My best friend spreads the cards between us on her comforter, strange and familiar, like any new deck. I try my best to keep my eyes off of them. I know that, at this point, I can be a pain to read for, interjecting my own interpretations and smiling knowingly when a familiar card flips in such and such a place. This deck is a little less decipherable than most – the images of the Rider-Waite-Smith not just reinterpreted but skewed, refracted – but I know myself well enough to keep my attention elsewhere, even so.
She mutters half-thoughts to herself as she lays out the spread. “You wanted to know what comes next?” she asks, her voice absent, as she pulls out the small book that came with the cards and references it, cross references with another.
“Yeah,” I say. “This project is sort of… tapped out. Wondering what they’d like me to focus on, now.”
She hesitates longer than I think is really necessary. There aren’t that many cards.
“Nothing,” she says at last, her tone hesitant and a little wary. “They want you to just – enjoy this part. Live in it. It only lasts a little while.”
I can feel my body tense. My readings range from the pedestrian to the occult but they very seldom touch on the future. Getting something so explicit feels ominous, like a ticking clock. “Oh yeah?” I ask, failing to sound casual. “What changes?”
She flips a card, and then another, and will not quite look at me. “Well,” she says slowly. “In three years the uh. The baby comes.”
I damn near fall off the bed.
I am not cut out to be a parent. As a child I had a lot of strong convictions about my future, but this is the only one that has held true. I knew then, as I know now, that I am not patient enough, that I do not take enough joy in the minutiae of helping a small person learn how to navigate the world. It’s not that I don’t like kids – my younger relatives bring a lot of joy into my life – but I would hold myself to a standard of parenting that I know full well I could not achieve. Having a child has never been in the cards.
My friend knows that, of course. She puts her hand over the last card and leans forward. “You know it doesn’t have to be your baby. Or even a real baby. It could be… metaphorical.”
I look at the spread, aware of my own breath, and then look at her with a raised eyebrow. “Does that card have Berkano on it?”
She looks at the card, and then at her book again. “You know that has a lot of meanings…”
I press my palms against the fabric of the bed and take a deep breath, rolling my shoulders. After the thin, panicky feeling in my chest has faded, I nod. “No, it’s – it’s good advice. Enjoy things as they are. I don’t need another project.” I manage a grin, although I can feel that it is a sickly, crooked thing. “Lots can change in three years. No use borrowing trouble before then.”
She nods. “Just spend time with your spirits,” she says, tapping one of the cards. “Live your life. It’ll change when it’s ready.”
The Rider-Waite-Smith Empress tarot card laying in grass [Pixabay]
My brother weaves the grasses of their land into a circle weeks ahead of me arriving. I’ve called them my brother for almost a decade, since before we’d seen each other face-to-face. This year we’ve decided to do something about it. “Did you know you can’t adopt a sibling?” they mutter grouchily as I settle onto the grass beside them, my bag bulging with supplies.
“Figure we’ve got something better,” I say, and start setting up my part of the ritual. Heavy cream, cider, sterile lancets, alcohol swabs – as I have gotten older my magic has gotten more simple, more direct. “Bind me to the land, and the two of us together – I mean, that’s what siblings are, right? I don’t think I can be more a part of the family than that.”
They give me a crooked smile, thoughtful and a little distant. “We’ll have you out here to help plant, in the spring,” they agree, as I wonder if my lighter will work. It’s always touch and go, in outdoor rituals. “And you can help with the nursery.”
“Like, the plant nursery?” I ask, and grin back cheerfully. “Sure. Always good to have a food source in uncertain times.”
They laugh. “No,” they say, their voice deeply fond. “Your nephew’s nursery.”
The grass is flat beneath my palm, pulled tight by the braid that marks out our ritual space. I stare at them, and as I start to grin I’m doing the math in the back of my brain. Two years… Two and a little, since that reading. “I’d like that,” I say, at last. “Won’t Mint be a fantastic big sister?”
“Nerd,” they say, and punch my arm. “You’re going to be a fantastic uncle. Again.”
