Charlie Brown for Charlotte K

[Charlie Brown]

Hi Charlotte,

Did you have a question for me?

[CharlotteK]

Hi Charlie, I'd like to know how I can continue to best support my son (we had a recent spell of trouble at school).

Thanks

[Charlie Brown]

I phrased the question as: How can Charlotte best support her sun at this particular juncture? Therefore, as I understand this, we're asking for something that's actionable on your part. I point this out explicitly because it's important to how I interpret The Tower. I used my Soprafino Menghello. Of course, I don't know any specifics about your son's situation, so I can only interpret the cards in light of generalities. Nevertheless, I think I got a fairly clear and concise reading.

The Tower - Temperance - The Fool
At some point I wanted to see what The Fool was walking towards so I fanned the remaining majors out and drew The Devil.

The message seems very clear to me, but it's one that I'm having trouble articulating concisely. Hopefully, you'll be able to follow the ramblings of my prose stylings.

Simply put, You need to act as the hand of god and put a stop to whatever/whoever is trying to either make your son grow up too fast or treat him in a way that is not appropriate to his age and/or developmental stage.

As I said, I drew this looking for an imperative statement, which means that I'll interpret the first card as a verb or suggested action. We clearly know that the answer to "how do I support my son" is not "crumble into the ground," so that leaves you in the position of the force that makes the tower crumble. Bring your powers as the parent to bear.

But to bear on what? There's a reason that later decks often refer to Temperance as Alchemy, the science of transforming matter. The process of tempering makes a metal harder, more durable, and less brittle. Similarly, it is the school's goal to improve your child, but it is the nature of children to be soft just as it is the nature of iron to be brittle. I get the sense that perhaps your son's metaphorical tempering is being rushed by the school.

In The Fool, we clearly see your son despite this deck's unusual bearded visage. The card is, as you know, generally associated with a youthful and carefree spirit. We see The Fool walking towards The Devil. Now, I wouldn't get too worried and overwrought about this. Context matters and we're talking about a child at school in a country with a robust public services sector. It's doubtful that it's an actual house of horrors. The Fool, like a child, can represent innocence while The Devil can represent corruption. Again this is contextual and metaphorical corruption. There's no reason to see anything overly dramatic here. We see your son's youthful innocence moving towards being "corrupted" in some way. This strikes me as exactly analogous to what I saw in Temperance—trying to turn your son into something less soft, youthful, brittle, etc.

So, putting these together, I hope you can why my interpretation is that you may be best serving him by stepping in as a strong parent and making sure that he isn't being pushed too hard too fast. As a sentence, I'd say "Bring your powers as the parent to bear and disrupt the adulteration of your son's child-like nature."

As an addendum, I recreated the spread using a standard Marseille deck (Grimaud) just to see if it would offer any other perspectives. The main difference that stuck out to me was the rhyming/transformation of pairs in the cards. There are 2 people in The Tower, 2 jugs in Temperance, and 2 sticks in the Fool. Of course, I didn't use the Grimaud and this is just a notion of mine. But... the 2 people are the teachers/administrators who are facing your wrath. The 2 jugs are the methods of transformation that they're trying to use with your son. Now, I know nothing about the actual situation but— regardless of whether or not they are doing the right thing— there are probably legitimate reasons that they are trying to do it. Is there a way to transform their jugs into sticks that will be helpful tools to your child/the fool?

I hope this was helpful. I really don't feel good about my ability to communicate this.

[CharlotteK]

Thanks CB. A ton of info there. I will come with feedback before too long. Just wanted to let you know I've clocked it and am reflecting

[CharlotteK]

I'm so very sorry for being so late Charlie Brown.

I wanted to leave the feedback until later in the month to give some more time for the situation with my son to pan out and to give more context to your advice.

But the last week or so I've not been at all good. Some past traumas came back to haunt me and my head was in a bad place.

I phrased the question as: How can Charlotte best support her sun at this particular juncture? Therefore, as I understand this, we're asking for something that's actionable on your part.

The Tower - Temperance - The Fool
At some point I wanted to see what The Fool was walking towards so I fanned the remaining majors out and drew The Devil.

The message seems very clear to me, but it's one that I'm having trouble articulating concisely. Hopefully, you'll be able to follow the ramblings of my prose stylings.

Simply put, You need to act as the hand of god and put a stop to whatever/whoever is trying to either make your son grow up too fast or treat him in a way that is not appropriate to his age and/or developmental stage.

As I said, I drew looking for an imperative statement, which means that I'll interpret the first card as a verb or suggested action. We clearly know that the answer to "how do I support my son" is not "crumble into the ground," so that leaves you in the position of the force that makes the tower crumble. Bring your powers as the parent to bear.

But to bear on what? There's a reason that later decks often refer to Temperance as Alchemy, the science of transforming matter. The process of tempering makes a metal harder, more durable, and less brittle. Similarly, it is the school's goal to improve your child, but it is the nature of children to be soft just as it is the nature of iron to be brittle. I get the sense that perhaps your son's metaphorical tempering is being rushed by the school.

In The Fool, we clearly see your son despite this deck's unusual bearded visage. The card is, as you know, generally associated with a youthful and carefree spirit. We see The Fool walking towards The Devil. Now, I wouldn't get too worried and overwrought about this. Context matters and we're talking about a child at school in a country with a robust public services sector. It's doubtful that it's an actual house of horrors. The Fool, like a child, can represent innocence while The Devil can represent corruption. Again this is contextual and metaphorical corruption. There's no reason to see anything overly dramatic here. We see your son's youthful innocence moving towards being "corrupted" in some way. This strikes me as exactly analogous to what I saw in Temperance—trying to turn your son into something less soft, youthful, brittle, etc.

