jessica:            But this friend is not one of them?

Babs:               It's complicated.

Jessica:            Okay.

Babs:               It's very complicated.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The two children that you had were from this nesting partner or with this nesting partner?

Babs:               No. I got married at 19 in the church.

Jessica:            Wow.

Babs:               Yeah, and had my first at 20, my second at 21, and then realized, "We don't want to raise our kids in this, actually," and we bailed. And to this day, the person that I married is still one of my very best, closest friends.

Jessica:            Awesome.

Babs:               But I realized I'm a lesbian.

Jessica:            Right.

Babs:               So we bailed on marriage eventually.

Jessica:            Yes. Yeah.

Babs:               But I adore him.

Jessica:            Great.

Babs:               He's a wonderful dad, and he's one of my favorite people. And everyone gets so confused when I'm like, "This is my ex-husband." But it is what it is.

Jessica:            And have you been able to share the grief with him?

Babs:               We share quite a bit. He's got that Cancer/Venus, so he's pretty emotionally in—even more than I am, quite often. So he really holds that safe space for the big feelings and the big, ugly crying. It's definitely a me-and-him thing.

Jessica:            It's an interesting answer you've given me. So many words. Do you share with him where you're at with your grief?

Babs:               I used to more. He's recently had another baby with his new parter.

Jessica:            I see. Okay.

Babs:               And so that support has kind of—

Jessica:            It's shifted.

Babs:               —dwindled. Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. And how recently did he have that child?

Babs:               Four months.

Jessica:            Okay. So, in the last year, his partner's been pregnant, and now he has an infant. And I just want to name that that makes sense that that's part of the uptick in isolation and grief, right? Because the partner that you would share this with, you need to help him move on in the way he's doing, right?

Babs:               Yeah. Absolutely.

Jessica:            There's two different ways I want to take this conversation, so I'm just going to name that. One of them is, do you want me to check in with your child?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay.

Babs:               I think that would be—yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Okay. And the other one is—I feel like I need to say it's not that I don't think that you have some habits that aren't serving you, that you just haven't challenged yourself around. It's not that I think you are perfect and there's nothing more you could be doing. It's not that I don't think that most of us—maybe not your perfect friend, but most of us are struggling to figure out what's enough. We're struggling to navigate the fear and the outrage and the heartbreak and all the things of the world and also find sustainable actions that actually help people and ourselves, right? All the things.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            All the things. I'm not trying to say you're perfect. You're deeply imperfect, as am I, as is your fucking friend. Okay. But I am not seeing that you're using your grief as a shield. I came into this conversation really being open to you could. You could be. That's a thing that a person could do. I kind of think you're reversing that. I think you're forcing yourself to be normal and to do things, and then you come home, and you're empty, empty, empty.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            I actually think you are trying—that voice that your friend articulated, you have that same voice inside of you. And you give it too much space—not not enough space, too much space, I would say. Do you have a practice for connecting with your child?

Babs:               A little bit. It's a tricky thing. I feel like his mom is in this little box, and I keep her in this little box so I can—

Jessica:            Function.

Babs:               —do dishes and go to work, right?

Jessica:            Yep.

Babs:               And it felt less optional to let her out in the beginning, and now it's more like I don't look forward to letting her out of the box.

Jessica:            Of course. Of course. Of course. Yeah.

Babs:               It's so much.

Jessica:            Yes.

Babs:               And it's so heavy.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Babs:               And then there's a little bit of guilt with that, too, like I'm not connecting with him like I used to. I'm not making time. And it just—it hurts.

Jessica:            Yeah. Yeah. So I am going to give you the advice before we check in with him and some perspective. Let's start with the perspective. I am a medium, and I speak with dead people. And I have never encountered a place called heaven. And in fact, when we are no longer in a body, there's no such thing as place. That's a material idea, right? When we are no longer in a body, there's no such thing as time either.

And so, because of that, somebody who's in spirit doesn't experience time. "Oh, you used to talk to me a year ago and you don't talk to me now"—I've never heard a dead person express that at all, okay? What's really important is not that you create time or space to connect with him as a parent, but instead that you create time and space to tend to the reason for your compartmentalization. Yeah. So let me say more.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            The reason for your compartmentalization—and I'm not a psychologist, and I don't have a reference point for autism or anything else. I'm just going to use my reference points. Your reason for compartmentalization is, in part, because the pain is so great that what the fuck else are you going to do, and in part because you're committed—whether you need to be or not, I don't know, but you are committed to acting like everything's normal. You are committed.

