This is the first in a two-part tarot reading for paid subscribers for the New Year. The newsletter below features an essay on the tarot cards I drew for 2023 as well as important astrological dates to keep in mind for next year; the second installment in the first week of January will provide specific tarotscopes for the year for each rising sign, showing you what the Eight of Wands and Ace of Pentacles mean for you!
Motherhood has changed Christmas, like nearly everything else, into a tug-of-war between the familiar and the strange, the intimate-good and the intimate-terrible.
What’s weird is that I’ve had a hard time discerning which is which, which traditions I never liked in the first place and so don’t mind having them wrecked by the responsibilities of parenthood, and which ones felt like god to me, and so to have them tossed out with toddler tantrums means I’m missing something holy, at a candlelit time when holiness has always been hard for me to get at, to, with.
By some sick alchemy, the end of 2022 has been transformed into a long and claustrophobic hallway, and the act of looking forward seems hard without a glance back, over my shoulder, at what the tarot said this time last year:
I felt such hope at the start of last January, even after I drew the Eight of Cups, even after I spent an essay waxing philosophical on the dark night of the soul, Louise DeSalvo, “neither too much hope, nor too much despair.” Even with my life’s evidence pointing to the contrary, I just felt like things couldn’t truly get any worse. I’d lost my breasts, Kiernan was in the long process of quitting his first stable job in a half-decade, Theo’s second bout of Covid meant we were traveling back and forth from the Omaha Children’s Hospital trying to figure out how to make him well again. The Eight of Cups popped up for the year and I thought “good—let’s leave all this shit behind.”
And truth be told, we did, but of course the leaving didn’t feel good. Or it didn’t feel only good so much as it felt messy, slick with longing, fear, and sickness, as well as a periodically overdrafted bank account because of said longing, fear, and sickness. From the vantage point, then, of an unexpected cancer recurrence and an impulsive move halfway across the country, I have to say I rolled my eyes when I turned over the cards for 2023.
The Eight of Wands and the Ace of Pentacles are, in my experience, usually welcome cards when they show up in readings, heralding fast moves and new beginnings. They’re a little impersonal, as far as tarot cards go, not necessarily a bad thing in a tarot practice that can be too “me, me, me,” amidst readings that can drag your heart out with the wasted food your kid didn’t eat on Christmas Eve.
The problem is that my capacity to trust, unfettered, in welcome cards, good news, optimistic beginnings has been diminished over the course of 2022. And 2021. And 2020. My history of motherhood and cancer in the time of global pandemic overlays a harsher language atop my history as a tarot card reader who believes intuition and magic can tether us to practical action, to hope.
And yet the latter part of me is there, beneath the eye roll, beneath the doom, feeling that little buzz of excitement and wonder at a Mercury-ruled card and an Ace, what that could mean for a year that sees heavy-hitting planets changing signs for the first time in decades, a new eclipse story too.