Fertility in Focus

One of the most significant “signatures” for infertility is a 10th house luminary.  I hesitate to use the word “signature”, because it could suggest that everyone with this signature is infertile.  This is not the case.  This article is an exploration of the special circumstances in which it is the case.

What does this phrase, “10th house luminary”, mean?  Simply that when you were born, if an astrologer were to draw up the chart of the time and place for that event, one or both of the planets we know as the Moon and the Sun would have fallen in the 10th house – a place in the sky astrologers signify as the “public domain”, the world out there, or the place in a person’s life where they express their sense of career or public identity.  This is the place where we see that a person has the potential to be a leader of a country or the head of the Parent-Teacher Association.

It is also where the astrologer will see for this person a distinct need to have a career.  Some people are happy enough to have a job, something that pays the rent, and are unconcerned with public profile, or having a name with important letters behind it on a business card; such people might be very happy to work from home, anonymously doing their thing.  Other people have a very strong need to be “seen” in the world, a desire to be part of the wheels of administration, part of a corporation that requires structure and leadership, part of a world that identifies people by titles and job descriptions.  Some people might never actually notice a desire to be a leader or have a public life, but they might be born to it, like royalty, or as a member of a dynastic family. 

When one is born with the Moon or the Sun in the 10th house, in this public place, it means that the person will feel the need to have a public identity quite distinct from a personal one.  Such a woman might need to be known in the public domain as a lawyer or as an investment banker, she might need to be known as the CEO of the firm.  She feels driven to be part of an infrastructure that is bigger than her home life and her personal relationship structures.  She needs to be more than a “Mom”, she needs to be accepted as a contributing member of a largely male-dominated world, and she thrives on the challenge that business, as we know it today, offers.

So when women with these planets in the 10th house arrive at my door, asking why they are not falling pregnant, in spite of the fact that they have bought every manual in the bookstore, are taking their temperatures and are “managing” the process of conception much like they approach their corporate agendas, I have the following to offer them:

Such women are usually financially independent.  They are about 36 years old, so they were born in the sixties.  Their mothers probably never worked, and they likely vowed never to be themselves in a position where they had to ask a man/husband for money.  They saw how their mothers were trapped with no job or career available to them as an exit strategy from a patriarchal marriage, and they were witness to resentment and to the humiliation of having to justify expenditure on personal and intimate items, vital to a woman’s self-esteem.  These girls, encouraged by their mothers to go and make it in a man’s world, duly did so, and they excelled.  By the time they were 30 years old, most of them were in a position to purchase property in their own names.  They may have bought a house with a partner or husband, and they had their own bank accounts.  They had financial independence – hard won and well-deserved.  So far so good.  However, something had been sacrificed on this altar of success - a necessary minimum of courageous commonsense which, mixed in with the intimacy of relationship, allows a fertile ground for conception.

Puzzled?  Follow the thread.  With financial independence there is no need to ask for a pretty dress or money for a facial – she buys them herself.  And there is no one checking on the bonuses that get paid into her account.

But old habits, as they say, die hard.  Now she is in partnership, there is another person aware that she has an income and, while she does not actually “report” to him, the partner is often under the illusion that she earns less than she actually does, because she learned at her mother’s knee to be ever so slightly economical with the truth about the cost of things; she never confesses to the shoe fetish, she takes the tags off the dresses before she brings them home and she always buys “on sale”.  She allows her partner to buy her the luxury items, the holidays, the fancy dinners, because she has been taught that a man should feel able to provide for her, even though she subsidises the joint income thereby ensuring that they live in a gorgeous house with all the trappings. 

Her partner is delighted.  He has a financially viable partner, someone who can take the pressure off him.  He is proud of her achievements - as he should be, since she has to work harder and longer hours than he does to get the same pay cheque in a male dominated environment.  So where is the problem?

The issue comes creeping in slowly.  When she is about 34-36 years old, having risen high enough to bump the glass ceiling, and with her biological clock ticking insistently, she decides that space might now be made in her career to take time off to have a baby, whose arrival will complete her relationship and give her the fulfilment she might feel to be lacking.

But now she confronts the consequences of her earlier economic cautions.
He thinks that she earns X and that he will have to find an extra X to cover the mortgage and the car repayments, etc.  Because of her economy with the truth he doesn’t know that she actually earns Xplus, and she now faces the necessity to make him aware that she will need apparently more than she has done in the past.  So she begins to feel resentful that she may have to justify her expenditure in much the same way her mother did.  This thought is just too much for her, and the double-bind of wanting a baby but fearing what feels like a punishment for having it creates a powerful emotional ambivalence that confuses her ovaries as she struggles month after month to conceive. 