Now, clearly, based on your one friend, I know that that is partially coming from your community. They want you to get over it. They want you to move on. But that's also coming from you because you didn't come to me saying, "This friend was so mean to me, and they said this really fucked-up thing. It has a grain of truth to it, but wow, they were so unkind to me." You didn't say that at all. And so you missed it because you're doing it to yourself, right?

Babs:   Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. And so, within this, I want to just name that your reasons for compartmentalization deserve care and curiosity from you. And within that, I want to say this may be too much. This might be like an idea for you to fuck with with your therapist. You may want to take a deeply psychological approach. You might want to take a deeply woo approach, but creating space once a week that you ritualistically return to—if that's too much, once a month—that you ritualistically return to where you are alone. Maybe you're in a bathtub. Maybe you're on a walk. Maybe you're in your room with the door locked. Whatevs. And you invite in the realities of where your heart is at in relationship to your grief.

Babs:               It just hit me that you're right, but also, oh no.

Jessica:            Yeah. I know.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            I know. It's like what I'm saying is like, "Hang out with a tsunami and be okay." Right? I know. I know what I'm saying. But the truth is that the tsunami—the amount of energy it takes to keep a tsunami away from you, to turn your back on a tsunami—yeah, of course, you're not doing all the things you could technically be doing. It takes so much energy to compartmentalize. We don't talk about that enough. It preserves your energy in some ways, but for me, to pretend that something is not what it is takes force of will. And that force of will is basically you saying to you, "Shut up, shut up, shut up. Don't feel. Don't feel too much. Don't feel bad. Don't feel bad. Shh. Don't. Don't."

                        So you're unconsciously reiterating a trauma that you fought so hard to avoid and to escape. And this is the problem with being immediately post-Saturn Return, is you realize all the ways in which you unintentionally became the thing you were trying to leave behind in your childhood.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            And so I am saying this as a medium. You can't do this for your son. This is not for your son. This is for you because if you do it for him, you're not actually doing it. It's motivated by guilt. So, again, the guilt-to-gratitude pipeline is an illusion. It's not a real pipeline. It doesn't exist. So I'm going to check in with him. Will you say his name?

Babs:               [redacted].

Jessica:            And did you tell me how old he was?

Babs:               He was nine.

Jessica:            And did you know he was going to pass?

Babs:               I knew about a week before. He was sick for three weeks, but it was out of nowhere.

Jessica:            Oh, that's so quick. Oh my God. I'm so sorry. Okay. I just want to make sure I'm seeing him correctly—both really extroverted and also kind of really introverted at the same time?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            And he was very into shoes?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. He's immediately showing me his shoes, like, immediately showing me he loved shoes. And he's the elder child, eh?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Was it something to do with his head?

Babs:               Yeah. So he had liver failure, but liver failure is like—it processes toxins, so then the toxins all go to your brain, and—terrible.

Jessica:            Oh God. That's fucking awful. I'm so sorry. And it just, like, out of a—I didn't even know that could happen to a child.

Babs:               Yeah. It was horrifying.

Jessica:            I'm so sorry.

Babs:               It was just a horrifying experience.

Jessica:            That is awful. I'm so sorry. He is showing me that it was his brain, that he feels his brain killed him, like his brain just was like, "You're done. You're out." Okay. So there's a number of things I want to tell you. He knew he was loved. This was not a child who was like, "You don't love me." He knew he was loved. So something that I experience with people who've passed is that sometimes a person who's passed away is very connected to this earth and this world after they die because of any number of factors. It's not good; it's not bad. It's just a thing. And eventually, what happens—and sometimes it happens immediately—is that a soul just evolves and is where it is. It grows where it's planted. You know? I mean, that's a very material way of saying it, but they're harder to access, in a way, because they no longer resonate with their personalities as much.

                        He's there. And my experience as a medium is that kids are really good at dying. They don't have a sense of control or entitlement like adults do. And so, when their health all of a sudden changes or they're all of a sudden in spirit, they're just a lot more adaptable.

Babs:               That makes sense.

Jessica:            And he was already kind of like a—I mean, he was your child, but he wasn't raised with a lot of restriction and judgment, so he was kind of a little wild. And he was adaptable. Sometimes he wasn't, but usually, he was like, "Okay. We'll just do something different." If you were to try to tap in and feel him, you would have a really hard time feeling his presence at this point. Have you tried in the last—I'm getting about year, year and a half.

