Today is my mom’s birthday. On Sunday, I had a two-hour conversation with a witch/astrologer about my birth chart, in which my mom and dad figured prominently. “Do parents typically feature prominently in birth charts?” I asked the witch/astrologer and she said yes, to a degree, but my chart showed them as larger than life. And to me, they were. Two of my favorite people.

If mom were alive today and I called her up to tell her I spoke with a witch/astrologer, I’m certain her first statement would be, “I want to try that.” (Much like it was my response when my dear friend Holly told me she was getting a birth chart reading from a witch/astrologer.) One of my favorite stories about my mom’s difficult childhood in Juarez is when her grandmother and other family members decided to hold a seance…to contact mom’s grandfather, maybe? I don’t remember the details, sadly. They were all seated around a table, my mom under the age of 10, I believe, holding hands with their eyes shut. Once it started, and the person began calling out to the spirits, my mom peeped open one eye to see what was happening. She was promptly kicked out of the seance. (I’m thinking the leader of the seance must have had her eyes open and saw mom sneaking a peek.)

If you know much about astrology, your horoscope, etc., learning about your birth chart isn’t terribly surprising. I’ve read enough about my sun sign and its corresponding qualities and feel that they explain me pretty well. The interesting thing about the birth chart reading is that it takes a sort of holistic look into patterns, the way planets engage with each other, the meanings of various planets, and what they can say about your life experience/decision making processes—a lot of information. Like I said, the conversation was just over two hours long.

I’m not going to hash out everything we talked about, but the most significant insight I left with involved my mom. When my conversation with the witch/astrologer first started, she said, “I’m seeing there may have been some scarcity in your childhood, or a type of trauma.” I was immediately put off because I feel quite fortunate with the childhood I had—protected, fed, loved. When I think of “trauma” or “scarcity,” I think of deep poverty and violent trauma.

And, particularly after my parents divorced, there were moments of financial scarcity—dad and I on food stamps one year because he was laid off; a Christmas where he asked me to choose only one item because he couldn’t afford more—but nothing of deep suffering. No fear of losing our house or the electric going off.

Eventually I opened up a bit more to the witch/astrologer (initially I approached it the way you would a psychic where you want to see what the person knows without saying much, but when I told her this, she said, “I’m not trying to get one over on you—the more information you share, the more we can read your birth chart through the lens of what you’ve experienced and how the two connect.”). I told her the most negative (traumatic?) experience I can recall as a child going into adolescence was absolutely the experience of being a brown girl surrounded by white faces. It distorted my notions of what is beautiful (Eurocentric only); it eroded my confidence; I became a wallflower that wanted no attention because I worried attention would lead to racial slurs.

As we were talking about this childhood experience, I mentioned the fact that I hadn’t learned Spanish as a kiddo because of mom’s difficulty with being understood in the rural midwest. She wanted us to assimilate. She didn’t want us to have any struggles with language. And then the witch/astrologer said: “You can look at that loss of language as a form of scarcity. A loss of connection to other members of your family. A loss of connection to other people who look like you.” Reader, my mind was blown. It was such a new way to think about scarcity, the lack of language—a language that madre should have been proud to share with us, but instead was shamed and mocked for it by people who “couldn’t understand her.” Witch/astrologer said, “you are the daughter of someone who had a politely violent experience in America, who was teaching a little brown girl how to be a brown woman in America.” (Politely violent—what an incredible word combination.)

“The generational influences are yours to grapple with,” she said. “How do you want to live with them?”