Daughter of Pluto

We’re 18 years in and she is still one of my favourite people on this planet. She is kind and funny. Generous with her time. And totally gross, which has appealed to me from the first hour of our friendship.

She told me once that she waits for me to reveal myself, through story. “I love how you tell me the same story four different times and each time I get more of you, and more emotion.”

I think that’s the magic sauce of being in relationship with me. Wait. I don’t reveal myself to anyone or anything unless I am damn well ready (and unless you show me you are, too).

Could it be my four houses in Scorpio? And my sun sign, too? Maybe I was created for depth and darkness. A true daughter of Pluto. The more you know me, you don’t.

I think it’s what makes me a good therapist and a good mom. I told my puking kid last night “yes, it’s terrible, but terrible can be okay and I’m here.”

I tell my clients all the time “dude, cry. This is the place.” I collect all the little seashells from the depths of deep deep waters. And my collection is grand and exquisite. But, (can you guess?) secret.

I keep a little map in my mind of the grocery store where this client saw her husband holding the hand of a another woman, where this guy was caught getting a blow job in the park, where this person ran into their friend that had that really awkward and awful breakup and then they cried in the bathroom until they were gone. That’s my map. And it’s weird and dark and twisted and mine and therefore secret.

Pluto is secret, mysterious, emotional and slooooow. In nothing my slowness, my reticence to tell all the layers of a story at once, she started to track my orbit. So much so that she is the first person I go to when I forget who I am. Or when my mystery or dark depths are criticized. She will remind me that my depths are valued and loved and patient people get dark and mysterious and incredibly stupidly loyal.

Her brother died by suicide a year and a half ago. She sent me a message in between bought of preforming CPR, which I didn’t realize until much later. She needed to know what to say to her kids who were in the other room. I gave her the most honest and loving and deep and dark true answer that I could come up with. And then I emailed all of clients for that week, arranged child care and packed the car.

So, she isn’t wrong. No other friends were there holding the sobbing frame of her dad, or keeping her kids busy while she disappeared into the woods to cry.

I was the first person to sleep in his bed after his death. Others kept calling it creepy. I light a candle and spoke to him as I got into bed. Taking extra time to linger just outside of the spot that he died. Unafraid of the dead and also how they died, daughter Pluto, you kind of make me proud.