I'm not going to attach the chart that shows transits going over the natal chart. Unless you know something about how to read a horoscope chart wheel, it will blow your mind. Uranus has been passing back and forth over the apex of this yod, Saturn, for the past three years. (Be mindful, this was originally written in 2019.) Take my word for it.
As Uranus went back and forth over the apex of the yod, what happened?
As I have reported, I was in an inappropriate emotional affair with a married man, who was henpecked by an emotionally constipated, domineering, shrewish wife (whose chart describes a childhood an awful lot like mine!) He was the extreme codependent noted above.
At first, because this person is very intelligent (except at home), gifted, and materially successful in life, I reacted to this person (I’m going to refer to him as Chi, short for Chiron) as if he were “better” than me. Able to step in, be my family, and be the success in life I thought I couldn’t be, if only I provided the love the wife seemed, um, stuck and unable to access. Only…although the wife in question is borderline emotionally abusive and has been for years, once he left her, his family, looking in from outside and believing the marriage to be perfect, hazed him into returning home. Although he didn’t want to do this, he caved in and went back so as not to hurt people like his grown children who were disappointed and angry, wife’s brother and sister, etc.
I. Was. Devastated.
Partially because I still didn’t see this person as horrifically codependent, weak, and truly emotionally ill. I still saw him as a safe haven, stronger, more successful, and better than me. All this time, I had assumed they must be doing great in marriage counseling, saved their marriage, and were wonderful now.
So, I must be this hideous Jezebel who had stepped in on a marriage that should have been saved. I had done something horrible, and he must look on me with shame now, thinking of me as a mistake, an embarrassment, and a horrible person.
But how could that be? Since he’d told me how she was acting right up til the time he dumped me, and It. Was. HORRIBLE. Nobody could think that marriage would be worth staying in! So how could I have screwed up so badly??
This Was Me, pretty much 24/7, from the end of May 2015 to the end of October 2017. (No … those of us with Serious Childhood Issues just don't move on. And that may be a good thing, since, as you will see, I still had a lot to learn, and a lot to fix in my character. Change is hard. We all take the time we need, and some of us need A Lot More Time.)
Where’s Uranus during this time? Uranus conjunct Saturn, June 2016-March 2018. That means that, from my perspective on the planet, Uranus was sitting right on top of where I would have seen Saturn on the day I was born.
What was going on? I was dumped at the end of May, 2015. The behavior of the wife was really, just awful. She had no idea I even existed, and she was still awful! I could tell by what he told me about how she was acting at the time that the marriage counseling he was beginning held none too sanguine hopes. My therapist agreed, and predicted he’d figure this out and know the only way to go was out by the next spring. Um, note those dates I just posted.
June 2016. No Chi. And on this went. In the meantime, my poor little codependent, lonely, sad, miserable needyneedy self is having a total meltdown. However, I consulted astrologer Alice Portman, who predicted I’d see this fellow again in October 2017. Which happened. Her interpretation of Uranus conjunct Saturn was that I needed to leave the relationship by the time Uranus left Saturn.
Uranus conjunct Saturn. What does that aspect mean? Liz Greene had a lovely writeup of her interpretation in the yearly transit I purchased on astro.com, but in a nutshell: I’m Changing My Mind About Something.
Something Very Big.
Chi showed up in October 2017, and told me how the preceding two and a half years had gone. And they had gone just the way I thought they would when he dumped me! Despite the fact that I’d sneaked a peek and seen several very good work transits going over her chart (the kind that say, “It’s a great time to work on longstanding childhood emotional problems that are fucking up your relationships,”) while they were in marriage counseling, the marriage had not been saved. The wife was still emotionally closed down, constipated, and scornful.
She tried as best as she could, but she was like Star Trek’s Data with the emotion chip missing. She insisted on marriage counseling, but then really didn’t seem to want to be there; Chi said she “slept through it” and it had been very difficult to make any progress. He was still very unhappy and still loved me. And, of course, I still loved him.
I was sorry for them—they and their incompetent therapists had missed an important opportunity and could have been doing much better by now—but for me, I was ecstatic! Chi still loved me! I was right about the emotionally constipated wife! He really was back when Alice and I thought he would be!