The difficulty arises because; in circumstances where there is an “abundance” of money, couples like these never have a real conversation about what the expenditure actually is.  But further, these women need to get over the inclination to justify their facials – goddamit, they have earned them! And why do they still feel the need to conceal the amount of money they spend on themselves – it is after all their money! 

At the root of this is the inherited patterning from their mothers, combined with the lack of mutual honesty between couples about money.  But let’s face it, if you cannot talk about money, what else can’t you talk about? And how can you have a solid foundation for real intimacy without open and fearless communication about your life together, in all its aspects?

These women have such a need to be independent – and elegant in that independence - that an assertive curiosity about the financial status of their prospective husbands or partners feels a bit vulgar, or might perhaps come across as avaricious, but as a matter of practical reality, it is a necessary  investigation that everyone, male or female, should take quite seriously.  If you are about to invest your life and your love in a person, why should it be considered unseemly to know what the contents of his/her will is?   Why shouldn’t you know how much he earns?   Why should a woman feel the need to allow herself to be financially vulnerable in an effort not to seem like a gold-digger? 

In my experience, and in my practice, I have often urged women with these issues to simply find the courage to talk with their partner about money. They have to ask what will happen to them once they give up their wonderful careers, and what will happen to them and the offspring should anything untoward happen to their partner/husband.

And they have to be honest from the outset. It would in truth be easier and fairer on a husband or partner to be honest about your income and expenditure, giving him a clear and accurate information base to project the cost of future contingencies. 

This signature in a chart is by far the most common one in cases of problematic fertility, and I think it is because women with a 10th house luminary care a great deal about what the world at large thinks about them, in all aspects of their lives - the house they live in, the car they drive and the kind of lifestyle they enjoy - because they are acutely aware of being in “the public eye”, whatever the degree of such exposure they enjoy.  Such women are sensitive to sociological issues and they are more likely than women with suns and moons placed elsewhere to be feminists, to challenge the world and fight for a place for themselves in which to express their strong nature and their capacity for leadership. 

These girls are used to getting what they want through sheer hard work, and so when a pregnancy doesn’t arrive punctually, whatever hard work they have put into this task, they are likely to feel confused, defeated, and demoralised.  There is no remedial corporate formula to succeed in this domain.  They are out of control and they are vulnerable.  Being out of control is foreign to them; it is scary and it requires a yielding to a process.  For this kind of woman yielding feels like submission and they will fight it all the way.  Admission of failure is unacceptable, and to be kept hidden – indeed, many such clients request that my services remain highly confidential, and some go so far as to use a pseudonym. 

The difference between having a sun in the 10th and a moon in the 10th is noticeable, and I would say that while neither one nor the other is stronger in its impact on fertility, the sun in the 10th is more apparent - it is something that a woman of 34 will not be able to hide.  She would be very in touch with her “public” identity, because it will usually manifest in her occupation and her birth status.  The moon in the 10th on the other hand, may manifest as an unconscious desire for public status, and thus the unconscious recognition that pregnancy, and the time taken off to raise a toddler before returning to the workplace, will cost her the opportunity to succeed.  And because this is unconscious, this woman will likely not have a strategy in place for when she returns to work; she may imagine that she might not ever return to her former career, and this stress can take its toll on her efforts to conceive.

An interesting phenomenon related to having a 10th house sun, and perhaps one we need to consider thoughtfully, is the increasing incidence of caesarean births.  Doctors will usually schedule Caesar births for 9.30am – 2pm, thereby increasing the probability of producing a nation of predominantly 10th, 11th, and 9th house sun signs.  Doctors are even more inclined towards Caesar birth where the birth is a result of an IVF or other assisted reproductive treatment, as these births are regarded as “special” and the age of the mother is considered to be a risk factor.  So, we are not going to see a reduction in the number of women who need to have a public career or identity, we are going to see an upswing. 

Consequently, we are going to need improved strategies to ensure that women are in the picture about what it means to need to have a public life, and to give them a means by which to express themselves while still bringing new life into the world.  We need to accommodate “public mothers”, and their children, when they return to contribute to the world.  We, as a society, need to see and accept that they can be outstanding mothers and role models for their children, in spite of working an 8 hour day, and leaving the kids with an au pair.  We need to encourage them to mother without guilt.  And we need to educate fathers, enabling them to understand that the need to return to work is not a rejection of the family values of the past, nor a neglect of the mothering or nurturing function; it is, for the woman with a 10th house sun, a necessity for her survival as a whole woman.  She will not be herself unless she is part of the public domain. And who in their right minds would want a partner who is suppressing their very essence? For, robbed of the stage on which they truly shine, their light will be dimmer in all the other roles of their life.

But when their parallel paths are clear, and free of conflicting interference from each other, these women can have the best of both worlds, and their light will softly illumine all it falls upon