Babs:               Yeah. I've noticed.

Jessica:            Yeah. He's not here the way he was, which is really good for him, not great for you as a mourning mother. I just want you to know he is showing me parts of himself when he—he thinks of it like before, like something happened to him—I wonder if his personality started changing in kind of surprising ways not long before he was obviously sick. It was his brain. His brain was just, like, different. And because he was a kid, it was really hard to tell what the hell was happening. You weren't mean to him about it, though.

Babs:               No.

Jessica:            No.

Babs:               I thought he was just—like, he started having deeper insights about stuff. And I was like, "Oh my gosh. This just must be what happens when kids start getting towards that preteen zone."

Jessica:            He's showing me that you just thought he was becoming a teenager overnight. And what was happening was something in his—he really just shows me this as a brain thing, like something in his brain—like, it slowed something down that he had never noticed in his perception. So he was always kind of like a reflective, introspective, kind of old soul kind of boy.

Babs:               Oh yeah.

Jessica:            But then, not long before he was very sick, something shifted in his perceptions. So you have this meditation you do sometimes, and it's kind of with a sun, like a really expansive sun?

Babs:               Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            He's like the sun. He feels—he knows that meditation that—and this means something to you? You know what I'm talking about?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay, because he's showing me that he is like that sun now. He's really big. He is not bad, and he is not good. He is. You know what I mean?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Like he is this really expansive, vibrant energy. And it's like what he's showing me is he's reunited with his wisdom. As a little boy, he was separated from a lot of it.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            And as he's in his soul state, he is deeply connected to it. And so that meditation is the best way to feel his presence, as opposed to trying to tap into him, because—

Babs:               [indiscernible 00:38:59].

Jessica:            Yeah. The way that he is showing himself to me is very hard to feel the boy that he was.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            But it's because he's so much more in a state of oneness than he was, than any human could be. God, this thing in your family about protecting people is so intense.

Babs:               It's a lot.

Jessica:            He's showing me some things about you, like just on a spiritual level, but he doesn't want me to say them out loud because he doesn't want you to feel, in any kind of way, criticized or—you know, it's not like he's saying something critical. It's not even about that. He's just like—it's this weird, protective, like, "We just don't name it. We just don't say it out loud," thing. Honestly, this is all your father. I don't know why you're so focused on your mother. This is 100 percent your father.

Babs:               Yeah. It comes a lot from—my dad is Black, and his parents—they're just very—like we have to protect each other because white people aren't going to protect us, and the system's not going to protect us. So we just—"What happens in the house stays in the house" is like a whole motto.

Jessica:            Is your mom Black as well?

Babs:               No.

Jessica:            Did he trust your mom?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Your son has this sense of, like, "I have to protect you. I can't say the obvious things. I can't say the subtle things. I can't say the—I could say it to you sometimes," but it's this really intense protection thing. And it is, on the one hand, a really important coping mechanism that has kept your father's parents and your father safe in a variety of contexts. It's like, you know, no notes. And then, on the other hand, it's like this thick, heavy, suffocating blanket that has been put upon everything.

                        And it's really interesting to me that your son's way of showing up in this moment to talk to me so I can talk to you is, in part, to be like, "I'm still putting that blanket—I'm still"—oh, I see. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Sorry. He just showed it to me. He just showed it to me. That's why. That's why your friend—you didn't notice it because your friend is demanding that you live under the blanket still. And you're like, "Well, yeah, that makes sense. Nobody should know about my child dying. Nobody should know about the horrors that I went through. Nobody should know about the horrors of grief. How dare I be out about that?" And yeah, you gotta talk to this friend. You gotta talk to this friend. But also—so your nesting partner—they? Is that the right pronoun?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. Were they there for all of this?

Babs:               Yeah. So we had only been dating like four months.

Jessica:            Oh my God. They are there for you. I'm seeing that correctly, eh?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. And they're not like, "Hurry up and get over it"? They don't have that attitude? No.

Babs:               No.

Jessica:            I can see that. Okay. Great. Your son likes this person and also agrees with you about your concerns. They're both true. And you don't need to make any decisions or changes at this time, okay? Yeah.

Babs:               He cracks me up. He's got a Gemini stellium but a Cap Rising and a Cap Moon, so it's kind of like that old man and childhood vibe.

Jessica:            Yeah. Totally.

Babs:               It's just so solid.