The Rider-Waite-Smith Four of Wands tarot card [public domain]
The baby is due in a month and a half and I am not ready. He is coming on Beltane, in the month when the landlord has informed me that I have to move. My house is full of half-packed boxes and I spend hours wandering between them, putting in a few more items, trying hard to feel like everything will be alright.
It is slow going. It is harder because I have spent the last six months in a haze of depression, gritting my teeth and forcing my hand every time I want to accomplish something. I put the box together. I put the books in the box. I tape the box closed. I do not think about any of the reasons this feels futile. I put it on top of the other boxes. I put another box together.
“Is it depression,” I asked my therapist, “when bad things happen and you’re sad about them?”
The effects are the same, either way. I love the place I live. I need to leave it. I do not know if my job will exist in a year. I have a home, people who love me, land that holds my blood. It is on the other side of the country.
At night, I lay still and try to ignore my own racing heart while all of the thoughts I’ve avoided during the day well up and over me, an ocean of separation from sleep. So many things have ended in the last six months. I try to imagine something new for myself and instead remember that I have no savings, no car, and if the federal government has their way, soon I will have no rights. All winter, I curl around the queasy pit of my gut and force myself into sleep like holding my head under the water.
This used to be the part of the day when I reached out to my spirits, spent pleasant idle moments wandering with them until the landscape shifted into dreams. Now it seems as out of reach as Massachusetts. The magic that I do has the same grit-teeth determination as any other chore. I need to wash the dishes. I need to take out the trash. I need to light a candle and tell Hermes that I am afraid. I need to tell the Puck I love him.
But the baby is coming in a month and a half. Last week I flew across the country to paint his nursery the bright yellow of birch trees in autumn. His sister is still with wonder when he kicks her hand. A month ago she made a grocery list and accompanied my brother to get snacks, checking off her pictures each time she added something to the cart, and we all wondered at how clever and helpful she has become. She has her father’s energy and her baba’s eyes, and I wonder if her brother will have the opposite.
I have been told I will need to learn to hold him so that I can help around the house. I worry that my hands will be too heavy.
“You’re not going to break him,” his father says, and wraps his fingers around mine. “We’ll get lots of pictures, so that at his wedding you can talk about how scared you were to hold him.”
At the pottery studio I make a vase that looks like sunlight through birch trees and try to keep my touch delicate. A week passes in the firing and it comes out solid and sturdy. I pack it into a box.
We are past the point where there is much to worry about with the pregnancy. Days grind on, news grows and fades, and my nephew is coming in a month and a half. I will not see him until weeks after, until his system can stand the shock of someone flying across the country to him. I remind myself that it will give me time to find somewhere to live – but planning for myself feels faded and unreal next to planning around him. The old adage about doing things for the world your children will live in has always felt trite and unreal. For the first time, I think I get it.
The news tells me that I got my passport just in time. The news tells me that I will never be able to change my birth certificate. “It’s hard to live in the moment,” I tell the candle I have lit for Hermes. “I don’t want to be in Chicago. I want to go home.” When I visited, we planted seeds and set them up under the lights to sprout. Everyone there seems to believe that winter will end.
Pamela Colman Smith’s Six of Swords from the Rider-Waite Deck [public domain]
“I do not know what I am supposed to be doing,” I tell the cards. I have lit a candle, but the cards unfold in the shadow of my body that it throws. “I feel like I should be doing better than this. Surely there’s something for me to do, to make it better.”
Wait, say the cards, again and again. Live in it. There are processes you cannot rush.
My nephew is coming on Beltane, coming with the indrawn breath of summer. Every day there is a little more sun, a few more leaves on the trees. Some nights I lay down and sleep comes easy, knowing that I have a home across the country, with people that love me and land that holds my blood.
“We bred the rabbits this weekend,” my brother tells me, and I can hear how tired they are between the words. “They’re doing fine – better now that their water doesn’t freeze overnight.”
That night I do a reading and I see the Sun. Everything may not change – but my younger relatives do bring a lot of joy into my life.
I can wait a month and a half.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.