(There is a tension that lives in my body, and it hurts me.)

My mom and I look so alike you'd think I was born via mitosis. I used to make jokes about being a miracle of science or an immaculate conception. A dad could have never been involved, because if he was, what did he even contribute? I know it sounds like I was using humor to mask the pain of being a fatherless kid, but I like to think I was already writing my divine comedy autobiography then.

I never met my father. I was in a stroller the only time that my father met me. He saw me and said that I wasn't his (“lots of kids look like the King of England, did the King of England father all of them?”) You see, even dad's version of events supported my immaculate theories.

I saw a picture of him for the first time when I was in my mid-twenties. I pushed my mom for photographic evidence of his participation in my creation and she managed to produce a group photo and delivered to me in an email attachment. I recognized some of my face on his. But every important element of me - nose, mouth, lips, eyes and eyebrows - undeniably came from mom. From scattered stories, I deduced my dad was sarcastic. I didn't know if there'd be any other connection to dad to claim in this lifetime, so I decided that if I could grab any straw it must be the one that said I inherited my mean humor from him.

I am the heir of my mom's decisions and the living witness of their consequences. In the prelude of her own Saturn return, my mom got me a new father. I was 7 when we moved in. Unlike my previous experience with absent and neglectful dad, this new father was hyperpresent: watching, managing, intruding, surveilling. Emotionally manipulative, victim complexed, and divorced from the alleged shedevil herself, new dad had a job then lost it. Mom eventually went to work and then school, and new dad and I became two peas in a duplex.

I was somewhere between 7 and 10 when the tension made its debut as stomach aches. I know we are conditioned to think kids are lying about these kinds of things, but the pain's consistency convinced the adults of my truthtelling and brought me to my first inconclusive medical exam. The doctors jabbed at my abdomen with their callous fingers and told my mom that I must not be eating enough fiber. Following their advice, I downed psyllium husk potions for a few months. I don't remember if it made a difference.

At 27, the tension reappeared with its most profound comeback yet. Whatever it was withholding at 7, it was now hurriedly expelling two decades later. I was shitting 5 to 15 times a day. I can't tell you the exact date this started, but the transition was night and day. I woke up one morning and couldn't leave the house without an elaborate bathroom routine. The thought of walking out the front door filled me with dread. If an outside appointment could not be avoided, I made mental maps of all the bathrooms available on route to the destination.

In this new decade of inconclusive medical exams, the doctors told me that I needed to stop eating garlic and onions and sugar and bread and cheese and fruit and certain vegetables. I ate potatoes and spinach for a month because those were the safe foods. It didn't really make a difference.

It was easy to deduce that this pain was psychosomatic. Go towards the door, stomach pain, retreat back to the living room couch, calm body. Stand up to go to the door again, stomach pain, go back to the couch, calm body. If I resolved not to leave the house that day, I would feel a tranquility so complete I could forget I had a problem. My natal Saturn is in the 8th house. The 8th house is the house of Death and Inheritance. Saturn is the planet of restriction, and discipline. Saturn is the slowest moving planet, making a complete turn about the birth chart and the return to its natal degree once every 30 years.

I used to say my body controlled me. I changed 'controlled' to 'initiated' in the third year of my illness. If my body didn't collapse the way it did, I would have avoided the past and its dad-related details my whole life. Introspection had no obvious benefits. The past was lonely, sad, or scary. There was no incentive to look back on it until my body forced me to.

In the first year of my illness, I saw a talk therapist who specialized in marriage counseling and personal development. After a year with me, she recommended I see a trauma specialist (specifically, somebody who could do EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, something she thought I'd benefit from.) The EMDR specialists were wizards. They dropped me into the unpleasant memories that haunted me in flashbacks and dreams and guided me to redo them. Over the course of a year and a half, the more progress we made through my memories, the more my tension relaxed. Things (namely addiction, disregulated eating, anxiety attacks, IBS) seemed to be fixing themselves.

New dad is now dead dad. He passed away when I was 18. We stopped speaking when I was 14. I haven't looked or asked for a picture of him. The older I get, the more dead dad becomes 'adult who was around for 7 years' rather than a 'father.' He cried when I left his house, and I cried when he died. The only thing that remains between us is the stomach problems he gave me, which come and go with Saturn in the house of Death.