Jessica:            Totally. Yes. And also, he picks up on lots of nuances that a lot of other people wouldn't. So listen. He needs nothing. He needs nothing. There's nothing he needs from you. There's nothing that you can do that would make where he is worse or better. And where he is is perfectly as it should be. He has absolutely no needs that are not well and organically attended to, which is not something that all people that I talk to who are passed away experience or communicate, I want to just say. It's not like this is my worldview of all dead people or whatever. He's really well resourced.

                        And this feeling that you have of how to continue to parent somebody who's no longer with us—we want to give you this reframe of, instead of trying to parent him—because he doesn't need parenting anymore. It's instead, can you find ways of living with your tsunami of sadness and grief and love and anger and all the things? Can you find a way to treat it less like an elephant in the room and more like a part of you? Because when you compartmentalize off this part, it disconnects you from receiving his wisdom and his love and that flow of love that exists between you that just shatters you but also fills you up at the same time. It's very hard to—yeah. I'm sorry.

Babs:               It's good. It's a lot, but it's good.

Jessica:            It is a lot. I'm so sorry. It is a lot. And he doesn't need you to do this on a timeline, but he's showing me that you have this one habit—and he's not telling me what it is because, again, protection—but this one habit, and he's showing it to me kind of like a square, like it's like a sharp turn that is really not helping your life.

Babs:               I think it's that I get these really good ideas, and I run, run, run, and I crash.

Jessica:            Oh.

Babs:               And my idea falls flat.

Jessica:            I see, I see, I see, I see. Okay. Cool, cool, cool. And is this something that happened before his loss as well?

Babs:               A little bit. I've only had kind of an issue with momentum [crosstalk]—

Jessica:            Sure. But it's gotten worse.

Babs:               —but it's def—yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah. Okay. Hold on. He's saying that's not it. That's not it. That's you just pushing yourself further than you're capable of going and then encountering a fucking wall. That's all that that is, is what he's saying. Is it doomscrolling? Is it—

Babs:               Maybe.

Jessica:            Okay. It's doomscrolling. Okay, because what's happening with this habit—and I'm not positive it's doomscrolling, but it might be. What's happening with this habit is that your—oh. It's fragmenting your capacity for attention, and it's manufacturing emotion instead of tapping into the real feelings you have. So—

Babs:               It's a lot.

Jessica:            Yeah. So, unfortunately, what he's showing me is a little less time on social media, which is part of how you stay activated and engaged socially and politically, right? But I think what he's saying is more intentional time and that when you have certain kinds of emotions come up and he says, "You don't always know what they are immediately, but you always know what they are," it's important to recognize, "Oh, it's tapped into this well that I've spent a lot of energy avoiding. And I actually am going to give myself 30 seconds." Put your phone down. Just breathe and notice where those feelings are, not because it connects you to him, because it doesn't. It connects you to you. And the more connected you are to you, the more connected you can be to him. You can't connect to him. You have to connect to you. Does that make sense?

Babs:               Yes.

Jessica:            Super annoying.

Babs:               I hate it, but yes.

Jessica:            It's the stupidest thing I've ever said to you in a long line of stupid things I've been saying, but yeah. Okay. Good. He says you just got it. Something just clicked inside of you. He's like, "Okay. I don't have to say anything more about this." Okay. He does want me to talk to you about veganism. He doesn't want you to be vegan. He doesn't want you to be a vegan. Did he love hamburgers? He's showing me hamburgers.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            He's just like, "Why would you stop eating hamburgers?" And I agree with every ethical argument for veganism. (laughs) Sorry. He's very anti-hamburgers. (laughs)

Babs:               He had a lot of food restrictions, and a gluten-free bun and a hamburger is like [crosstalk].

Jessica:            It's joy. It's joy. Exactly. He has this attitude about it which is like, "You can't do everything. So why are you doing something that's going to be—like, what's the point of doing that?" He understands, but he also is just like, "Why?" It's the first thing he's shown me that I'm like, "Oh, he's a kid," but also, he's not wrong, you know? I would say this is coming back to the laws that the good book insists upon may be right, but they're not always right for all people. And it's not actually your job to live according to all the laws.

                        And I say that, but what I really mean is your friend might be right, but that doesn't mean your friend is right for you. And I'm really focusing on your friend partially because I'm a little horrified by the whole thing that happened there, but also because their voice lives inside of you because they got that rigidity from the same place you did. And this is unexplored, undeconstructed shit. And it's narrating inside of you what you feel is too much—you shouldn't be feeling it. You shouldn't be asking for help. You should be—it's a lot of fucking "shoulds" is what I'm trying to get out here.