And, that meant I wasn’t crazy. (I was beginning to worry.)
But….
Remember that Neptune House Three bit about seeing what you want to see, getting the general impression, but missing the fine print? Yeah. I kept expecting I’d hear more from him, since he so clearly loved me and missed me, and he was so clearly still unhappy.
I had heard what I wanted to hear, and I got that general impression I was Still The One, but as the months wore on and I didn’t hear anything more, I had to consider the fine print I’d missed in my joy at hearing from him again: This guy was NO better. Although, at my urging, he’d entered therapy back in 2015, when I asked him about how that was going, I was appalled! I had assumed his therapist would work with him on his codependency. Instead, this therapist saw him once a week for two months, and then parked him in the back of a support group, where he went and listened every week and got to talk maybe once every two months.
This. Guy. Had. Made. NO. Progress. At. All.
The implications of that began to sink in as I realized this months later in hindsight, when he hung up the phone with me in November ... and stayed gone.
What Uranus moving off Saturn—and off the apex of this yod—ended up marking in this case, in March 2018, was me changing my mind about something big, all right.
I had to let go of my image of him as this knight in shining armor—so much smarter, better, and more mature than me. This marked the time I really changed my image of this person. He wasn’t smarter than me. He wasn’t healthier than me. I was healthier than him! And I needn’t look at him anymore as someone who would feel like a savior to me. It simply wasn’t true. These two were seriously emotionally ill (and, apparently, planning on staying that way.) And I needed to quit looking at life as an exercise in me being not-so-smart, not-so-capable, and finding deep codependent enmeshed relationships to have, one after the other. Life wasn’t going to give me Someone To Watch Over Me anymore. That had been my entire orientation toward relationships, and well … that entire paradigm was going to have To Go.
What did that have to do with my writing dream and my yod?
Well, I had started concocting a fantasy novel about all this, so it certainly gave me something to write about. But, more than that, it vomited me out of this childlike dream of finding and fitting into this safe familylike nest like the one I’d had with my late husband…because, contrary to what I’d always believed about him, Chi was NOT a rock like my late husband! I could no longer think comfortingly to myself, “Well, it doesn’t matter if I achieve in the publishing world or not. If finish something and it isn’t a Big Hit, if I don’t even finish anything, it doesn’t matter, because I have a real family now and that’s what’s important! That’s what all other women do, and now I can be just like them, and who cares that I’m not Suzanne Collins. I can leave that goal behind and not even have to think about it anymore. Right?”
All my life, the focus of my life had been frantically trying to establish bonding with other people, because I didn’t get the bonding with parents, family, and school friends that other kids got. I thought I’d find it again with this guy…and I realized this guy was no safe place for that. He was really sick, and not coming back. Even though the wife was still a nightmare!
A healthier person would have left. Not Chi.
This was the first step in changing the focus of my life from Furiously Struggling To Find Relationships, to: Achievement.
But, wait! After that, Uranus went retrograde, and came within three degrees of Saturn again (well, almost) in February. There it was at the tip of the yod again. What did that signify?
I had been thinking that Chi HAD to come back. He certainly wanted to when I last spoke to him. In transits to come, there’s a whole SLEW spanning all three charts that talk about a protracted love triangle.
And, when Chi showed up again in October 2017, I had the choice to start seeing him again.
We had met in a social group that was still meeting, and he had given me custody of the group when he left to start marriage counseling. Now he wanted to come back. All I had to do was say yes, and we’d be seeing each other all the time again! Ohhh, and I Could Work On Him. (There’s that manipulative Pluto Sun square Mars power trip that other astrologers reading this chart have warned me about.)
But I had looked ahead in transits several years…where I saw a full-blown affair starting, dozens of stern warnings NOT to try to control another person or the outcome of these relationships, and then: Me getting dumped again because I had gotten as domineering as the wife, trying to force him to divorce her.
Looking at all this, I didn’t trust myself not to do that, and reading more on codependency, I fully agreed with the transits that that would be the likely outcome if I did do that, so I said no to his request to come back to the group.
It was a hard decision.
I still loved him, and I didn’t want us never to see each other again.
