My mother was a hippy, but she denies that, she says, “I never did any drugs!”

To which I invariably reply, “yes, and I spent the first year of my life in a backpack picketing Safeway’s in support of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.”
To which she says, “yes, but I always took regular baths, I was definitely not a hippy!”

“Uh huh,” I’ll say, unconvinced, “and we lived in a log cabin for three years that you and dad built with no running hot water or a bathroom!” Not to mention the Volkswagen bus that took us from Seattle to said log cabin in the woods (well, to the little tin house we lived in until the log cabin was built anyway).

This is usually where she starts to look a little uncertain, so I’ll pounce with what is really the showstopper of my argument, wailing, “Mom, we didn’t have a TV until I was FOURTEEN!!!”  And then we both fall over laughing.  If there was just one thing I could say about my mum it would be that we spend a lot of time laughing (as evidenced by the picture above with my Gramma – guess we both come by that honestly).

Our most significant Astrological stats are that my Moon is conjunct her Sun (at 20 and 19 degrees Libra respectively) and my Ascendant is conjunct her Descendant  (at 9 degrees Aquarius).  Plus, with Saturn opposing her Sun natally – and hence my Moon as well, I suppose it’s only  natural she’d have a Saturn riddled daughter.  In short we understand one another pretty well.  It wasn’t always like that, of course, with so much Saturn we didn’t make things easy on ourselves or one another for most of my adolescence.  But once I became a nanny to twins in my early twenties and got over myself we found each other again.  Since then our relationship has been mostly very, very good.  Pretty amazing, really.

But aside from the astrology of it all, basically at heart I just really like my mother.  Here she is at Thorung La Pass after celebrating her 70th birthday trekking for three weeks in Nepal.  Frankly, I feel really lucky to be over forty years old and have a mother I can still look up to and want to emulate whose good opinion of me matters so much.  Of course, she’s always telling me to stop needing her approval, she claims she can’t understand why I would even think that matters, and with Saturn going through Libra right now, I have the feeling this might be the year I actually kick that habit.  I just hope she’ll be proud of me if I do…