                        And every time you catch yourself "shoulding," I just would say catch it. Just catch it and ask yourself, "Is there a different—how would I say this to my son? How would I say this to my child? Would I say to my child that they should be feeling differently or doing something more?" No. Of course not, because that's shitty. So why say it to yourself? This is a practice, if you commit to it, that will take years before it becomes a reflex to not be a dick to yourself. Right?

Babs:               Right.

Jessica:            So it takes years of reframing and reframing and reframing and reframing until you're like, "Oh, I don't have to reframe. I caught it before." And let me pull up your chart. Hold on.

Babs:               Okay.

Jessica:            This is your chart. You were born July 31st, '92, in Offutt AFB, Nebraska, at 6:48 p.m. So I pulled up your chart really quickly because I want to point to a couple things that are just about you. And they're not specific to your loss, but your loss is like fire, fire, fire alarms going off, right?

The first thing is you have your North Node in the twelfth house, not the sixth house. And what this means is that adapting your behavior is not what you've come here to learn. It's tending to your spiritual and mental health, finding the truth, centering that truth with very twelfth-house vibes: empathy, care, spaciousness. Right? And in your best moments, you do that. And in your worst moments, it's like a hyperfixation on actions and little things that you can do to fix yourself.

                        You also have a lot of other things in your chart that are really beautiful, but I'm just focusing on this. You've got this Saturn opposition to Venus, and Saturn and Venus both square to Pluto. So you have Pluto as the focal planet to a T-square. You don't do breakups well. If there's a song that you love, you will listen to it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until you don't like the song that much anymore.

Babs:               Yes.

Jessica:            Yeah. And you do it because that's better for you than listening to the song and missing the song. You don't like missing. You don't like longing. And you don't like loss. And we could spend ten hours talking about where that comes from in your family origin. You could spend 30 years in therapy—and hopefully you will, because that's what therapy is for, talking about this stuff. But I wanted to bring this up because saying or doing something that could potentially end a relationship is devastating for you. You really do not enter into loss well. It's just not your happy place.

                        And so I want to just acknowledge and name that, because if that's true, which—clearly, by your face, it's true, right?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Then the loss—and we can call it the sudden and violent loss of a child that you love with every fiber of your fucking being. It's senseless and terrible. Yeah, you're going to be what some people could call slow to get over it. And I'm not going to call it slow. This is your pace. This is your pace. You experience loss and danger really deeply. You experience it very deeply. And because of the depth of those feelings, it is really hard for you to stay with the feelings and then to let them go because even letting go of your grief and letting go of your devastation—does that mean you've let go of him?

That's the thing that people who are always in such a rush to make other people get over their grief don't realize. Grief is the last thing that connects you, or so it seems, right? It's not true. I know it's not true, and hopefully you know it's not true. But also, there's an element of that being true. And it's fucked up. Now, you have a beautiful Moon/Jupiter conjunction. And all the astrology texts will tell you, when Jupiter conjunction, you're happy. Things go well for you. You're such a lucky thing. It's intercepted in your eighth house. It just means that you are constantly fixated on and obsessing on picking apart your emotions, and you can never do enough. And you're never supposed to feel bad, and if ever you feel bad, then it's a moral failing.

Again, this comes from your parents, both of your parents, not just your mom, not just your dad. They came to that place from different angles, like for different reasons, but they both came to that place.

Babs:   Yeah.

Jessica:            And so you were loved. You were beloved as a child. And that doesn't mean you were treated in a way that was appropriate for you. And your child was beloved. It's all written in your chart, right? Your child is beloved. Both of your children are beloved. And also, the pressure that you place on yourself to be in the sunshine with your love and never be at dusk or never be in darkness with your love is, I would say, slightly inhumane and completely unattainable. But it is a thing.

                        The beauty of all of this is that you were able to show up. Because of these same—like that Saturn/Venus/Pluto fucked-up thing that makes it so hard for you to let go, it also made it so that you were able to—the second you realized shit was going down with your son, you were able to show up. You met the fucking emergency, and you met it centering him and not you.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Babs:               [indiscernible 00:55:12].

Jessica:            Yeah. You're fucking amazing. And you gave him what you needed. You didn't falter. You didn't skip a beat. You gave him everything he needed. And that same skill set needs to be turned inward now. And in this way, he's giving you something that you need, which is to choose yourself, even in your intensity, to recognize that your intensity is not bad; it's intensity. Yeah. I know. I know it's fucking terrible, and I'm—it's terrible.