So, putting these together, I hope you can why my interpretation is that you may be best serving him by stepping in as a strong parent and making sure that he isn't being pushed too hard too fast. As a sentence, I'd say "Bring your powers as the parent to bear and disrupt the adulteration of your son's child-like nature."

As an addendum, I recreated the spread using a standard Marseille deck (Grimaud) just to see if it would offer any other perspectives. The main difference that stuck out to me was the rhyming/transformation of pairs in the cards. There are 2 people in The Tower, 2 jugs in Temperance, and 2 sticks in the Fool. Of course, I didn't use the Grimaud and this is just a notion of mine. But... the 2 people are the teachers/administrators who are facing your wrath. The 2 jugs are the methods of transformation that they're trying to use with your son. Now, I know nothing about the actual situation but— regardless of whether or not they are doing the right thing— there are probably legitimate reasons that they are trying to do it. Is there a way to transform their jugs into sticks that will be helpful tools to your child/the fool?

I hope this was helpful. I really don't feel good about my ability to communicate this.

I'm not really sure how to disentangle the key elements of this reading, I though giving some time for it to sink in there would help but it hasn't so I think I am therefore meant to take this as a whole.

Main observations are that yes the school was a key part of the situation that triggered my question. My son was in trouble for fighting at school, several times a week and both his class teacher and the head teacher were very unhappy about it. I can't say I blamed them! His behaviur was not good at all.

I think a lot of it stemmed from moving up from foundation year at school into first-year proper. A lot less play, and many more expectations academically. And my son is very young in his year.

He is being pushed very hard and part of me thinks it has been rather fast. You are completely right that the transformation they expect children to undergo is quite rapid. I felt my son was struggling with this, which is why I wanted to know how best to support him.

What I didn't do was turn my wrath on the teachers or try and prevent them from exercising the discipline and consequences for his behaviour. I felt the actions they took were justified and in deed we imposed our own consequences at home also. I felt my son was headed in a direction we needed to steer him away from (getting involved in 'pranks' and fighting, talking back to seniors and being very disobedient). I think thisnis the 'corruption' I could see happening.

Fortunately he seems to have turned the situation round and has stopped fighting and hurting other children and he seems to have also regained his manners and considerate nature. We've been strict with him but have also spent a lot of time working with him on empathy and affirmations.

I saw some real insights in your reading - the two teachers involved, the transformation taking place and am enforced development being driven by the school expectations, the child innocent walking away from that soft kind nature.

Thank you CB and again, I'm so sorry I missed the end of the month for feedback.

[Charlie Brown]

Thank you for the feedback. I'm glad to hear that the problems with your son seem to be sorting themselves out but am sorry to hear that you week has been so trying. I think that I probably would have read some things differently if I'd had some of that context. As you kindly mention, there were a lot of accurate points but, still, I wish I had done better for you.

If you could help me by clarifying something. You said that you had trouble disentangling the individual parts of the reading. On my end, I had a lot of difficulty writing up this month's reading for some reason. Do you think that your difficulty had more to do with the actual message of the reading or was it the way that I communicated it? If it's the latter, do you have any thoughts about what I could do for the future? I like to be as clear as possible, but it's not always the easiest thing for me.

[CharlotteK]

If you could help me by clarifying something. You said that you had trouble disentangling the individual parts of the reading. On my end, I had a lot of difficulty writing up this month's reading for some reason. Do you think that your difficulty had more to do with the actual message of the reading or was it the way that I communicated it? If it's the latter, do you have any thoughts about what I could do for the future? I like to be as clear as possible, but it's not always the easiest thing for me.

Hi Charlie I think it was surely more the message as there was absolutely nothing 'wrong' with the way you wrote it up.

It also occurs to me that the school is a Church of England school and is regulated by the Church as well as by the local education authority. A 'house of God' indeed

[Charlie Brown]

So, I guess looking at it again, based on 1) a better understanding of the situation and 2) the benefit of hindsight, I'm thinking that my interpretation of The Tower was pretty much on, that you need to bring your powers as the parent to bear. Where it went wrong was the "to bear on what" part. Into effecting Temperance, the "steering away from" you mentioned. Moderating his walk towards the devil. That would also be of a piece with my idea of turning the teachers' directions into tools he can use.

I think I also made a poor inference in reading your question. When you said the trouble was "at school," my mind leapt to the notion that the trouble was with the school. I myself would be more likely to say he was having a problem with fighting or something like that. You know, now that I think about it, I did some readings a bit back for someone who was very much in an antagonistic position with their child's school. I think that dynamic was lingering in the back of my head. Figuring this out is a good lesson for me as a reader, I think. The cards had everything there that I needed for a more applicable reading.

Thanks for the follow-up feedback.

[Charlie Brown]

I also think I need to spend a little bit of time getting my thoughts on Temperance into a new order. I think I focus too much on the metallurgical process because it's how I tried to make sense of this card as Sagittarian. That certainly made it easy for me to think that the school was trying to 'toughen up' your sweet little boy before he was ready.

I really need to bone up a bit on the cardinal virtues.

[Charlie Brown]

I'm watching a show called Christmas Cookie Challenge, which is sort of a festive rip-off of the Great British Baking Show. The baker wanted to add egg as a thickening agent to something that's already hot. The problem with that is that if you add egg into something hot, they'll cook and you get scrambled eggs up in your cookies. In order to do it right, you need to use a process they call tempering.