Uranus in Cancer

Your parents’ house had rules about who sat where. Yours has had more kinds of family through its door than they could have imagined.

A planet on its side

Uranus spins on its side, tipped over so far that its poles point almost at the Sun in turn. Each pole gets about forty-two years of daylight and then forty-two years of night. Nothing on Uranus is arranged the way a planet is supposed to be. Cancer, where the Moon rules, holds home, family and roots, and here Uranus tips those over too.

The baby boom

This is the Uranus of the post-war baby boom. Its people grew up in new houses in new suburbs, with new machines in the house and a very old idea of family still hanging over it, and then took that idea apart: divorce, working mothers, chosen families, children raised in ways their grandparents would not have recognised.

Belonging, freely

You have lived in more than one kind of household, and learned something from each. You want a home that feels safe and you want to be free inside it. You can move many times, live in unusual arrangements, and build a family of friends as close as any relatives. Emotional honesty outranks keeping up appearances.

Your front door has had more keys cut for it than you can count, handed to friends, neighbours and the friend of a friend who needed somewhere to stay. Your feelings change suddenly, too. A mood can arrive out of nowhere and leave just as fast, and you need room for that at home above all.

The restless root

Home is both anchor and cage. You can crave closeness and then need to escape it, or carry an old family upheaval with you for decades. Stability seems dull and change seems frightening, sometimes on the same day.

House rules

Children of this generation remember unusual house rules, an open door and a dinner table where anyone could say anything, and a decision about family that shocked the grandparents and proved right.

Every family photograph you keep has somebody in it who would not have been allowed in the frame fifty years earlier.