                        The other thing about this fucking Jupiter/Moon conjunction that I just want to say—Jupiter governs healing. Your capacity to heal is really profound, and that's part of why you fuck yourself up, because you pressure yourself to heal, because you know you can. But the process of healing—it's kind of like—you know when you go to the ocean—do you ever go to the ocean or rivers?

Babs:               Yeah. We're [redacted].

Jessica:            Okay. So you know. This is—this works.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Okay. And you know how rocks and huge boulders—their shape is changed by water?

Babs:               Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            That's you. You are the water, and you are the stone. If you try to force yourself to change, then you're not using your own nature, which is that eighth-house and that twelfth-house water in your chart. It's just—the water comes up on the rock, and it doesn't seem like it's doing anything. And it pulls back, and it doesn't seem like it's doing anything. But it keeps on ebbing and flowing, and then the rock changes shape with time, but not through force—through consistency. And I want to say, for all that, you are not a consistent person in a ton of ways, I can see. Respect.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            You were a consistent parent. You are a—I keep on saying "were" because I'm just seeing it through his eyes. I know you're still a parent, and I don't want you to—sorry. I just want to be really clear I'm just—

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            It's like he's here, so I keep on getting it from him. He experienced you as a very consistent parent—again, bananas, all over the place in your own way, but not in the ways that mattered, not in—he was provided for in such—he always knew where he stood. He always knew where he was. And I don't know if you realize how powerful that is.

Babs:               I think parenting is one of my more confident ways that I show up, and I think it's also a way I show up in the state of the world, is raising kids who are so loved and who know who they are and know how to be kind to other people and also know their own autonomy and authority. And so, yeah, I kind of lean back on that one, I feel.

Jessica:            So here's the problem. You've taken yourself out of this. You're not parenting you. So, again, this is where he keeps on showing me that's what this is. That's the time it is, is to figure out how to parent you, which will pull you further from certain kinds of actions, potentially, for a period of time so that you can then come to them in a sustainable way. It's like power of water. It's power of water, right? It's not force. It's flow.

                        And that's where you are. It's finding, okay, even with the restricted eating stuff that you named earlier, it's like, okay—and I don't know the medical side of it, so I don't want to speak to anything diagnostically or whatever. But I will say, okay, you can focus on the restrictions of it, or you can say, "I have a flow with these five foods. I have a flow with these five foods, and I'm going to let myself experience the flow of these five foods," instead of saying, "Oh, I'm restricted, and I'm going to focus on everything I'm not flowing with." What if there's a subtle reframe that gave you permission to be when you are, who you are, where you are? Instead of focusing on the shape that your rock isn't, focus on the shape that your rock is. That's what you would give your children.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Babs:               I like that.

Jessica:            Yeah. I know it doesn't sound like this is activism, but the sustainability of your ways of showing up in the world require you. So, if you're destroyed and carved into pieces so you can cope, then there's going to be a big drop-off on your capacity, right? And that's what your friend inelegantly is naming, that there's a drop-off in your capacity. And what I want to say is that's a time to spend more energy nurturing your capacity instead of focusing outward.

                        Your son's like, "Okay. Okay. Okay. Mom gets it." Your son's like, "Okay. Stop talking about the friend." But I'm concerned about the friend. Okay. Fine, fine, fine, fine. He tells me to stop talking about the friend. I listen to him. Okay. Sorry. He says, do you have any questions? He told me to make room for questions.

Babs:               I don't really have a question for him. I'm happy he's where he needs to be.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Babs:               I'm also happy I got to say hi.

Jessica:            Mm-hmm.

Babs:               For you, I am curious about—I know Uranus is coming up conjunct my Mars trine Pluto.

Jessica:            Okay. Let's go back to your chart.

Babs:               And I'm a little nervous about it.

Jessica:            Here's some news for you. Pluto is already squaring your Midheaven. Why aren't you concerned about that? That's fucking up your life.

Babs:               I am concerned about that one, too, but—

Jessica:            Okay. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. I was just making sure. Listen. Uranus conjunct Mars is kind of exciting. It is possible that it will stimulate your nervous system or your body in a way that activates preexisting conditions or activates something. I wouldn't worry about it. I would just be mindful of it, right?

Babs:               Mm-hmm.

