The dreams of my father - Pluto-Moon

If I had chosen a birthday for my son I would have chosen early January 2008 which had a much easier, more harmonious chart than the one he was born with on the 30th of December 2007.

But the one thing I know now from motherhood and pregnancy is that our thoughts of what we wish for our children are not as important as the wishes of the children themselves.

When I was pregnant my husband and I had done a lot of planning and saving in preparation for our transition into parenthood and the resulting drop in income and increase in underslept stressed-out craziness. We had been feeling pretty on track about things and wanted to spend the last month of my pregnancy being as relaxed as possible, just taking it easy and enjoying the last days of being a family of two.

Instead when last December rolled around all hell broke loose. My husband found out he was a victim of (essentially a form of fraud) that nonetheless jeopardised his credit rating and livelihood and decimated both his morale and his savings. The ultimate sword hanging over his head was the possibility that he would not be able to get a re-mortage and lose his house and considering that this house represented what he had spent years of his life saving and working towards, the prospect of that loss was painful for him.

And even though both of us tried to focus on what was the most important - we had each other and we would have a baby and we would always have somewhere to live - the effects of stress were undeniable and the free-floating anxiety and anger and pain reached out to touch my son as well and coloured the world into which he was born.

My family has a legacy of loss. So many of us have fought for our lives and run and hidden. My hope was to protect my child for this, but he is the one who gets to choose, not I. And he chose to be firmly connected to that inheritance.

My son was born with a fourth house Moon in Libra as the apex of a tight t-square with Pluto and Mars. Natally he is plugged in to a collective drive for survival and the fear/memory of the world as an unsafe and threatening place. Furthermore, his Moon conjuncts my Mars and his father's Pluto so in our interaction the natal T-square is being constantly activated.

My son was born into a world that was falling apart. Shortly after I had him, I also had a substantial haemorrhage so within 15 minutes we were snapped from a lovely Libran thing into a more existential state of hospitals and ambulances and then after a lingering anxiety about renewed bleeding and long-term weakness while my body recovered. Furthermore, within a week of his birth we had two deaths in the family. It was a strange, intense time, when our nerves were strethed as thin as the boundaries between worlds and in the dark hours of the night love and sadness and bitter rage vied for attention.

The world into which my son was born welcomed him and loved him, but it reinforced his perceptions that it was fundamentally unsafe. And he reacted with all the terror, wrath and despair his lungs and tiny flailing fists could muster. There was no language. He couldn't tell us what he was terrified of and we couldn't reassure him. If his need wasn't recognised or met instantly it was like it was never going to be met. And if his need wasn't met within a particular window of time then he'd have a complete fit of frustration which would need to be calmed before anything else could be resolved.

We spent a lot of time holding him, and rocking, and soothing and pacing up and down while he bent his back like a bow and screamed in our arms rigid-bodied and scarlet-faced. He was so peaceful in sleep and generally inconsolable when awake. I remember feeling pushed to the end of my tether and then pushed again - to breaking point and then past it as I struggled to please him and to contain the waves of frustration and tiredness and anger that surged in me like the sea.

Growing and experience have mellowed him. At some point what we offered became enough, and having remembered that his needs were met yesterday, and the day before , and the day before that he has become more patient, more able to wait. But memory and cognition are a double-edged sword and now he has taken to waking at least once per night screaming with fear or some terrible dream.

Each night is a separate world, a dark sea we navigate by stars and instinct alone. Each night is an undoing, replete with the phantoms and monsters of our past. The lost dreams of my father and the ongoing legacy of war and death and loss. I don't know what my son sees which terrifies him, only that his dream journeys lead him to places of which he is terrified. His racing heart tells me that, and the nature of his cries.

I am his mother, and I have a Scorpio Moon. I know the shadow and the dark. So each night when he cries I reach out for him and he snuggles in my arms and I hold him. He presses his cheek against my skin, sobs his ragged breath into my neck. And I kiss his hair and stroke his face and hum solaces and lullabies.

I tell him: I am here. I am always here. I have walked the shadow-places. And I love you. And I will protect you. And I am not leaving, and I am not afraid.

He may not know all my words yet, but he knows the beating of my heart and he knows the flavour of my thoughts, just as I remember knowing my father's (who had a Scorpio Moon conjunct mine).

In those nights, he is often there with us, my father. Neptune is part of the legacy. I have it in the fourth. My father was a Pisces rising with a Sun-Neptune opposition. He was a singer and musician who died when I was a child. However, the veils between worlds are thin. Love is what connects us still. And sadness. And music.

My whole life since he died I have heard music in my mind so vividly I spent years making a mistake of thinking that someone had the radio playing.

In the dark as I hold my son, I also am held. I feel his presence. I hear his voice and the song he sings.