But ... starting in summer 2018, I saw SO many transits spanning all three charts predicting we were back together again by summer 2019 anyway, and such a ton of stuff hitting my vertex in January 2019, I rolled the dice and bet he’d be back again no matter what, so I had nothing to lose. It helped me say no.
January and February 2019. All that stuff hitting my vertex (fated relationships and fated events that are out of your control) came and went. Was It: A Fated Relationship? Nope. No Chi.
So it must have been A Fated Event: “You expected him back by now, and He Doesn’t Show Up.”
Ah, but Uranus was still hanging around Saturn again, so what was I changing my mind about this time?
This time my mindset changed from, “He’ll be back. He’ll be back,” to: “Wow. This is The End. He’ll NEVER be back.”
And I pretty much fell into a HORRIBLE depression, kept getting sick, and spent two months really sick, sleepless, and hideously depressed.
And now, at the end of all that, I’ve pretty much given up on him.
And I still haven’t met anyone who could qualify as a close personal relationship of any kind, and still find myself utterly alone in life. So, after being utterly alone in life for five and a half years, crying about it like a lost little child in a shopping mall, frantic to find parents and close people to love me and take care of me, I’ve just accepted that life has no close relationships in store for me at all right now, and quite possibly not ever again.
For the first time in my life, I have QUIT struggling for People To Bond With, and turned my attention to other things in life and developing other aspects of my personality. (Which various transits have been advising me was what I needed to do.)
I understand now that life isn’t just about relationships.
Other Things Exist to provide meaning and purpose to our time here on the planet. Good times with other people don’t last forever. And, the older we get, the more likely we are to be all alone, especially if we’re women.
Life’s not kind. We need to be rugged and able to handle it all alone. We don’t all get close loved ones forever and ever more.
So, I’ve crumpled my old life up and tossed it in the wastebasket, and moved on to what I always wanted to do. I’m still very sad about Chi, I’ll never forget him, and I’ll always wish it hadn’t ended like this, but I’m still here, writing this. I’m starting two websites. I’m writing articles for an online magazine. I’m posting a novel on Wattpad. I’m trying to figure out how to build a readership online, so one day I can e-publish and maybe make some money writing to help out once I’m too old and sick to work anymore. Unlike most other people, I won’t have family or a spouse to fall back on.
Saturn, up there in my chart, is all alone, just like I’m going to be in old age. And that’s okay. A big purpose in this life incarnation, I think, was to become contemplative, finding value in solitude, comfort in the world, and ease in being completely self-sufficient, instead of terrified if I have no one else.
I was supposed to make this big, big, BIG change in my character, and I’ve made it.
It kind of looks as if close relationship may be permanently over for me in this lifetime. I’m not meeting any close friends, no matter how hard I try to meet new people who are interested in the same things I am, and transit-wise it sort of looks as if Chi is the last love relationship that presents itself to me in this life, EVER.
So I’m discovering that I’m not a little child anymore. Establishing Relationship is no longer a matter of life or death. I’m fully competent and completely able to take care of myself, live completely alone, enjoy my own company, and absorb myself in writing. Close relationship needs to be left behind. It isn't here for me anymore.
I’ve sort of made this big U-turn in life, and my life is COMPLETELY different from what it ever was. I used to think life wasn’t worth living if I had no family, no bosom friends, no significant other, no loved ones. If no one cared about me, what was I alive for? Might as well die!
Now I’m finding that life goes on without all of that, and I can be a completely different person. An old person alone, entire of herself. I’ll always regret things didn’t turn out how I wanted, but I see that other things that aren’t about people need to be front and center in my life from now on. I’m going to write and try to sell my writing. And that’s going to be it. And if that’s the way it really goes, I need to be able to feel okay, and not constantly torn up that life didn’t give me everything I wanted.
Seriously. When does it, ever?
So there’s my example of Number 4, Transits passing over the apex of the yod reflect dramatic changes in the course of the problem represented by the yod.
And this concludes Numbers 1-4 for Yod Number One, my personal yod.
Hopefully the next examples I post will be a little shorter. Turns out Chi has a yod, too, so that one's next. And then...The Relationship Yods.
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