Jessica:            Uranus conjunction to Mars gives you some fucking juj. People are scared of Uranus. I'm such a Uranian—I'm a fan. I just like—it plugs in your car so it can charge. You know what I mean? If you have been seeking motivation, welcome. It starts April 26th, right?

Babs:               Yay.

Jessica:            Pluto is trine your Mars. That's a spectacular transit. It empowers you to excavate your motivations and make progress. It empowers you to be impactful in your actions. Both of these are great for fucking, too, you know? I'm just—it's off topic but worth naming.

Babs:               Fair.

Jessica:            Yeah. They're great for—you know, especially if you're like—I'm imagining if you're grieving, you're disconnected from your body and not feeling as saucy. These transits can, again, plug in your car and just kind of return you to your body a little bit and have you have fun times with random people or with old people in random ways. It's different. That's Uranus for you.

                        In regards to these transits, the reason why they occur and the reason why they're occurring now is to help you change what you do, to change your motivation. My hope—because what does Mars do in your chart? It sextiles your Sun, and it squares your Moon. So it's how you feel. It's how you show up in relationship. It's how you show up in the world, and it's how you feel. And so these planets are stimulating you in your body—Mars. And that means either you're going to use feats of strength to evade your body so you don't have to feel your feelings, or you're going to choose to tap into your feelings in your body. That's what these transits are trying to get you to do.

                        And unfortunately, it can bring up ego conflicts and arguments. But that's because it forces you to choose a side. Take a stand. Do a thing. So my hope for you is that you choose you, not instead of other people—it's just you choose you and ask them to follow your lead. That's what you'd tell your kids to do.

Babs:               Yeah. I guess "worried" maybe wasn't quite the right word. It's like nervous about harnessing them or, like, [crosstalk]—

Jessica:            Harnessing the transits?

Babs:               Mm-hmm. It's just that all of these big ones are happening at the same time, right? You mentioned the square and the trine and then the—it's just a lot.

Jessica:            So this is my attitude about that. You don't have to harness anything. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to do anything. If you meet yourself where you're at, then you're doing the transits. The problem with how a lot of us engage with astrology—and this is not like a beginner versus advanced. It's just how a lot of us engage with astrology, is we say to ourselves, "Oh, this thing is happening. It's happening once in a lifetime. It's a big fucking deal. I've got to do something with it. I've got to do something about it." And I used to do that, as well, all the time. What I've come to find is that's not how life works. That's not how life works.

All you can do is strive to be present and meet the moment, knowing that you have the greatest innovator of the zodiac helping you along. You have the deepest feeler and transformer of the zodiac helping you along. So those are likely to be your themes. But you already fucking knew that. You already knew that's what was happening, right? I mean, Uranus hasn't come for your Mars yet, so we don't know how that's going to feel exactly. But nobody since the dawn of time has missed Uranus. Either you dig in your heels and you insist on staying the same way you were, or you open yourself up to the unpredictability and the uncertainty and the chaos of choosing a new way or letting a new way choose you.

                        So I don't think you have to do anything to maximize these transits. Instead, what I would say is all the things I've already said. Meet your feelings. Meet your feelings. Meet your feelings. Meet your feelings. If you don't think that's Mars, then you don't understand what ego is. Meet your feelings because, again, I wasn't sure if you were hiding behind grief. That is a thing that we can do. Sadness can be very powerful, and it can be an excuse. A lot of us use it as an excuse, right?

                        I think you're doing the opposite of that. I think you're trying to pretend that you're not sad to the people because of how deeply fucking sad you are. And I want to encourage you to invite in that water that keeps on hitting your fucking rocks, and just be like, "Sometimes that feels really fucking awful, and sometimes it feels like being connected to the Universe. And sometimes it feels like caring for other people, and sometimes it feels like I just want to not do anything and hide under the covers for a week."

                        And instead of attaching meaning to each way it feels, it's honoring that moment and letting the water keep on coming and pull back. So it's not being attached—and Uranus will help you with that, and the Mars trine will help you with that, actually. But that's really what we've been talking about, right—

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            —is giving yourself that gift. And hold on. There is one more thing that I'm—keep on seeing. The behaviors that we've been talking about this whole time that you are having around how you are compartmentalizing and distancing yourself from your feelings and trying to not be a burden on other people—it's, like, peak your dad. It's super fucking your dad. So the fact that you talk to your therapist about your mom and you talked to me about your mom is really interesting because if that bestie that prompted you to even ask this question is your mom, that kind of makes you your dad. Sorry.

Babs:               Oh no.

Jessica:            I know. I know. I know. It's the sneak attack. It's a sneak attack. And your dad's life—I mean, he's such a smart—honestly, he's got a weird streak that he's really tamped down. He has a lyrical way of thinking. He's just a lovely, creative man who has shoved himself into the smallest possible container he could fit himself into.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            And he's so clearly not happy. He's not living at his capacity. He's living a fraction of what he could live. And that's his choice. It's not yours to manage. But you are doing what he did. And you have great reasons, right? But one thing I want to say is, okay, this is actually useful to have empathy for him, to kind of get him more, to recognize that as different as the two of you seem and as different as he thinks the two of you are, you actually know better. You're very similar. Very similar.

                        And the other thing is you know you don't want to do what your dad does. You have no ambiguity about that whatsoever. So, when you catch yourself telling yourself you should put it in a tiny box, I want you to remember that that's what you learned from your father, and that's what your father does, because you know that that doesn't work, actually. In the moment, when you're trying to do it, you don't know. But your wiser part knows. And your son is the one who's shown me this. He's pointed the trails of connection between you and your dad this way.

And he's saying the thing about the Uranus conjunction to Mars is it's a rebellious transit. And so rebel against your dad—the part of you that's taking on the voice and the values of your dad, of "Be small; don't be too much," and instead allow yourself to rebel and to take up space  and to take risks and to let people know you and to let people hold you, or to let people disappoint you so that you can have boundaries with them.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Yeah.

Babs:               That's lots of reframing and—

Jessica:            Yeah. Sorry. It's a lot of reframing.

Babs:               —sitting in my body, too.

Jessica:            Yes. Yes. So, after this, do you have time to yourself, or do you have to go do something immediately afterwards?

Babs:               I have time to myself.

Jessica:            Okay. Do you have a bathtub?

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Could you take Epsom salt bath or something?

Babs:               Mm-hmm, definitely.

Jessica:            So I want to encourage you to not go straight to note-taking. So don't go to your sixth house. Go to your twelfth house. So hang out in water, or go to some big-ass body of water if you prefer that. It's cold, though, right?

Babs:               Yeah. It's frozen.

Jessica:            I feel like just go in a bath. And the Epsom salts are there to pull out toxins, right? That's the point. So just allow yourself to release whatever just kind of got unfastened. Set the intention in this bath that you're going to let whatever strands just kind of got unfastened that are ready to go—you can let them go. And if nothing is released, nothing's released. It's fine. There's no timeline. It's about just opening up the possibility.

Babs:               I kind of have this image in my head of the elephant getting just slightly smaller, making slightly more wiggle room.

Jessica:            I love that. I love that.

Babs:               Just a little more room.

Jessica:            I love that. And if it takes a long period of time, like years, for the elephant to eventually be pocket-sized—because you don't want to actually—we don't want to get rid of the elephant, actually, because it's a skill. It's a tool to be able to be like, "Okay. I'm not going to pay attention to the elephant in the room." I mean, that's helpful, to have that skill. We just want it to be like the size of a stuffie that you can easily manage and put away instead of something that actually makes you small.

Babs:               Yeah. [crosstalk].

Jessica:            So give yourself space with that. And I'm sorry I can't take all your grief from you, because I would really like to do that. And I know it would be great for you if I could do that, and I'm so sorry that I can't do that.

Babs:               My therapist likes to tell me that complicated grief comes with complicated gratitude.

Jessica:            I like that.

Babs:               [crosstalk] kind of hold on to that one.

Jessica:            Yeah. I like that.

Babs:               Like I've had grief because I was so grateful for my baby, and I loved him so much. I do love him so much.

Jessica:            Yes. Yeah. It's hard and messy, and also, he's just—you know.

Babs:               He's vibing.

Jessica:            He's vibing. He's like pure—sunlight is the best way I can put him. He's just radiant, like radiates at the vibrations of sun. He's really amazing. So I'm really glad about that.

Babs:               It makes sense to me. Based on who he is, who he was, it just—

Jessica:            Yeah.

Babs:               Yeah.

Jessica:            Is and was. Is and was. It's at the same time, right?

Babs:               Right.

Jessica:            Yeah. Well, my dear, I'm really glad we did this. And I know it's stirred a lot, so I hope you take really gentle, spacious care of yourself.

Babs:               Will do. Thank you so, so much.

Jessica:            It's totally my pleasure.

Babs:               I'm very grateful.

Jessica:            It's so my pleasure.